This book is an annotated collection of English-language documents by foreigners writing about Japan's kabuki theatre in the half-century after the country was opened to the West in 1853. Using memoirs, travelogues, diaries, letters, and reference books, it contains all significant writing about kabuki by foreigners-resident or transient-during the Meiji period (1868-1912), well before the first substantial non-Japanese book on the subject was published. Its chronologically organized chapters contain detailed introductions. Twenty-seven authors, represented by edited versions of their essays, are supplemented by detailed summaries of thirty-five others. The author provides insights into how Western visitors-missionaries, scholars, diplomats, military officers, adventurers, globetrotters, and even a precocious teenage girl-responded to a world-class theatre that, apart from a tiny number of pre-Meiji encounters, had been hidden from the world at large for over two centuries. It reveals prejudices and misunderstandings, but also demonstrates the power of great theatre to bring together people of differing cultural backgrounds despite the barriers of language, artistic convention, and the very practice of theatergoing. And, in Ichikawa Danjuro IX, it presents an actor knowledgeable foreigners considered one of the finest in the world.
Samuel L. Leiter is professor emeritus of theater at Brooklyn College, CUNY.
List of Figures Acknowledgments Part I: Overview Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: A Brief Survey of Meiji Kabuki Part II: The 1860s Chapter 3: From Japan through American Eyes (1859; 1860), by Francis Hall Chapter 4: From Ten Weeks in Japan: "Japanese Drama" (1860), by Rev. George Smith Chapter 5: From Japan through American Eyes (1861; 1862), by Francis Hall Chapter 6: From the Capital of the Tycoon: "Osaca" (1862), by Si Rutherford Alcock Chapter 7: From A Lady's Visit to Manila and Japan (1862) by Anna D'Almeida Chapter 8: "Japanese Theaters" (1864), by Humbert Aime Chapter 9: From A Diplomat in Japan (1866?), by Sir Ernest Satow Chapter 10: More from the 1860s, by Jacob Mortimer Silver, R. Mountenney Jephson, and Edward Pennell Elmhirst Part III: 1870s Chapter 11: From Japanese Episodes: "A Day in a Japanese Theatre" (1872), by Edward H. House Chapter 12: From Clara's Diary: "Kabuki-the Japanese Theater" (1876), by Clara A.N. Whitney Chapter 13: From Japan Day by Day: "The Theatre" (1877, 1878), by Edward S. Morse Chapter 14: "Theatricals" (1878), by Isabella L. Bird Chapter 15: From Clara's Diary: Part I: "Chushingura" (1878), by Clara A.N. Whitney Chapter 16: From Awakening Japan (1879), by Erwin Baelz Chapter 17: From Clara's Diary (1879): "Entertaining General Grant"; "A Western Style Drama", by Clara A.N. Whitney Chapter 18: More from the 1870s, by William Elliot Griffis, Christopher Dresser, Arthur Collins Maclay, William Gray Dixon, Charles H. Eden, and Mrs. Julia D. Carrothers Part IV: The 1880s Chapter 19: From Japan Day by Day: "The Theatre" (1882), by Edward S. Morse Chapter 20: From Jinrikisha Days in Japan: "Japanese Theatre" (1889), by Eliza Rumaha Scidmore Chapter 21: From A Japanese Interior (1889), by Alice Mabel Bacon Chapter 22: More from the 1880s, by Thomas W. Knox, Arthur H. Crow, Andrew Carnegie, William Henry Lucy, Henry Knollys, Henry Fauld Part V: The 1890s Chapter 23: From A Diplomatist's Wife in Japan: "Danjuro, a Great Actor" (1890), by Mary Crawford Fraser Chapter 24: From The Japs at Home (1892), by Douglas Sladen Chapter 25: From Lotos-Time in Japan (1894), by Henry T. Finck Chapter 26: From Japan: A Record in Colour (1896): "Art and the Drama," by Mortimer Menpes Chapter 27: "Japan's Stage and Greatest Actor" (1896), by Robert P. Porter Chapter 28: From Japanese Plays and Playfellows (1898): "Popular Plays"; "Afternoon Calls," by Osman Edwards Chapter 29: More from the 1890s, by Adolfo Farsari, M.B. Cook, G.J. Younghusband, Mae St. John Bramhall, Katherine Schuyler Baxter, William Eleroy Curtis, S.C.F. Jackson, Stafford Ransome Part VI: The 1900s Chapter 30: From Tales from Tokio: "Shibaya to Yakusha" (1900), by Clarence Ludlow Brownell Chapter 31: From Awakening Japan (1903), by Erwin Baelz Chapter 32: From Present-Day Japan: "The Drama" (1904), by Augusta M. Campbell Davidson Chapter 33: From Things Japanese: "Theatre" (1904), by Basil Hall Chamberlain Chapter 34: From Rare Days in Japan: "At the Theatre" (1906), by George Trumbull Ladd Chapter 35: From Smiling 'Round the World: "Visit to a Japanese Theatre, Tokyo" (1908), by Marshall P. Wilder Chapter 36: From Every-Day Japan: "The Japanese Stage" (1909), by Arthur Lloyd Chapter 37: From Japan and the Japanese (1910), by Walter Tyndale Chapter 38: From The Full Recognition of Japan (1911), by Robert P. Porter Chapter 39: From Japan of the Japanese, by Joseph H. Longford Chapter 40: More from the 1900s (and Beyond), by Anna C. Hartshorne, Fred Gaisberg, Douglas Sladen, Walter Del Mar, George H. Rittner, Ernest W. Clement, W. Petrie Watson, Eleanora Mary D'Anethan, Clive Holland, Anonymous, Evelyn Adam, and A.H. Exner Glossary Bibliography About the Editor
Samuel L. Leiter, a foremost scholar of kabuki, has compiled a rich trove of firsthand accounts of kabuki theatergoing in Japan during the Meiji period. The selections were written by people from Britain, the United States, and other countries who traveled to Japan during the first decades of Japan's modernization. They offer fascinating insights into ways that the outside world viewed kabuki and the culture that produced it. Dr. Leiter's introductory material and extensive annotations and commentary provide essential context for the accounts. Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes is a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship on what has become one of the world's most revered art forms. -- Barbara E. Thornbury, Temple University Following two-plus centuries of isolation, Japan in the Meiji Period (1868-1912) overflowed with new possibilities, stimulated partly by a nonstop stream of foreign visitors. Japan's traditional theatre-no, kabuki, and bunraku-so different from Western theatre, garnered far more than superficial "if it's Tuesday, it must be Kyoto" reactions. Samuel Leiter has assembled in this eminently readable book their accounts of kabuki performances. None better than he, the world's leading kabuki scholar-translator outside Japan (he's also a prominent critic of American theatre), to assume this task. He brings alive the excitement-sometimes, the puzzlement-in the foreign accounts. Very few of these early observers were well informed about kabuki, but their gawker-like, enthusiastic accounts provide collectively a fascinating, incipient take on a salient feature of Japan's deeply rooted traditional culture. -- John K. Gillespie, Gillespie Global Group The combination of domestic turmoil and foreign incursions brought immense change to Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912). Kabuki, the reigning stage art, took a leading role in the political and social agendas of the period. In Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes, Samuel Leiter has gathered written accounts left by a significant number of foreigners who attended kabuki during the Meiji Period, and he has added generous and highly informative commentary. The volume takes readers into theatres over the decades of kabuki's rapid transition from a broadly popular cultural attraction to an art forced from on high to serve new purposes and new audiences. This exceptionally valuable volume is an eye-opening and essential contribution to the study of kabuki, while also augmenting understandings of Japanese history, modernization, foreign relations, and foreign interest in Japan. -- Katherine Saltzman-Li, University of California Santa Barbara
