| When Japan's missions of political and cultural leaders were sent to visit Western countries by the Tokugawa shogunate and by the newly formed Meiji government during the 1860s and 1870s, what impressed the members was the important position that theater held in each nation.; Inspired by the discovery, the progressive theater manager Morita Kan'ya XII, the powerful politician Ito Hirobumi, and the ambitious journalist Fukuchi Ochi collaborated, between 1878 and 1879, to create a "Japanese national drama" that was comparable to nineteenth-century Western theater. As a result, kabuki, which had flourished as a popular entertainment for Tokugawa commoners, was burdened, suddenly, by the need to deserve the elevated position of representing Japanese culture. The commercial theater for entertainment was invited to turn into a public theater, and as such, forced to encounter Western civilization face to face.; The ambitious attempt has tended to be treated as an individual undertaking and as a mere part of the trend of "kabuki reform" in Japan's theater history. However, I believe that this undertaking is better viewed as an attempt not merely to reform or modify but to "transform" kabuki into a totally different kind of theater for a totally different kind of audience, specifically national drama aimed at upper class citizens and intellectual elites including foreigners.; This dissertation, therefore, reevaluates Morita Kan'ya's kabuki productions of 1878--79 as representing a unique hybrid resulting from the direct, if accidental and fragmental, encounter between nineteenth-century Western theater and Meiji kabuki. Further, this research reveals that the significance of these productions is best understood within the large cultural and political scope of the "reformation" of kabuki and the "transformation" of Japanese theater, a scope that Kan'ya, and his collaborators and his advisors, claimed from the start. |
