Kabuki and the Audiences
Mitsumi
Yamamoto
At the present time, the term kabuki would be explained as the
Japanese traditional performance if you look it up in a dictionary. Some people
might imagine a situation that the sophisticated ladies and gentlemen wearing kimono appreciate kabuki solemnly. It is true that almost all audiences try to dress
up neatly to watch the play, but one question occurred to me. The question is
whether kabuki has been called “Japanese traditional performance” since the Edo period,
when kabuki became very popular among
ordinary people. The images that people at that time had must be quite
different from that we have now.
Before the Edo period, kabuki was
considered as a kind of light theatrical entertainments. The audiences were
uneducated people with the lowest social status. They watched kabuki
eating shushi, and chatting or
heckling. That sort of thing occurred very commonly. Moreover they paid more
attentions to the actors’ appearances than the contents of stories since kabuki in those days consisted of young
and good looking boys. There were even fights over which actor was the most handsome of all.
In order to prevent the breakdown of
public morals, the Edo government established the following rules on performing kabuki.
1. Actors
who are less than 14 years old cannot be permitted to play.
2. Do
not stimulate sexual feelings of the audiences.
Rule
No.2 can be said as a tacit order, which
kabuki should not be light shows or revues without contents, but dramas
showing certain stories. Those rules changed the world of kabuki business greatly. People who were engaged in kabuki struggled hard to find a way to
attract the uneducated audiences. As a result, the actors came up with various
ideas to entertain the audiences: using famous historical events or legends,
combining topical news at that time, making it easy to recognize each role by
various makeups, stylizing acting, making lines sound like beautiful music and
reflecting the decadent world. This new style of kabuki is the present one which is still performed in many
countries including Japan.
At the Meiji period, excessive Wsternization
occurred in Japan. This tendency influenced kabuki
as well. People involved in kabuki started
to research the accurate historical background of the stories they performed
and show modern Western thoughts and the image of the sort of person they
regard as ideal. They tried to build up new intellectual kabuki style. However, this new style created at the Meiji period really
does not be performed at the present time. This fact proves that their attempt
ended in a failure.
Why was it a failure? It is simply because the
intellectual kabuki was boring and
not interesting for the audiences at all. The audiences actually tried to
adjust themselves to modern and sophisticated society as well. The westernized
Japan looked stimulating, but at the same time, the ordinary people might have
felt lonely, seeing everything at the Edo period being thrown away. For them, kabuki was the simple entertainment
everyone can enjoy easily. They did not care about inconsistency and unreality
of the stories. They preferred lowbrow and obscene words which were usually
used in their daily lives to refined and beautiful words. Kabuki, which we consider as the traditional and dignified
performance, was very common entertainments even uneducated people could enjoy.
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madeno yasuminashi: Kyougen sakusya no sigoto toha?. Retrieved from http://allabout.co.jp/gm/gc/202878/3/
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Kabuki
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