The first Shintomiza looks traditional enough in photographs, but certain architectural details, such as a copper-roofed tower, were a wonder and a pleasure to the Kabuki devotee. In the pit (though they are not apparent in woodcuts) were several dozen chairs, for the comfort of those who chose to attend in Western dress. Kanya’s first Shintomiza burned in 1876. The theater visited by General Grant was opened in 1878.
Kanya was an enthusiastic improver—in content, in techniques, and in managerial methods. He introduced bright new lights, and theater evenings. Kabuki had been staged only during daylight hours, on moral grounds, it seems, and also for the practical reason that the fire hazard increased as darkness came on. With the opening of his second Shintomiza he greatly reduced the number of theater teahouses, with a view to eliminating them altogether. The teahouse functioned as a caterer and ticket agency, monopolizing the better seats. Kanya’s endeavor to get rid of the teahouses was in the end a complete success, although it took time.
The Shintomiza
Only complete control of the box office would permit a rationalization of managerial methods. With little exaggeration, it might be said that he looked ahead to the impersonal efficiency of the computer. Old customs can be slow to disappear, however, when people find them a little expensive and time-consuming, but not unpleasant. That they should die was probably more important to entrepreneurs like Kanya than to the Low City Kabuki devotee. (Traces of the old system survive, even today, in box-office arrangements for Sumō wrestling.) In his boyhood Tanizaki Junichirō was taken to a more modern and rationally organized theater, the Kabukiza, and it still had teahouses. Tanizaki was born in 1886, almost a decade after the opening of the second Shintomiza.
I remember how my heart raced as we set out by rickshaw, my mother and I, southwards from Nihombashi towards Tsukiji. My mother still called the Shintomi district Shimabara, from the licensed quarter of early Meiji. We crossed Sakura Bridge, passed Shimabara, where the Shintomiza then stood, and turned from Tsukiji Bridge to follow the Tsukiji canal. From Kamei Bridge we could see the dome of the Kabukiza, which was finished in 1889. This would have been perhaps four or five years later. There were eleven theater teahouses attached to the Kabukiza. Always when a play was on they had awnings draped from their roofs. We had our rickshaw pull up at the Kikuoka, where we would rest for a time. Urged on by a maid, we would slip into straw sandals and hurry over the boardwalks to the theater. I remember how strangely cold the smooth floor of the theater was as I slipped from the sandals. A cold blast of air always came through the wooden doors of a theater. It struck at the skirt and sleeves of a festive kimono, and was at one’s throat and stomach like peppermint. There was a softness in it, as on a good day in the plum-blossom season. I would shiver, pleasantly.
Kanya spent a great deal of money on important officials and foreign visitors. On opening day of the second Shintomiza in 1878 all manner of notables, dressed in swallowtails, were set out upon the stage on chairs. The prime minister and the governor were among them, and so were most of the actors to whom the future belonged.
As an innovator, Kanya experimented boldly to bring modern elements into the Kabuki repertoire. The ninth Danjūrō became famous for his “living history,” which sought to introduce literal reality into the properties and costumes of historical plays, while the fifth Kikugorō was renowned for his “cropped-head pieces”—plays with modern settings, distinguished by enlightened haircuts. Among Kikugorō’s roles were the celebrated murderesses Takahashi O-den and Hanai O-ume, and Spencer the balloon man. Kanya even experimented with foreign performers and settings. Clara Whitney witnessed his most ambitious attempt at the cosmopolitan, A Strange Tale of Castaways, in 1879. A foreign lady from Yokohama trilled, “delightful on the high notes. But the best parts were spoiled because the Japanese, who thought it was something unusually funny, would laugh aloud…. I was quite out of patience.” The experiment was a financial disaster, and Kanya’s enthusiasm for Western things waned thereafter.
Kikugorō’s balloon ascent did not join the Kabuki repertoire, but Kanya’s experiments in stagecraft had a profound effect on the form. Near-darkness had prevailed in Edo, and he started it on its way to the almost blinding illumination of our time. The second Shintomiza had gaslights, but it may be that Kanya was not the very first to use them. E. S. Morse thus describes a visit to a theater, probably one of the two that still remained in Asakusa, in 1877:
Coming up the raised aisle from the entrance, several actors stride along in a regular stage strut and swagger, the grandest of all having his face illuminated by a candle on the end of a long-handled pole held by a boy who moved along too and kept the candle constantly before the actor’s face no matter how he turned…. There were five footlights, simply gas tubes standing up like sticks, three feet high, and unprotected by shade or screen, a very recent innovation; for before they had these flaring gas jets it was customary for each actor to have a boy with a candle to illuminate his face.
Conservative actors still attempt to follow old forms as they are recorded in Edo prints and manuscripts; but bright lights have changed Kabuki utterly. Kanya also introduced evening performances, permitted because the bright new lights were regarded as less of a fire hazard than the dim old lights had been. From Edo into Meiji, theaters sometimes opened as early as seven in the morning, to pack in as much as possible before dusk. We can but imagine how heavily the shadows hung over the old Kabuki, natural light and candles doing little to dispel them. Perhaps Kabuki was improved by the efforts of people such as Kanya, perhaps it was not; but certainly it was changed.
Kanya was a zealous reformer in another sense. The “movement for the improvement of the theater” had two aims in his most active years: to abolish what was thought to be the coarseness and vulgarity of late Edo, and to make the Kabuki socially acceptable, a fit genre for upper-class viewing, let the lower classes follow along as they could and would.
As early as 1872, there were bureaucratic utterances informing the Kabuki that it must cease being frivolous and salacious and start being edifying. Danjūrō—to his great discredit, many will say—was a leading exponent of improvement. Wearing striped pants and morning coat at the opening of the second Shintomiza, he read a statement on behalf of his fellow actors: “The theater of recent years has drunk up filth and reeked of the coarse and the mean. It has discredited the beautiful principle of rewarding good and chastising evil, it has fallen into mannerisms and distortions, it has been going steadily downhill. Perhaps at no time has the tendency been more marked than now. I, Danjūrō, am deeply grieved by these facts, and, in consultation with my colleagues, I have resolved to clean away the decay.”
Improvement became an organized movement during the Rokumeikan Period, shortly after The Mikado was first performed in London. There seems to have been a link between the two events. The Mikado was the talk of the Rokumeikan set, which thought it a national insult. Proper retaliation, it seems, was the creation of a dramatic form that foreigners had to admire, in spite of themselves. The Society for Improving the Theater had among its founders the foreign minister and the education minister. The wantonness of the old Kabuki must be eliminated. An edifying drama, fit for noble ladies, domestic and foreign, must take its place.
These purifying endeavors had little permanent effect on the Kabuki repertoire. Danjūrō presently moved away from “living history,” which had never been popular. Many found it incomprehensible. The novelist Mori Ogai advised the spectator to stuff his ears with cotton upon entering the theater. Danjūrō was all