2012: The Year in Japanese Contemporary Theatre

2012 was always going to be a problematic year.

One year on from that undefinably terrible day in March 2011, when northeast Japan changed surely forever. And yet, unlike 2011, the disaster seems no longer fresh in the mind. TV has moved on; certainly the world press is hardly interested in the political quagmire that the nuclear power argument has initiated, nor that only a fraction of the funds for refugees and shelters have been distributed. Aside from some headline-grabbing stunt-meisters like Chim Pom, the world has lost interest in Japanese artists and their feelings.

Traditionally, catastrophe has been a fruitful stimulant for Japanese theatre. The 1923 Kanto earthquake which destroyed so much of Tokyo at the time directly led to the creation of opportunities for a stronger boom in western-style realist plays written by native playwrights, as new theatre venues were built out of the rubble. In the same way, the end of the war brought Butoh, Angura and other cultural movements that have left a resounding impact not on just Japan but the world.

Time has still to tell what changes “3.11″ will bring. So much is different now; so much is not. Yet another election was held this month, ushering in yet another prime minister, though one who held the post before. What is needed is the new, not more of the same.

Theatrically, 2012 was also likewise a mixed bag.

The struggle to give expression to the post-disaster mentality and dilemmas is the paramount issue still gripping the Japanese and one worthy of a longer article in its own right. It is a struggle that will continue to obsess (perhaps self-obsess) the Japanese arts for years to come. Needless to say, as there were attempts in 2011, so were there others in 2012, mostly unsuccessful.

When populist director and writer Suzuki Matsuo, a talented actor and one-time winner of the prestigious Kishida Kunio Drama Award, tried to tack on a post-earthquake theme to his lame “foreigner-in-peril” comedy, Welcome Japan, the results were painful to watch. Dealing with tragedy through humour takes immensely light footing, and Matsuo’s style — packed ensemble plays filled with popular performers all with bombastic slapstick sketches to shine and please their fans — is insultingly inappropriate to the theme. No more of this, please!

One of the best straight plays of 2012 was in fact a revival dating prior to the Tohoku disaster. Mahoroba was originally staged a few years ago and won the Kishida prize in 2008. Its playwright, Ryuta Horai, has had a good run at the New National Theatre recently (he also wrote Enemy that was staged there in 2010) and is settling down as the Hatsudai venue’s most dependable scriptwriter (and he seems to be a much better dramatist when he is not directing his own work as he also does with his own company). The play offered several strong roles for women of different generations, even if the plot was old hat: a rabble of unmarried sisters getting together at the family home in Kyushu for a festival weekend, with the inevitable secrets and lies spilling out. The at times clumsy veering between jokes (yes, the requisite old granny character for comic relief is alive and well) and domestic melodrama worked due to the comfortable cast and receptive audience, and it was pleasant to see a straight play doing well in Tokyo.

For the most part, the theatre scene in Japan is devoid of new writing theatres or such organisations, and with even commissions from commercial or public ventures essentially unsupervised (literary staff or dramaturges do not exist). The result is carte blanche for artists who take on both the writing and directing with their own company of cast and creative team (the fringe scene works basically entirely in this way as well). This does not matter in the commerical theatre since the star sells the tickets and in the public world the producers just trust to the reputation of the artist to deliver something of cultural value.

To offer a contrast to Horai’s play, there was at least one revival that should never have happened but no doubt was given the go-ahead based purely on the status of the artist. Yukiko Motoya, a playwright and director who has transitioned from the fringe to the commercial theatre, also staged her own 2006 award-winning play Distress again this year at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, but this blogger at any rate wishes she hadn’t bothered (nor that public subsidy been used to fund it). A shameful and cringeworthy “comedy”, it purported to deal with a serious topic — bullying in Japanese schools — but offered for the most part only cheap gags about horny older women seducing younger colleagues. While I am reluctant to criticize a female writer in an industry endemically dominated by men, I could find no justification for such a travesty when the theme demanded to be taken seriously.

Hideki Noda’s “Egg”

The New National Theatre is run by a director who comes from commercial theatre, a trend that has become endemic in Japan of late. Likewise Ikebukuro’s Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, newly re-opened and re-named in the autumn, is run by Hideki Noda, the writer-director who has also staged his work with Colin Teevan in London. Noda’s artistic directorship has given us some oddities, not least the continual staging on his own plays — unthinkable except perhaps in a place like Japan where the theatre industry is so onanistic for artists. Given how these days Noda is more interested in casting celebrity actors in his plays than experimenting with form, one might question the worth of him running one of the country’s main public venues. That said, he brings in new audiences aplenty and also surreptitiously manages to sneak in satirical themes that only someone with his calibre could.

Take Egg, his play whose two stars ensured full houses at every performance. It did, though, take a much-needed swipe at Olympic fervour. This is both the decidedly un-British elation that seemed to hold London and the country in a vice over the summer — but also Tokyo’s bureaucrats, who insist on repeating their efforts to harness nostalgia for the 1964 Tokyo Games and crank up residents’ enthusiasm for a further Olympics bid. So far the campaigns have met mostly indifference or derision from locals, while a successful vote from the powers that be has yet to be seen. The conceit of the play was that there had once been a ridiculous sport that may or may not have been part of the Sixties Games. What was true? And what did it matter when the result was such hysteria? Though its trappings had the pungence of commercial star-driven theatre, Noda’s play was interested in how mob and memory make for a dangerous combination.

On the fringe, two established artists made a splash. After The End Times in 2011, Daisuke Miura returned to probably his biggest hit, Love’s Whirlpool (Ai no uzu), taking it to Berlin for its European premiere. Potudo-ru then continued their revivals with Castle of Dreams, re-staged in Kyoto and Tokyo over the autumn. It famously portrays a group of young Tokyoites living like animals in a tiny shared flat. Over around ninety minutes we watch scenes from their existences — scraps, junk food splurges, video game sessions and plenty, plenty of sex. But no verbal communication at all.

Daisuke Miura’s “Castle of Dreams”

Toshiki Okada (Chelfitsch) finally decided in the wake of the 2011 disaster to adjust his now famous style (dialogue in fragmented snatches, anonymous characters, externalized anomie through incongruous movement). However, though April’s Genzaichi (Present Location) was publicized by all the hipster media as a definitive “post-3.11″ art work, just judging merely by Okada’s response, the hype was anti-climatic. After all, his characters now mostly simply stood still (shock!), even actually looking at each other when they conversed. In other words, a normal play, ordinary “fiction”. Was Okada suggesting that communication is what is needed now? Well, indeed, though one wonders if, on the other hand, we then needed his play to tell us that. (Or perhaps I am being grossly optimistic and we do?) But why would Okada care about critical flak? He has commissions coming out of his ears; his new project is an opera written for a virtual idol character called Hatsune Miku.

In May, a fierce debate erupted on the fringe scene due to the antics of Banana Gakuen Theatre Company, the bizarre troupe of performers who create hyperactive versions of Akihabara subcultural idol events — though for what purpose (imitation? parody? tribute?) it remains to be seen. They have built a reputation over the last few years for their aggressive involvement of the audiences — from pelting them with objects and liquids, to pulling them onto the stage.

Controversy erupted after one performance in which audience members complained that they had been groped — or at least that their manhandling by masked male performers unintentionally constituted groping (groping is far more serious in Japan and is a major problem on crowded trains). The controversy went viral on Twitter with third parties and those who had not even attended the performance, all baying for the blood of the group. Whether or not this time the admittedly naive Banana boys and girls strayed over the line is one thing — but no audience could surely have been under delusions before they went to see their show, given the reputation of the company. In the end, though, the group announced it would be disbanding to satisfy the calls for atonement. Execution by SNS: such Twittermob “bashing” has grown to be a grave issue locally, since the at times nefarious social network is immensely popular, particularly with male users who enjoy the benefits of anonymity while stirring the hornet’s nest of “public” indignation.

The nation’s biggest annual performing arts event, Festival/Tokyo returned in October and November with its now customarily ambitious line-up of major overseas talents and local artists. [Disclosure: This writer works as a translator for the festival.] The programming this year included Jossi Wieler, Jean-Michel Bruyère and Saburo Teshigawara, though the centrepiece was a trilogy of plays by Austrian Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek. To programme the bulk of your festival around a playwright and novelist obscure even in the English-speaking world, let alone an Asian country on the other side of the globe, takes some doing — but when two of the plays are based on Fukushima-inspired texts, there can be no question about its relevance.

“Kein Licht.” by Elfriede Jelinek, directed by Motoi Miura

Jelinek wrote Kein Licht. straight after the 2011 earthquake and the text has already been performed in the German theatre. It features a pair of violinists talking to us in the darkness (this is a typical Jelinek wordplay — Geiger means violin in German but also infers radition), seeming to existing in an ambiguous limbo, both witnesses and victims. For the Tokyo premiere, directed with epic bravado by Motoi Miura (Chiten) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, there was one significant chance: the musicians did not play their instruments. Instead the sounds came from the onomatopoeic Japanese dialogue, almost sung by the cast, who wore diving gear, like lost souls on the banks of the rivers of the underworld. A peculiar chorus lay “under” the stage, only their feet sticking out and visible to the audience. The title is a rift on Goethe’s famous last words — mehr Licht! — calling for light to brought nearer as he expired. Following the Fukushima crisis, Tokyo was literally blackened out. Miura’s production seized on this key motif, the darkness slashed by the cube of light at the back of the stage, a shaft both celestial and despairing, tempting us with illumination that would close periodically on the purgatory.

An epilogue written by Jelinek one year on formed the basis for Akira Takayama‘s Kein Licht II, a site specific audio walking tour in Shimbashi, the old business district in central Tokyo (and not coincidentally, home to the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Company). Participants received a small transistor radio and a set of postcards, on the back of each were numbered maps to the next location on the route. Then they were sent out into the city to find the locations.

At each site (office room, plaza, abandoned lot or in front of a Pachinko Parlor or company showroom) participants tuned into one of the voices of Fukushima students nonchalantly reading Jelinek’s text. Meanwhile the “tourist” would take in the recreation of the image on the postcard, a scene selected from thousands of media photographs of the Fukushima events. The mass of imagery is thus cut through by the penetrating purity and rawness of the voices of children, the direct victims of a disaster we feel we all know, but actually have not experienced.

“Kein Licht II” by Akira Takayama

In 2011 Takayama also created a fictional “Referendum” on the issue of the current state of Japan: a mobile booth that toured the country, inviting audiences to visit, watch interviews with school students about their hopes (or not) for Japan at that time, and then to “vote” by answering the same questions themselves. Takayama has continued this project in 2012 as well, aiming to create a kind of time capsule of the post-disaster zeitgeist.

And what a way to end 2012 but with some more controversy? Yukio Ninagawa, the local industry giant who at nearly eighty seems to want to never stop directing at all, finished 2012 with a bang with his production of The Trojan Women, that is a co-production with Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre, and a mixed Japanese, Israeli and Israeli-Arab cast. Unfortunately, with the recent situation in Gaza, the timing for what Ninagawa no doubt sincerely hoped would be a project promoting practical cultural exchange has been overshadowed by those with far less worthy ambitions.

Lost for words: Takuya Murakawa’s reflection on Tohoku

words
Direction: Takuya Murakawa [Japan]
November 8 (Thu) – November 11 (Sun), 2012

Adorno famously said that after Auschwitz, to write poetry was barbaric. A now hackneyed quote wrenched aphoristically out of context, indeed, but nonetheless this is much like the dilemma facing Japanese artists today. How do you turn the Tohoku and Fukushima catastrophes into art? Is it possible? Or is it offensive to even try?

One approach is verbatim theatre.

Following his acclaimed 2011 docu-theatre project Zeitgeber, which looked at the quiet dignity in the occupation of a care-worker, film-maker and theatre director Takuya Murakawa returned to Festival/Tokyo to present a brand new piece, the result of voluntary field work and a road trip in Tohoku following the March 11th catastrophe.

Introduced by Murakawa himself in his usual casual style, words (Kotoba) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, Theatre East was a meditation on an “amateur” attempt to express an experience of the post-disaster world.

Takuya Murakawa

Murakawa, in his trademark baseball cap, first explained that we were about to witness the performance and asked us to note the microphones set up in front of us and hanging above us. These would be turned on at certain times.

He then handed things over to the “cast”: two speakers, a man and woman, who narrated without drama their experiences, observations and stories of travelling in Tohoku and volunteering in the disaster zones.

Image: © Tsukasa Aoki

For the next ninety minutes on a stage devoid of anything except two chairs and two speakers they took it in turns to talk: it was simple, with no “dramatization” or attempt at reconstruction of the trip — but this very simplicity then took on a resonance, a poetical sound.

The two speakers did not speak to each other. Instead their exchanges were polite alternations: “words” ranging from the harrowing (finding bones) to the banal (snippets of a pop song); from stories and snatches of dialogue of meeting locals to finding rubble in a toilet when desperate to have a shit, or seeing a firework display in Rikuzentakata.

It would veer from the comic to the chilling, but it was always straightforward. Only the man occasionally almost seemed to “act out” his experiences. He spoke in a slang, while the girl was more reserved and formal in her Japanese.

Image: © Tsukasa Aoki

The microphones facing the audience and over our heads would be turned on when the two speakers paused and the audience was lit up. As Murakawa had explained, this was the moment when we were invited to speak and contribute — perhaps with our own experiences or thoughts on what had been said. No one did. The microphones (and the silence) merely reverberated, alone; a challenge, a condemnation? The echo embarrassed us — every shift, every cough was picked up and resonated back to us all, like a sound chamber confessional. There is a possible play on shindou at work here; depending on the way you write it this could be “vibration” or “tremor”. Thus sound and tremors are related, though silence is necessary not anechoic — something will bounce back and respond. And yet we are impotent, mutes who can only watch what is put on a stage for us.

Following a rather unsuccessful and under-used photo slideshow that slightly clumsily appeared halfway through, in the latter part of the performance a signer, who had previously been standing at the side and (in a relay with a colleague) providing sign language interpretation of the two speakers’ accounts, actually came on to centre stage. We then watched her, learning the gestures and how the words translated visually.

The ninety minutes finished with the girl warning of an “earthquake” seemingly happening right now. As the lights went down, we could see the signer fading into the dark, a provocation to our linguistic impairment.

Image: © Tsukasa Aoki

There was also an unintended double effect in watching the performance as a non-native Japanese speaker, meaning I was yet a further step away from the “words” and being able to understand them, to share in them — and to contribute my own.

And this is the current double bind: the Japanese (or, everyone residing in Japan) are all participants (toujisha) in the tragedy of Tohoku — and yet, we also are not. Like the characters in Jelinek’s Rechnitz: Das Würgeengel, we are simultaneously, ambiguously reporters, observers, participants — sharing the experience of the victims in part but also detached from the real victims. Distant, and due to this, potentially complicit in a obscure crime of non-participation, an impossible empathy.

Going Beyond the Heap of Broken Images: Kein Licht II

F/T12 Jelinek Series: Kein Licht Ⅱ
Port B
Text: Elfriede Jelinek [Austria]
Concept, Direction: Akira Takayama [Japan]
November 10 (Sat) – November 25 (Sun), 2012

Kein Wort der Wahrheit haben sie ungesagt gelassen, sagen die, die es nicht gesehen haben können. Als Augenzeugin sage ich: Jedes Wort der Wahrheit ungesagt geblieben.

Akira Takayama, known for his interactive and tour-style “performances”, and creative process involving people drawn from outside the theatre world, has achieved what may be his most successful work to date.

Adapted from Elfriede Jelinek’s text Fukushima – Epilog?, a follow-up to Kein Licht., the poetic treatment of the Fukushima crisis she wrote immediately after the March 11th catastrophe, Akira Takayama and his unit Port B have pulled off likely the most original and effective examination of the disaster not only in Japanese contemporary theatre, but in all the arts to date. Forget attention-grabbing fraudsters like Chim Pom, Kein Licht II was an intelligent, brave and sincere approach to the post-Fukushima zeitgeist.

Taking Jelinek’s text, in an ambitious and award-winning translation by Tatsuki Hayashi (who also provided the Japanese for Motoi Miura’s production of Kein Licht., which ran concurrently in Ikebukuro), Takayama asked female high school students still living just outside the exclusion zone in Fukushima to look at fragments of the text. They then chose the parts they liked and, without any interference or direction, recorded their reading of the section. Since they still live just outside the no man’s land, it is possible to conclude that the children’s parents might even work for TEPCO, the power company responsible for the Fukushima power plant, and that they will be the first to feel any side effects should the exclusion zone prove inadequate. With this knowledge, their aural rendition of Jelinek’s text becomes incredibly raw and real — much more so than if it had been read by actors.

Takayama is interested in the relationship between radio and radiation, and incorporated this “old” technology into his project. Audience members would gather at a reception desk inside the wonderfully decrepit New Shimbashi Building, right outside Shimbashi Station in the heart of “salaryman town” in Tokyo. The area is the site of a former post-war black market and then became the centre of Japan’s economic boon years. Now, though, it is populated merely by the less glamorous of Japan’s corporate slaves, with all the stylish shops and offices these days located in Shibuya et al. Like a concrete Ozymandias, Shimbashi stands as a symbol of Japanese modernity; it was here that the country’s first railway line started, running to Yokohama. And a stone’s throw away from the area is Hibiya Park, the most popular site of protest marches in Tokyo, and also Kasumigaseki, where the nation’s bureaucrats hold away.

The New Shimbashi Building itself is a richly retro lair of old fashioned kissaten coffee shops, cramped shops, VHS shacks, suspicious Chinese massage parlors, and even clinics and other facilities. It has clearly seen better days. It was opened in 1971, the same time as the Fukushima nuclear plant went into operation and just after the Osaka Expo, which cemented Japan’s resurrection as a respected world power again. TEPCO is also based in Shimbashi and we can infer here the open secret: regions like Fukushima were seduced by generous investment into a double bind — to provide the power to fuel the economic boom enjoyed largely by Tokyo but at the cost of bearing the burden should anything go wrong. And we now know how things turned out.

At the reception visitors were handed a small radio and a pack of twelve postcards, which at first glance resembled sightseeing postcards, designed with a photograph on one side and writing on the back. You were a tourist now and sent out to follow the trail to your first spot.

The postcards, though, are immediately unsettling because the images are all media ones from the Tohoku disaster and Fukushima crisis. Takayama is here investigating the nature of photography itself. He worked closely with a photographer and chose the postcard images from thousands of press photographs, deliberately pinpointing moments when a “media” image and a personalized one might overlap in a shutter moment of ambiguity. In today’s labyrinthine digital world of individual blogs, Google Image, Flickr and tumblr, the division is hard to make. The objective and subjective, the public and the private — it is all washed away in the tidal wave of simulacrum. The endless YouTube videos of the water smashing over the Japanese fields. The TV footage of the helicopters desperately trying to cool down the reactors by crudely dumping water onto the chimneys. The darkened streets of central Tokyo as the city attempted to save energy over the summer.

More disturbing has been the landslide of imagery of the earthquake and tsunami damage, and the abandoned ruins from inside the Fukushima exclusion zone: in its sheer volume it takes on another character — a pornographic lensing of suffering and crisis. Similar things happened with 9/11, Detroit, Hurricane Katrina. Truly, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s phrase, a heap of broken images. “Since the catastrophe I have had many opportunities to see press photographs, but I always feel full of regret somehow,” says Takayama. “The landscape reflected there has absolutely no connection with me and yet there is a sense that it has become part of me. There is no way that I have ever entered the Fukushima exclusion zone but after one and a half years, the landscape of that place has woven itself up inside me.” [Tokyo / Scene #3 (Published October 20th, 2012) Artistic Expression in the Time of Cruelty]

What is necessary here is an act of mourning, of reflection and repentance — something that cannot sincerely be achieved now with imagery alone.

The tour participants followed the maps and directions on the backs of the postcards to go by themselves to the dozen locations around Shimbashi. Each site reflected the respective media image on the front of the postcard; either a complete recreation (some of these were remarkable — rooms in anonymous empty offices were turned into Japanese homes, complete with every object and detail from the original image) or a symbolic “re-take” (the cracked soil, dried mud from the tsunami wave, was re-imagined as a tucked-away minor plaza accusingly near to TEPCO’s headquarters).

The journey itself was circuitous and fun as you wove amongst the late afternoon and evening office workers, heading up random staircases, through narrow alleyways. Occasionally you spotted other tour participants and exchanged a fraternal smile. You uncovered hidden shrines, miniature meeting room spaces, empty lots. The logistics of organizing a Port B project like this are immense. The reward, though, is a unique urban experience you would never have as a regular pedestrian, or an ordinary theatre-goer. Takayama has previously pulled off this kind of exploratory stunt with The Complete Manual of Evacuation (2010), which saw participants answer an online personality test and then, depending on the result, directed to random places around the Yamanote train line in Tokyo and there encounter urban minority groups.

In this respect, Takayama is the inheritor to the Sixties’ Angura counterculture concept of shigakigeki “city theatre”, most famously as practised by Shuji Terayama, who would turn whole streets and locales into his “theatre” for multi-hour marathons where audiences explored the urban space in carnivalesque riots of the macabre.

He is uneasy about this heritage, though. Takayama uses some similar techniques to Terayama, such as street interviews, but is doubtful whether Terayama’s city theatre would provoke contemporary audiences jaded to guerilla tactics. It would become just another spectacle, maintaining the binary of audience/performance. “In today’s society, I think we need to develop a more deft methodology that can implant theatre inside the city, one that removes the audience’s feeling of isolation [from the performance]. If I explain by using a metaphor of dreaming, when someone is strongly stimulated while asleep, he or she will wake up and start analyzing the dreams they were just having. I think Terayama’s theatre is similar to this. Because the stimulus is so strong, the audience winds up waking up. But what I want to do is to create a system where people dream but are not aware of the fact that they are dreaming. In other words, I want to devise theatre that doesn’t appear to be ‘theatre’. I believe that this is where the possibilities for contemporary theatre lie in today’s society.” [Tokyo Theatre Today, Kyoko Iwaki]

The low-fi tech used in the roughly two-hour performance — small transistor radios hung from the necks of the participants — emphasizes how you are looking back to Japan’s post-war period and investigating its legacy. As you would arrive at each spot, you then tuned the frequency of the radio to what was indicated on each postcard and then you heard the sounds of the children reading Jelinek’s text. Their voices rung true, rendering the Austrian writer’s typically oblique and circular wordplay into something more direct and comprehensible. Emotional response can be hard to pull off with site-specific theatre and yet this event was incredible moving. The voices came from the mouths of local people — the most involved of all people in the current crisis — and, since it forced you to listen when normally you are overwhelmed by visuals, it cut through the mountain of images and noise that has been inexorably increasing ever since that mid-afternoon moment on March 11th, 2011, when tsunami waves crashed towards the cost of northeast Japan.

By focusing exclusively on the voices of toujisha (the involved) and by making the audience “involved” through its interactive nature, the project succeeds in stimulating and moving much more so than any dramatic treatment of the text could have. Jelinek’s text is filled with references to burial (begraben) and the tragedy of Antigone, in which internment and dealing with the dead was made a state crime. Figuratively speaking, the dead are still rotting in Fukushima, since their tragedies have yet to find closure. (The girls reading Jelinek’s text are all Antigone.)

Takayama’s approach is deliberately non-provocative; he is not “political” in the obvious sense of the word. He invites participants to reflect through the experience he provides. “I have no vision,” he says. “I cannot propose a system for building consensus… It’s like I’ve devoted myself to the work of listening just to voices, and the more I think about it the more it seems that I’m not heading towards activism. It’s like I’m standing there in a stupor.” [Tokyo / Scene #3]

Last year he created the Referendum Project for Festival/Tokyo 2011, a touring truck showing interviews with Tokyo and Fukushima school children on the state. Visitors could watch the interviews they wanted and then “vote” by answering the same questions on a “ballot sheet” and then posting this in a box inside. Adopting his usual quiet, roundabout way to the theme, it was nonetheless a theatricalized referendum (Japan has never had a national referendum), inducing audiences to listen, to think and then to share. At the time, though, with the disaster still very fresh in the mind, somehow this reflective approach felt too indirect. We were craving action. Now enough time has gone by and we see the inadequacy of just shouting. Kein Licht II succeeds precisely because of its implicitness, in how it eschews didacticism.

To return to T.S. Eliot again, The Wasteland famously opens with a section entitled The Burial of the Dead.

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

Its intonations are the more chilling when we consider the animals roaming Fukushima, the corpses awaiting a proper tomb.

Exploring Shimbashi and the “gap” that exists between reality, the images and the voices, you come to see Tokyo, as Eliot saw London, as an “Unreal City”.

Photo: Eiji Kobayashi

[Image Source]

But some things have been buried — responsibility, the future, recompense — and these must be exhumed. There can be no greater offense to the twenty thousand dead and the hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees than the amnesia that Tokyo is currently willingly undergoing.

The authorities have turned dealing with the crisis into a taboo. It is doing nothing to deal with TEPCO’s mess, not least because governments like Tokyo city itself are major shareholders and want to protect their own interests rather than break up the company. No real solution to the nation’s grave energy crisis has been proposed by the public sector as of yet. Swept under the carpet, the media is drowning in tidbits about fatuous entertainment machines like AKB48, fed to them by ad agencies. The real issues are only being addressed by a handful of journalists, thinkers and artists. Akira Takayama can now claim his rightful place as one of their leaders.

Festival/Tokyo 2012: Beyond Words

Festival/Tokyo 2012 starts on October 27th.

This year’s program focuses on themes of the media. Following the March 11th earthquake, tsunami and subsequent Fukushima catastrophe in 2011, the inability of the mass media to report or investigate certain aspects of the crisis were apparent. On the other hand, many people praised Twitter and other forms of media for providing new avenues for communication.

In the wake of such a disaster — and one which has been insidiously brushed under the carpet so quickly by the central and metropolitan governments, and even the population — how can you respond with sincerity and eloquence? And are media like theatre or the performing arts adequate platforms today for such a response?

“Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)”
© Arno Declair

Language and the arts are limited media; there are many things they cannot do, though conversely there are innumerable and immeasureable achievements that only they can reach as well. If language presents all kinds of semantic binds and problems, is there a realm beyond words?

The F/T12 Main Program explores these issues, with a trilogy of productions of Elfriede Jelinek forming its central work. Kein Licht. and its epilogue Kein Licht II were written by the Austrian Nobel Prize laureate after March 11th and ruminate on motifs of Antigone and the absurd. In the same way, Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) looks at the absurdity of another catastrophe, the Holocaust and Nazism, and the complicity of ordinary and well-to-do citizens, and explores in its style the inability of language to voice this articulately: you are forced to adopt the vernacular of the absurd, since any logical response (e.g. a straight drama) would be inappropriate to the complexities of the tragedy.

Takuya Murakawa, the documentary theatre and film director, continues his own explorations of communication media in words, looking at sign language and other forms of dialogue. Likewise, crossing categories and genres is a key signature of the festival; there are many other dance, art installations and tour performances, with participants from Iran, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Germany and more.

“Le Préau d’un Seul”

A wordless play like Daisuke Miura’s Castle of Dreams, revived at F/T12, may be as powerful as the most language-heavy text on Broadway. In the same way, a universal, essentially dialogue-free installation like Jean Michel Bruyère / LFKs’s Le Préau d’un Seul draws the audience into the sphere of an immigrant camp, rather than lecturing or merely presenting ideas. (Sir David Hare, take note, please.)

Since its inception, F/T has attempted to break out of the molds of regular performance venues, with promenade theatre events, tours, outdoor shows and even one performance in a moving vehicle. This year sees a series of flash mob events in Ikebukuro each weekend that will attempt to involve passers-by in spontaneous happenings that break them out of the molds of ordinary Tokyo life.

Daisuke Miura / potudo-ru, “Castle of Dreams”
© Bruno De Tollenaere

And with the theme of media as its central focus, F/T has launched a new freepaper, Tokyo/Scene, offering essays and interviews on this year’s program and published in four issues before, during and after the festival period. Critique and mainstream in-depth media is seriously lacking in Japan and the mini journal is an experiment in broadening public consciousness of the role of written language in such discussions.

In the same way, there is another critics-in-residence program this year, F/T Dialogue, with 2012′s participants each holding their own independent events. One of the projects is by arts journalist Kyoko Iwaki, a blogger training camp to encourage critical writing by young Japanese. Penning reviews is completely natural for Europeans and people from other cultures, but the Japanese education system makes no attempt to promote this kind of faculty amongst its youthful wards. As a result, most lack the ability or motiviation to do so, even when they have opinions to express.

There are also a host of performances with either English surtitles or that would otherwise be comprehensible for international audiences regardless of Japanese language ability. The F/T website has more information on the best productions to see.

Oshimai no toki (The End Times) by Daisuke Miura (Potudo-ru)

Last September Daisuke Miura’s Oshimai no toki (The End Times) was premiered in Shimokitazawa, under the auspices of his potudo-ru company.

This sex psycho-drama unusually for Miura has more of a clear narrative arch and is not just about “young people” (wakamono), featuring two married couples who are ostensibly apparently approaching middle age (at least, their social position is heading in that direction, though their years are still a fair few off it yet), as well as the more typical Miura characters — poorer, rougher, and essentially on the fringes of society (or at least respectability — their poverty is not so much economic as moral and emotional). In this case it is two air conditioner engineers, one a drug addict and with a pregnant girlfriend who is tattooed and ugly. At least in this play Miura shows that the barren affliction of humanity is democratically spread across all social classes and walks of life.

That is not to say the Miura has never portrayed average “salarymen”-types before. They crop up in situations, such as being one of the participants of the swinger party in Love’s Whirlpool. But in this case the setting is predominantly focused on a middle class marriage and gravitates around its lair, a dull but well-furnished condo. Into this comes tragedy (the death of a child), and then (this being Potudo-ru) graphic scenes of rape and sex. What is more surprising is how drug addiction then infringes, forming a portrait of a corrupt bourgeois lifestyle that all too easily collapses within its own husk.

When a married couple’s son dies in an accident, the wife, Tomeko, retreats into a landscape of grief that her husband cannot penetrate. But things change with a seemingly banal episode, when two engineers come to repair her air conditioner and one of them, a gruff and silent near-thug (played by Potudo-ru member Ryotaro Yonemura), stays behind to seduce (or is it assault?) the young wife. This snaps her out of mourning and she promptly begins a passionate affair with the man, even making excuses not to go to her son’s grave in order to enjoy carnal sessions on the floor of her apartment. The engineer himself has a pregnant girlfriend whom he finds ugly and will not touch (she’s an example of so-called busu-yaku, literally “ugly role”), preferring instead to indulge in heroin. However, if you think Tomeko’s husband is merely the victim in all this, think again…

Miura is playing with noir here, right down to the scorching summer setting. In many ways The End Times is seeped in the motifs of a familiar story and genre, that of adultery and the lovers’ plan to kill the wife’s husband. Take out the Japanese context and you could have The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Body Heat and numerous famous noirs.

As always Miura is concerned with the ugliness lurking just below the surface of our lives; the slightest scratch will throw it out into the open for all the world to see. “In my plays, the ugliness is on display from the beginning to the end,” he has said. That is certainly true of previous work, though in this new play it is more hidden within the snug cabinet of bourgeois treats, ready to sliver out like a foul plague.

Miura is often keen on well-constructed and slick set designs, frequently depicting multiple spaces and rooms at once. In this case, the stage was indeed split (as if between worlds) — interestingly, it is the large middle class condo that is the “netherworld” below the cramped and simple apartment of the wife’s lover. It also employs more visibly authorial conceits and tools, such as using narration to show the thoughts of Tomeko, with this also forming a kind of deus ex machina at the ambiguous end.

Miura has made his name through extreme In-Yer-Face plays that are semi-documentary in style, with the audience unsure if the actors are genuinely abusing each other. He then switched to more “artificial” forms, though never losing his graphic edge, reaching likely an apogee with Love’s Whirlpool and the wordless Castle of Dreams (shortly to be re-staged in Kyoto and Tokyo).

The End Times sits within this oevure then as the next rung on the journey towards a kind of playwriting that could be at home quite comfortably in the Anglophone world, driven by devices, conventions and narrative — though without sacrificing the essential Miura vision. Up till now he has sought out drama through the “small trembles” in daily life. “So-called dramatic moments do not arrive with life-changing incidents,” he has said. “What I want to do is… depict the ‘little trembles’ which are embedded within our ordinary lives. [...] The very kernel of my play is these tiny trembles.”

The End Times, though, surely has a slightly different kernel. It uses more generic structures and large narrative events (death, adultery, addiction) that are closer to melodrama than his previous plays. It does not feel as original — at least to anyone well-versed in film or theatre — but it is still nonetheless a gripping, chilling and surprising indictment of marriage and partnership, class, and humanity.

Interview quotations from Tokyo Theatre Today: Conversations with Eight Emerging Theatre Artists (2011) by Kyoko Iwaki.

Banana Gakuen Theatre Company accused of “audience rape”

More accustomed to throwing water (and other liquids) around the theatre, Banana Gakuen Theatre Company (previously known as pure BANANA girls class) have this time themselves landed in hot water. Or is it much ado about nothing?

Famed for their extremely physical performances, in which legions of “geek” idols sing, dance and shout in disharmonious unison, Banana’s popular productions are always cacophonous and visceral to say the least.

They reference Akihabara tropes and other subcultures by taking those motifs and adding a heck of a lot of volume, amplification and emphasis. The final result is either a unapologetic celebration, overwrought mimesis, insane pastiche — or parody, depending on your outlook. Their actual theatrical merits beyond revelling in these pop elements is an issue which we will have to leave to another, more considered time.

Their current “controversy” revolves around recent performances at the Ouji Shogekijo in which some members of the audience members are allegedly furious at the way they were literally manhandled when brought up onto the stage. The accusation is that female audience members had their chests and lower bodies touched and groped by male performers, who were masked by “wearing” cardboard boxes.

As usual, Japanese people are taking to Twitter and other semi-anonymous digital media forms to express anger or criticism. It’s not all just tweets of rage, though. There is also a pensive dialogue evolving with those defending the troupe and others considering what the “incident” means for freedom of expression, and the sanctity of the theatre space versus the legality of breaking certain taboos.

The theatre has posted a cautious response on its blog, stating that it is trying to contact the alleged victims and establish veracity in their claims. It does not appear *at present* that anyone has actually directly contacted the theatre or company, let alone the police.

Audience interaction is always a thorny subject and hard to pull off successfully in this very much post-Sixties era. In the same way that every road construction features a plethora of hard hat and flashing baton-bedizened men to shepherd pedestrians around the hazard, performances in Japan are usually highly cordoned affairs, with numerous ushers and other crew and staff making announcements, guiding you to seats and guaranteeing everyone is suitably pampered. Even when there is no fixed seat numbers there will often be a fussy system of “numbered entry tickets” (seiri bangou) for when you can go and claim a pew, all designed to ensure that everything, everyone and everywhere is careful and safe and comfortable.

Banana Gakuen, then, breaks with this mold like a bat outa hell.

One might argue that Japanese audiences, even fringe ones, are not exposed to as much immersive or interactive theatre as hardened ones in Europe or America. But Banana Gakuen are not a new company and have a definite reputation now. When you go to a Banana Gakuen performance you expect to emerge soaked, deafened and sensorially assaulted. Regardless, this is still a step further, and I personally know of at least one veteran and open-minded theatre-goer who felt physically invaded by the aggression on display. He even compared the group to fascism, not least for their irresponsible use of right-wing (uyoku) imagery, presumably employed purely for shallow aesthetic purposes rather than as political statements.

That being said, the title of the performance was, among other things (Banana Gakuen titles are always horrendously long), Rinkan Gakkou (literally, “Gang Bang School”) (輪姦学校), and so perhaps to be shocked or upset is missing the point? Or — it is the point? (With their typically manic linguistic prowess, Banana Gakuen themselves have rendered the full performance title in English as to be to be to be!!!!! BANAGAKU the Shakespeare fucker(a tentative-working-preliminary title). The only response can be “sic”.) The claimants in this online maelstrom were then the “victims” of the theatrical “rape”, though paradoxically that is the word now being earnestly bandied about in the tweets.

Interestingly some of the most vocal people on Twitter at least seem to be other fringe theatre artists as much as regular members of audiences (the theatre world in Japan, especially the fringe scene, can feel very small at times), making it even harder to put this “controversy” into a proper context.

*JULY UPDATE* Banana Gakuen Theatre Company have now issued a formal apology and announced they will disband following their next performance. The company also withdrew from the Festival/Tokyo Emerging Artists Program in the autumn (F/T’s fringe satellite program) and its forthcoming performance was cancelled at Oriza Hirata’s Komaba Agora.

Iron-Cracking Jesters in a Quiet Room

I saw a third—I heard his voice:
It is the Hermit good!
He singeth loud his godly hymns
That he makes in the wood.
He’ll shrieve my soul, he’ll wash away
The Albatross’s blood.

It may be Coleridge who initially springs to mind for the literature graduate when they first hear the bizarre name Crack Iron Albatrossket.

Led by a handful of dynamic personalities, including novelist Akihito Inui, Crack Iron Albatross is a fringe comedy theatre troupe with a large cult following. Large enough, perhaps, that it’s about time it got some exposure on this modest blog that professes to cover Tokyo contemporary theatre.

Imagine a cross between Monty Python, The Fast Show and Rakugo, with the Japanese penchant for unashamedly physical gags and the downright scatological thrown in for good measure… and you might have something of an idea of the take-no-prisoners concoction Crack Iron serves up on an average night.

One moment the performers may be acting out a fist fight, the next trying to kiss each other or suddenly segueing into an Awa-odori dance. Many of the references and in-jokes are contemporary but the skits also reverberate with shitamachi flavours. Even the name, Crack Iron (inverted from the Japanese, Tetsuwari — tetsu means iron, wari means to separate), seems to derive from an Edo-era circus group, paired with a neologism of “albatross” by way of Fleetwood Mac.

The ‘show’, for want of a better word, is composed of many short sketches, some of which have loud music and songs, and all of which are incongruous and surreal, played by the cast at a zany pitch. If it sounds derivative then you should be aware that, though it is visual, the dialogue is packed with cultural motifs and riffs, from the blind masseur-cum-samurai Zatoichi to Japanese foods.

And if the anarchic content of the sketches may seem juvenile — and it is, in a knowing way — then the framing of the performance is more austere, though also in a meta-theatre style. The stage is typically like a kind of Rakugo or other traditional play, a slightly raised set with a room full of junk, noren curtains and tatami mats. Skit titles are shown on a large handwritten scroll/notepad, the pages of which are changed with each scene. Many of the sketches are often reworked in different shows, so audiences enjoy new versions of familiar scenarios.

One such scene (‘A Corner of the World’) involved two men arguing over whether one of their t-shirts was a Paul Smith or a Patti Smith, before the other rips the shirt open, massages his shoulders and extracts lots of grime from the skin. This is then placed in a cigarette and smoked, getting them both very high.

Here’s a version of the sketch:

Another sketch is essentially a monologue of a man who eats liver yakitori and gets horny, and proceeds then to inject himself with the meat skewer like it is heroin. It shouldn’t be funny but it is.

Breaking taboos about, say, drugs is typically a big no-no for mainstream Japan, even for the halls of comedy. Most cultures allow comedians at least to get away with the risque, the challenging and the offensive. But even the most gross or in-your-face mainstream comics in Japan stay clear of taboos (the imperial family, the war, much of politics). When the British light comedy panel show QI mentioned in passing the case of a man who had survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs as an amazing (amusing?) story of bad luck, as part of a section discussing strange but funny ironies, people in Japan were outraged, not so much by the content of what the guests said on the show — the vast majority could not understand that, and in fact the ‘jokes’ that were made were all about the, ahem, quality of British rail transport — but simply by the idea of a comedy show bringing up such a sacred subject matter. This kind of dangerous cultural self-censorship is challenged, certainly inadvertently, by the likes of Crack Iron Albatrossket.

Though revolving around the same key members, and especially Inui, Misao Ushijima and Yoichi Murakami, the group has innovated over its ten-plus years of existence by collaborating with outsiders, such as the dancer Masako Yasumoto and more recently, the manga artist Toyo Kataoka.

It reads like an arresting thought but Japan suffers from a dearth of fools. Shakespeare is replete with clowns and their ilk to play the soothsayers of society. You will find none in Kabuki and even the Japanese imperial court, which, unlike the Shogun’s world, actually had nothing to do for centuries except enjoy the refinery of the arts, had no jester to liven up the stakes, let alone deliver licensed anarchy in the form of jokes and mockery.

It is left to comedians to do this, even in modern Japan. However, o-wari, or mainstream comedy on TV, is composed of celebrity comics who start off in poorly paid Manzai stand-up and work their way up to advertisement endorsements, presenting cooking shows and marrying busty female models typically many years younger. Comedy is safe and physical for the most part, either playing on reoccurring gags and punchlines, or in-jokes about other celebrities (a nickname, a forte, a scandal and so on). It is, however, often loud. Volume, in a culture that stereotypically at least, places great emphasis on harmony and the quiet that should accompany this — consider the trains, which attempt to curb unnecessary noise, such as talking on mobile phones — thus becomes a key tool for changing things up. Being raucous, though not as edgy or clever as a sardonic fool or a witty satirist, is nonetheless a form of anarchy.

Crack Iron fall into that category, singing loud their un-godly hymns. Despite being relative veterans of the fringe scenes, their audiences are still young, in their twenties for the most part, though they seem to have retained their original fans as well. Crack Iron performances become a process of catharsis for a young entertainment-seeking generation. To call it irreverent is perhaps going a bridge too far; there is no direct targeting of social mores. We cannot find a voice of specific dissent here. Rather, licensed chaos and incoherence gives way to shared exploration and communal ties through laughter.