| In the nineties Brecht was the second most staged foreign author after Shakespeare in Japan. Today in the beginning of the 21st century, Shakespeare still enjoys a high popularity in Japanese theater, but Brecht is not well known any more to the audience, according to Iwabuchi Tatsuji, one of the leading representatives of Brecht's theater.;The goal of this study is to establish the factors that led Brecht to become an important playwright in the political turmoil in the sixties, followed by the decline in the seventies and eighties and a certain revival in the nineties to a more “audience friendly,” and imaginative theater of entertainment. The approach chosen was to present a historical background of Japanese theater before the Brecht reception, reflecting the radical changes in society, including literature and theater, during the Meiji restauration.;The new style of life and the resulting problems could not adequately be expressed by the centuries old and well preserved forms of the traditional theater.;In 1906 Tsubouchi founded the “Society for Art and Literature,” and in 1909 Osanai founded the “Free Theater.” This “New Theater” (Shingeki) introduced and concentrated on Western Drama, with the goal of improving Japanese theater. Tubouchi's ideal was Shakespeare.;In 1932 another pioneer of Shingeki, Hijikata Yoshi, staged Beggar's Theater, based on Brecht's Three-Penny-Opera. This performance was initiated by Senda Koreya who had just returned from his stay in Germany (1927–31) and who had experienced the theater of Erwin Piscator and Gustav von Wangenheim as well as the German and International worker's theater movement.;Senda's plan of introducing the theater of Brecht to Japan could not be materialized until after the war. In 1940 most of the politically active Shingeki troups were dissolved and the actors imprisoned by the Japanese government.;Another approach chosen in this study was to analyze the correlation between Brecht's adaption of the No play Taniko and the Japanese interpretations of Brecht's Jasager, Neinsager and Massnahme, based on Taniko. |
