History of Tokyo 1867-1989. Edward Seidensticker

entertainment after another received the badge. He went to see Sumō wrestling in 1884 at the Hama Palace; the grand match was, most fittingly for all, a draw. He viewed certain offerings of the variety halls—and in 1887 he attended a presentation of Kabuki, at the foreign minister’s residence. Kanya was in charge of the arrangements, and Danjūrō headed the cast. The first performance, at which the emperor was present, lasted through the afternoon. The emperor did not leave until almost midnight. Danjūrō grumbled to Kanya that no actor could be expected to perform well with a truncated hanamichi (the processional way by which actors approach the stage through the pit), but of course he could not, on such an occasion, decline to go on. (Actors grumbled similarly, but likewise went on, when Kabuki came to New York in 1960.) On the second day the empress had her viewing, and on two succeeding days other members of the royal family, including the empress dowager, had theirs. The emperor was taciturn in his reaction, declaring merely that he found Kabuki unusual, but the empress wept so profusely at a play about the murder of a child that Kanya, alarmed, urged the actors to try understatement.

      In Edo and the Tokyo of Meiji, the most highly esteemed Kabuki actors had enormous popularity and influence. They set styles, such as that for a certain kind of umbrella, which quite swept the place. Huge crowds, of which Tanizaki himself was sometimes a part, turned out for the funerals of famous actors.

      Still in late Meiji, after the turn of the century, the Kabuki was, along with the licensed quarters, the form on which the high world of the Low City centered. At the end of Meiji a lumber merchant from east of the river, as in Osanai s novel The Bank of the Big River (see pages 69-70), could still be a patron of the arts. One would not come upon his kind today. If modern actors have patrons, they are from the entrepreneurial aristocracy of the High City. In this fact is the measure of the success of the improvers in “improving” Kabuki and its actors, making them artists in an art acceptable to the elite. In the process, old ties were cut. The Kabuki and the demimonde are still close, but the demimonde too has cut its ties with the Low City. One would not be likely to find a person from east of the river among the big spenders.

      Danjūrō is often reproved for obsequiousness and for indifference to the plebeian culture that produced Kabuki. Whether or not he is to be blamed for what happened, one may see the dispersal of the old mercantile culture in the changing sociology of the theater.

      Morita Kanya’s day of prosperity had already passed when Spencer came and Kikugorō took his balloon ride. It was at the Kabukiza that he took it. Opened in 1889, on the site east of Ginza where it still stands, the Kabukiza had a generally Western exterior, in a quiet Renaissance style. Some details suggest a wish to incorporate traditional elements as well. A fan-shaped composition on the central pediment looks in photographs like the ridge piece of a shrine or godown. Inside, the chief difference from the Shintomiza was in size: the Kabukiza was much larger. The great day of the former did not return and, immediately upon its opening, the Kabukiza became what it has been for almost a century, the chief seat of Tokyo Kabuki. Managerial methods were ever more modern, though the old teahouses were allowed in limited numbers, and yet humbler establishments as well, street stalls for which Ginza was still famous in the years after the surrender.

       The Kabukiza, in a 1902 lithograph

      

      The improvers still were not satisfied. Even after the opening of the Kabukiza, they lacked a place where a gentleman might enjoy, in gentlemanly company, the traditional theater. So, in the last full year of Meiji, the Imperial Theater was opened beside the palace moat, on the western edge of Mitsubishi Meadow. Plans were begun in 1906. Shibusawa Eiichi, most energetic and versatile of Meiji entrepreneurs, was chairman. He was born in 1840, in what is now a part of metropolitan Tokyo. To the true son of Nihombashi he may have been a bumpkin, but his case further demonstrates that Osaka people were not the only successful ones in emergent Tokyo. He was everywhere, doing everything, among the organizers of the Bank of Japan, the First National Bank (the first incorporated bank in the land), the Oji Paper Company, Japan Mail Lines (N.Y.K.), and the private railway company that put through the first line to the far north. His was the somewhat Moorish house (see page 97) that seemed so strange to the young Tanizaki and other children of Nihombashi. Among the other organizers of the Imperial Theater were Prince Saionji and Prince Itō.

      The first Imperial, which survived the disaster of 1945, was a highly Gallic structure of marble, hung with tapestries, and provided with seventeen hundred Western-style seats. Initially it had a resident Kabuki troupe, but it never really caught on as a place for Kabuki. The High City liked it better than did the Low City, which had a happy simile: seated in the Imperial, one felt like a cenotaph in a family shrine. The Imperial was the place for gala performances when, in the years before the earthquake, celebrities like Pavlova began appearing.

      Theater was meanwhile becoming a big business, one which Osaka dominated. The theater and journalism, indeed, provide the best instances of the conquest of Tokyo by Osaka capital that is commonly averred and not easy to prove. It may be that Osaka money did best in fields of high risk and low capitalization. The Shōchiku company of Osaka bought the Shintomiza and another Tokyo theater in late Meiji, and in 1912 the Kabukiza. Shōchiku has dominated Kabuki ever since—but of course Kabuki has become a progressively smaller part of the city’s entertainment business.