The Mikado in Japan

Fujiwara Opera U.S. Tour (1956)

Reviewers of productions of The Mikado in occupied Japan desired to see performances of The Mikado not just as the triumph of Gilbert and Sullivan over Japanese enemies, but also as the willing concession of Japanese to a Western alliance that would benefit them. Such sentiments continued into the cold war. The United States, emerging as a new superpower, was under pressure to show itself as a liberal nation, deserving of its prominence as a world power and morally superior to its World War II enemies, Germany and Japan. As Christina Klein notes, U.S. global influence came at a time when antinationalist and anticolonialist movements were also gaining ground, particularly in Asia, thus causing a kind of paradox: “How can we define our nation as a non-imperial world power in the age of decolonization?”38 U.S. expansion into Asia was thus “predicated on the principle of international integration rather than on territorial imperialism,” and relied on “an ideology of global interdependence rather than one of racial difference.”39

For the American public, a larger shift in the image of Japan from war enemy to occupied dependant meant a return of the older images of Japan as “elf-land.” Naoko Shibusawa has noted that during the American occupation of Japan there was a resurgence of the nineteenth-century image of Japan as an exotic tourist locale, and for American military personnel during the occupation, buying Japanese souvenirs, particularly those that suggested the familiar icons of japonaiserie, was an especially popular pastime. For instance, Lucy Herndon Crockett, an American Red Cross worker during the occupation, noted that military and diplomatic missions became “hectic shopping tours” for “cheap white silk kimonos embroidered with flamboyant dragons and flowers . . . white silk scarves, handkerchiefs, pajamas, and doilies similarly embroidered or brightly painted with pictures of Fujiyama, geisha girls, cherry blossoms, and torii gates” as well as other products made for “foreign consumption.”40 Attempts to refigure Japan from enemy to postwar ally also figured in post–World War II Hollywood films, which featured “vision after vision of cherry-blossom Japan, receptive Japanese women, and grateful, smiling Japanese children.”41

Such a spirit of benevolent patronage and a renewed interest in the queer and quaint register in the reception of the Fujiwara Opera Company productions of The Mikado that toured the United States eighteen years later. Traveling to cities such as San Francisco; Los Angeles; Denver; Washington, D.C.; Hartford, Connecticut; Asbury Park, New Jersey; and Boston,42 this 1956 Mikado production was performed in tandem with a production of Madame Butterfly in which the Japanese cast members sang in Japanese and the Americans in English. In the years ensuing, the company returned to the United States on tour and took these two productions to Europe.43

Their Madame Butterfly in particular was praised by American reviewers for its “uncommon realism”:

Up to a point the nationalistic realism is rather charming. The young women are pretty and graceful and their mannerisms are real, not acquired. The men, too, seem to be recognizable types and their naturalism is to be preferred to the caricatures one is accustomed to in Italianized opera. There is no very strong acting ability anywhere around, but they all do what comes naturally with a reasonable amount of conviction.44

Unlike the Fujiwara Opera’s Butterfly, their productions of The Mikado seem to be troubled rather than benefited by their Japanese performers. For U.S. reviewers, one consistent complaint was that the cast was unable to measure up to the standard set by D’Oyly Carte. For the reviewer from the Los Angeles Times, “everything but the style of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado’” was authentic when the Fujiwara Opera Company, an import from Tokyo, performed this popular operetta at Philharmonic Auditorium Saturday night:

But as it is precisely style and tradition that matter most in Gilbert and Sullivan the production did little or nothing to warm the cock-les of a true Savoyard’s heart.

The cast, of course, looked perfect in their parts, the costumes and even shoes were absolutely correct, and if the sets were disappointing they had an atmosphere reminiscent of what was seen when the Kabuki troupe visited here.

The performance, however, was another matter. It was constantly on the slow side musically, never really polished let alone precise, and the small orchestra, conducted by Allen Jensen, was little comfort to those who missed the sonorous voices that can lift Gilbert and Sullivan work to the level of a first-rate event.45

The L.A. Times complained that some of the words were “simply unintelligible,” observing that “there was plenty of good-natured amusement in the audience as Gilbert’s idiomatic dialogue emerged in what sounded like the Mikado’s rather than the King’s English.”46 The Hartford Courant concluded:

Actually, it was not a very wise course, in many ways, for the Fujiwara Opera Company to undertake “The Mikado.” True, the work has a Japanese setting, and bits of Rising Sun stage business here and there. But the sprit of the fooling is indelibly English, and above all, its successful presentation depends of matchless clarity of English diction. The humor is almost totally in the lines, and if the witty turns of Gilbert’s libretto do not come over the footlights, you lose half the pleasure of the evening. Last night at the Bushnell, the visitors from overseas were completely floored by our tongue, with a single exception. What they sang sounded like a foreign language. As a matter of fact, it was very like Italian, the language of “Madama Butterfly” which I believe they do sing in the original [according to the review of Madame Butterfly in the Los Angeles Times, the company sang in English and Japanese]. They made a gallant try at being understood, but English phonetics and English sense were too much for them.47

Uniformly, reviewers focused on the linguistic problems of the Japanese cast, of which the Washington Post notes:

The trouble is, of course, that Gilbert was writing in English, hilariously in English. Our visitors are not at home in English, indeed have evidently learned their roles phonetically. The result is that they can’t begin to get at the hidden glints of humor, painfully mis-rhyme the lyrics and, indeed, can scarcely be heard across the big amphitheater.48

Even when praising the production, reviewers emphasized the inability of the cast to capture the true nuances of Gilbert’s lyrics, relying on repetitive and mechanical pronunciation rather than expression and parodying their distinctively Japanese pronunciation. Time magazine joked, “There may merely be something piquant in what sounds like ‘Three little meds from skoo are we’ or ‘The fathers that bloom in the spring, twa-la,’” though it found “a certain toylike appeal” in the production.49 The Hartford Courant noted,

On the other hand, of course, there is always Sullivan’s beguiling music, and having downgraded the Fujiwara people for their English, let us hasten to extol their singing and musicianship. For this is a company of fine, lyric voices, expressive and communicative in any language as far as music goes. The soloists were first-rate, the ensemble work was excellent.50

A number of the reviews observed that the audience seemed amused rather than critical of these mistakes, with the Hartford Courant remarking, “Nevertheless, there was a great deal that was charming in its Japanese way about this ‘Mikado,’ and though the audience was at times audibly amused by the company’s battle with language, its sympathy was warmly with the players. It was an oddly enjoyable event.”51 Even the disgruntled Washington Post reviewer who disparaged the production as “the Molto Andante Mikado” commented, “One regrets writing this [negative criticism] for our visitors are so charmingly anxious to please.”52

Of the 1948 Nagato Miho production in Tokyo, Time magazine remarked on the painstaking efforts of the performers in preparation for their Mikado debut: “Nervous, white-haired Michio Ito, who had spent 20 years in the U.S. directing dance productions, had rehearsed the cast for two months. The 49-man Tokyo Philharmonic had been drilled on the tricky rhythms of Sullivan’s music. Kiyoshi Takagi, as Ko-Ko, had learned how to sing ‘teet wiro, teet wiro.’”53 This review seemed to emphasize the amount of effort that it would take for Japanese performers to learn the English lyrics of the opera. But as the comments on Takagi’s mispronunciation indicate, these eager efforts only resulted in an inevitable gap between the classic Mikado and the Japanese performers aspiring to become these faux-Japanese characters. The reviews of the touring production of the Fujiwara Opera echoes these sentiments. Yet the Fujiwara Mikado cannot be understood simply as an inevitably inferior imitation of D’Oyly Carte, nor can it be seen as Japanese mimicry of orientalist tropes in a gesture of cold war subservience. The U.S. reviewers’ criticism of the Fujiwara Mikado, though focused on the flaws of the performers, also confirmed the limitations of The Mikado’s version of yellowface. The aspects of the production that did not fit neatly into either the “toylike” fantasy of Japan or the recognizable style of D’Oyly Carte were dismissed. These reviews remind us that unlike the role of Cio-Cio-San, on which Japanese sopranos made international reputations, the characterizations of The Mikado stood to lose rather than gain in credibility with Japanese performers in the flesh.

We can also read into the production more subtle yet willful attempts to revise the opera. The Fujiwara’s touring production of Madame Butterfly, in which Japanese cast members sang in Japanese and the Americans in English, seems to have followed the precedent set by earlier productions of it in Japan, which sought to correct the cultural inaccuracies inherent in Puccini’s opera. Mari Yoshihara describes a four-day performance of the opera in 1930 at the Kabuki-za Theater in Tokyo, featuring Kōsaku Yamada, the foremost Japanese composer of the period, as director and conductor, and the libretto translated by Keizō Horiuchi. They cast Japanese singers in Japanese roles and white performers in American roles. Dialogues among the American characters were in English, as well as Pinkerton’s songs. Details of characterization such as Cio-Cio-San’s age and Count Yamadori’s occupation were changed to be more plausible, and Yamada changed some of Puccini’s faux-Japanese melodies to make them more “natural.”54 Interviews and reviews commented on the producer’s struggle to eliminate inaccuracies of dress and manner; translator Horiuchi commented, “Even Westerners must find it absurd that these characters with chonmage [top-knot] appear onstage—one cannot tell whether the setting is supposed to look like Japan or China—in shuffling steps, put their hands on the ground, and bow up and down.”55 One newspaper article praised the producers in trying “to eliminate the national humiliation generated by the quasi-Nippon performances of this opera traditionally done by the Westerners,”56 but another questioned whether such changes were warranted:

There are two questionable points about this production. One is that Butterfly and other Japanese characters were so realistic both in their costume and in their acting that the exotic flavor of the original is almost entirely eliminated. Of course, it is understood that in the case of this particular opera, what is exotic in the West is not at all exotic in Japan. Nonetheless, since one of the strengths of this opera is in its exoticism, is it appropriate to direct the piece in ways that lose that element?57

As Mari Yoshihara has stated, opera and other kinds of Western classical music were embraced in East Asia as part of a larger project of modernization, whereby “association with modernity, Westernization, and hence national progress was at the heart of the eagerness with which Asian nations adopted the music into their own educational and cultural institutions.” However,

the later history of Asian engagement with classical music has been far from a simple continuation or variation of this opening theme. Although the association with modernity has remained an important factor in Asians’ interest in classical music, as Asians gained more agency in defining the meanings of the music for themselves and using it for their own goals, they translated the original motive into many different forms. Interestingly, in the nation-and empire-building period in East Asia, Asian intellectuals and governments used Western music as a tool for promoting Asian, rather than simply Western, cultural values and political objectives. Especially during war and revolution, Asians invested distinct political meanings into classical music, and musicians practicing classical music were treated as arbiters of imperialism, or nationalism, or sometimes both.58

Founded by tenor Yoshie Fujiwara in 1934, Fujiwara Opera Company was the first opera company in Japan. Fujiwara’s tour of The Mikado built another dimension to its productions of Madame Butterfly, which had already toured the United States in 1952 and 1953, with a staging “designed to represent authentic Japanese culture and correct prejudices against Japan in Western production.”59 Thus the Fujiwara’s Mikado did make subtle changes in presentation and interpretation. Reviewers noted that “such sacred songs as ‘I’ve got a little list’ have been brutally cut, and such profanities as ‘teenagers’ and ‘Hollywood’ have been barbarously added.”60 The production added what the Washington Post described as a “quaint seriousness,” attributed by the reviewer to “what also boils down to the Stanislavsky method’s Tokyo vogue. We have a Ko-Ko who suggests Sal Mineo in his more restrained moments and a Pooh-Bah who considers every one of his multisyllabled words. We brood instead of caper.”61 This probably contributed to how certain roles became more believable; for instance, the reviewer for the Hartford Courant remarked, “Komino Saegusa raised the unsympathetic role of Katisha to dramatic proportions,”62 changing this characterization to the point that another reviewer remarked, “The Katisha positively has charm.”63 These revisions seem understated yet are significant departures from the dictates of D’Oyly Carte, whose rigid hold on British productions was still in effect at the time.

Super Ichiza (1992)

The Fujiwara Opera is acknowledged as the first opera company in Japan. It first specialized in Italian operas; its debut performance, for instance, was Puccini’s La Bohème on June 6 and 7, 1934, in the Hibiya Public Hall. Its founder tenor Yoshie Fujiwara had studied opera in Italy and made his debut there in 1921 before returning to Japan in 1923. However, the performance of opera in Japan preceded the formation of this company, and Fujiwara’s own considerable accomplishments as a principal singer and director might well be traced to an earlier and less hallowed precedent, the Asakusa Opera.64 The Asakusa Opera began with singers trained by G. V. Rossi, an Italian director of operettas working in England, who came to Tokyo in 1912 to start a Japanese company at the prestigious Imperial Theater. Though Rossi was ultimately unsuccessful and departed in 1918, his singers migrated to Asakusa and created a popular entertainment that incorporated operatic numbers along with Western musical comedy and vaudeville. As Ken Ito writes, in the Taisho period (1912–1926), Asakusa became a center for mass entertainment of many kinds:

In an era suspended between the Meiji emergence of an urban industrialized Tokyo and the migration of entertainments of transit hubs during the Showa period (1926–89), Asakusa captured the public imagination and glowed with the assurance of being the biggest and the latest. For a moment, Asakusa caught the pulse of the mass consumer society arising on the shadow of the industrializing economy.65

Asakusa Opera was not for opera connoisseurs; it served as a form of popular entertainment. Acclaimed novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki writes:

Thus, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Eichberg’s comic opera The Doctor of Alcantra were introduced, and Suppé’s Boccacio, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana came to be performed before an audience of nursemaids and riffraff, children bored with moving pictures, and good men and women on their way home from praying to the Kannon. The skills of the performers and the orchestra had been crude and infantile to begin with, something on the order of calisthenic exercises. The moment they fell to performing in Asakusa, they became coarser still; but the innocent and ignorant masses applauded without knowing a single thing. There is no need to go into shock hearing that the operas Faust, La Traviata, and Carmen were present in Asakusa. For what were performed were not Gounod’s Faust, but Asakusa’s, not Verdi’s or Bizet’s Traviata and Carmen, but the Asakusa versions. As I have said before, everything that entered Asakusa became a distinct creature of that environment.66

The attraction of Asakusa Opera was its gaudy and attractively foreign vision of European culture, giving its Japanese audiences “a West that was at once exotic and peculiarly Japanese,”67 as Tanizaki describes:

The audience welcomed an opera, even if there was no coherent plot to speak of, as long as men and women in Western dress frolicked noisily about the stage, carrying on in a way that was cheerful and gay. Among the productions there were some that could hardly be distinguished from what goes on at a school playground. No, “among” isn’t accurate: there could finally be no objection to saying that the essence of these operettas was that of a playground, with a bit of decadence and exoticism thrown in.68

This view of Asakusa Opera as a site of riotous energy and cultural hybridity helped to inspire a 1992 rock Kabuki Mikado by Super Ichiza in 1992. Founded in 1979 by Shinichi Iwata, Super Ichiza (Super company) in Nagoya is one of three major Japanese theater companies known for innovative new versions of kabuki.69 Super Ichiza has created innovative modern adaptations of Western dramas and parodies of Kabuki, pioneering a style of rock Kabuki that, as Natsuko Inoue describes, “comically dramatizes kabuki themes using the same stylized acting forms and period costumes as traditional kabuki, but accompanies them with live rock music rather than the traditional instruments.”70 In addition to a rock Kabuki Macbeth in 1984 and King Lear in 1987, Super Ichiza has performed a number of works by Gilbert and Sullivan including The Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore, Utopia Limited, The Gondoliers, as well as, post-Mikado, a version of Sidney Jones’s The Geisha.71

Super Ichiza’s founder, Shinichi Iwata, has evoked the influence of the Asakusa Opera on its rock Kabuki version of The Mikado. Super Ichiza’s Mikado directly responded to the decorative stereotypes of Japan in the West, but chose to revisit rather than to replace them. Their Mikado, Super Ichiza’s first foray into Western opera, is reimagined in the spirit of Asakusa’s popular entertainment, which set a precedent for its innovative and irreverent approach. In a letter to Professor Yuko Matsukawa of Seijo University, Iwata says, “Our theater company is deeply interested in Japanese culture and we perform kabuki plays”; however, their choice of The Mikado resisted how “Japanese culture has come to be defined”:

Now, though we have been interested in Japanese culture, we have been also very dissatisfied with how Japanese culture in general is understood today. That is, since we believed that Zen, wabi, sabi, simplicity, spirituality, are not the only things that stand for Japan, a more flamboyant Japan—that is, the Japan of Nikko, Yoshiwara, kabuki, and so on—seemed much more contemporary to us. So we found that the Japan seen by foreigners, which is usually described as superficial and exotic, to be more refreshing than the culturally conventional image of Japan has been forced upon us. So we decided to perform The Mikado as an example of this. Words that have been thought to be prejudicial, such as “Fujiyama” and “geisha” are now fresh and new to us.72

Super Ichiza’s promotion of its version of The Mikado evokes the Japan craze of late nineteenth-century Europe but projects it through a very different lens. Iwata’s letter recounts the history of The Mikado and its initial popularity. He analyzes the reasons for the opera’s lack of popularity in Japan, which for him hinge both on the opera’s inaccuracies and in “Japanese cultural conventions that elevate grand opera and show disdain for enjoyable operettas.” He praises the “delightful and beautiful songs” of The Mikado, but for him, an even more compelling reason to produce it is the chance to reappropriate and rework Gilbert’s exotic depictions of Japan. For Iwata, “one of the reasons why this work is so fascinating is that it is set in Japan.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, Japonisme swept the western world. One of the reasons was that it provided a new perspective, as we can see from the works of artists like Van Gogh. Another reason was simply exoticism. The Mikado was a great hit because of its exotic depictions, but if we think about the larger popularity of such images, it is because they dream of a paradise impossible in real life, and transpose it upon a foreign country. Exoticism means dreaming about paradise. And the place most suitable for paradise to be transposed was Japan. Japan, admired by Morse [the collector Samuel Morse, the benefactor of the Peabody of Museum in Salem, Massachusetts], loved by Yakumo [Koizumi Yakumo, or Lafcadio Hearn]. That Japan no longer exists today.

What is there in Japan today that would allow paradise to be transposed here? Now, all we can do is reconfirm the paradisiacal qualities of Japan by re-experiencing the Japanese paradise that the West once dreamt about.

The vision of Super Ichiza’s Mikado is nostalgic, not for the Victorian England of Gilbert’s day and not for the queer and quaint yellowface images of the Savoy, but for the late nineteenth-century Japan that so transformed the world as well as its popular image.

According to Iwata, Super Ichiza wished to perform Kabuki as an art for the masses and so premiered The Mikado for its broad appeal and comic nature. The Mikado is played not because it reiterates the queer and quaint image of Japan, but because it reflects the spirit and energy of popular entertainments such as the Asakusa Opera. Super Ichiza’s promotional materials for the production clearly referenced the working-class audience, decadent exoticism, and cultural hybridity characteristic of Asakusa. One flyer blithely announces the “Comic Opera The Mikado” and that “seventy years after Asakusa Opera, transcending time and space, it is revived with the birth of ‘Osu Opera.’” The flyer recalls, “Seventy years ago, Asakusa Opera was all the rage and swept everyone—students and apprentices and craftsmen and people of all classes—into its hot maelstrom, only to disappear like a dream after the great Kanto Earthquake,” and “its incredible cheer and broad appeal is revived here and now.” It extends a hearty invitation to audiences: “To hell with haughty and high-priced opera! Come enjoy the cool evening breeze, have a beer, and watch Osu Opera, a local specialty.”73

Iwata reported that his audiences were receptive: “Our audience is comprised not of general opera fans, but rather kabuki fans, both young and old and male and female (other theater companies do not have this broad appeal). All sorts of people enjoyed Sullivan’s The Mikado. With the success of our The Mikado run, we were able to get what is now our opera series on track.” He recalls that “we did not change the script at all; it was a straightforward performance,” but there was “no criticism of how the Mikado or Emperor was depicted nor of an exoticized Japan.”

Iwata attributes the success of Super Ichiza’s Mikado production to three things: “the comic nature of the piece, the gorgeous costumes that derive from this opera’s being set in Japan, and the likeable melodies.” His comment brings to mind one of the appeals of the Asakusa Opera: its staging of female bodies in Western dress, which, according to Tanizaki, introduced “the masses of Tokyo” to the fact that “beauty resided not only [in] the face, but in the bosom, the legs, the arms, the wrists, the heels, the ankles, the back [of] the teeth, and the gums.”74 What was attractive was not the direct import of models of Western femininity, but the construction, through the enactment of these roles by Japanese women, of a new ideal of beauty:

At the Asakusa Opera one could see not only caricatures of Charlie Chaplin, but living reproductions of such stars as Pearl White, Ruth Roland, Doris Kenyon, Billie Burke, and Dustin Farnum. The reproductions were, of course, crude knock-offs, hardly comparable to the originals, but paradoxically they charmed the audience precisely because they were crude. They appealed to us because their eyes were black like ours, because they showed us rose-colored cheeks not discernible in the movies, because they sang at the top of their lungs, and because they catered to us in our own language. Their allure was that they constructed of Japanese flesh and blood a certain new ideal of feminine beauty, a beauty of features, expression, and physique that had heretofore not been in evidence among us. Perhaps it is going too far to say they “constructed” this new ideal; what they did was attempt to construct, and in this effort affirmed the possibility of eventually constructing, the new beauty. In any case, they turned our eyes away from the old and toward a new feminine ideal.75

Asakusa opera suggests multiple racial transformations and their attendant desires; the 1992 Super Ichiza Mikado evokes these as well. On the cover of the pamphlet advertising the 1992 Super Ichiza Mikado is a female figure based on the familiar piece of japonaiserie, Monet’s “La Japonaise.”

Instead of just referencing a familiar instance of yellowface, this production associates the image with both the transformation of the white performer into Japanese and its complement, the Japanese enactment of whiteness. Clearly Super Ichiza did not simply reproduce orientalist tropes through its Mikado, nor was theirs a politely intercultural production that simply applied Kabuki techniques to a Western classic. Instead of using The Mikado’s japonaiserie to represent Japan, it built on the erotic energies of multiple racial impersonations and commented on the operatic history of the Asakusa, in which both orientalism and its Japanese counterpart, occidentalism, collided.

Chichibu (2001)

The hybrid sensibility, mass appeal, and bright restlessness of the Super Ichiza production contrasts with the earnestness of a much more publicized production of The Mikado in 2001. The performances held in Chichibu, a town in Saitama Prefecture, some fifty miles northwest of Tokyo, drew international attention. The Chichibu productions were inspired by Rokusuke Ei, an essayist, songwriter, and radio host, who believed that the town of Chichibu served as a real-life inspiration for Gilbert’s Titipu.76 Ei drew his ideas from historical events in Chichibu’s history. From October 31 to November 10, 1884, thousands of silk farmers protested the government’s deflationary policy that kept them in poverty. The imperial army was called to suppress the uprising. Both on his regular radio program and in a lecture in Chichibu in 1984, Ei explained his theory that Gilbert got wind of the uprising and then used it as his inspiration for the opera.

The theory that Chichibu was the inspiration for Titipu evolved into different versions, none of them consistent with Gilbert’s own accounts. Ei’s theory that the opera was inspired by a local rebellion against authority gave way to another version of the story, used to promote the productions: that Chichibu’s raw silk, used for women’s kimonos, might have been featured at the Knightsbridge Japanese Native Village. Shinichi Miyazawa, a professor of English literature at Saitama Women’s Junior College, also suggested that Ernest Satow’s Handbook for Travelers in Central and Northern Japan (1881), which mentions Chichibu, might have also influenced Gilbert.

In 1991, print shop owner Takashi Inoue heard Ei tell his version of the opera’s origins on the radio and told his friend Yasuichi Tsukagoshi, proprietor of a coffee shop. The two watched the 1982 Stratford performance on laser disc, and joined with others, including mayor Zenichi Uchida, to investigate the possibility of organizing an exhibition or lecture. This ultimately led to plans for a performance in conjunction with the 2001 celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of Chichibu as a city. The first performances took place on March 10 and 11, 2001. The successful production was remounted in Chichibu and Ikebukuro, Tokyo, in March 2003, and also played at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton, England, in 2006.

This production was very much about civic pride and the interests of local community. The production opened with a scene from the annual Chichibu Yomatsuri (evening fair); Yasuichi Tsukagoshi, who headed the organizing committee, said, “We in Chichibu have many festivals all year round—they’re a kind of communication tool for us living in a basin land (that isolates us from other towns), and thus I think of our production of The Mikado as yet another festival.”77 The production drew together an appreciative audience to watch the singers and dancers; many with local connections performed key roles. One newspaper article remembered a deceased music teacher, Masao Takanami, who worked at Chichibu High School for more than twenty years and taught twelve of The Mikado performers.78 Local associations and schools supplied volunteers as performers and stagehands. Costumes were created by Fumio Ino, a local Kabuki actor and costume designer. Translated into Japanese, and with Japanese cast members, the lyrics and references became much more accessible to audience members. One account suggested that the audience appreciated the allusions to the Mikado that put them in mind of another national figure:

Watching a full house enjoying the comic opera, Uchida Zen’ichi, the mayor, and Tsukagoshi Yasuichi, a local businessman, savored a great sense of achievement. They were especially relieved by the audience’s response to the Mikado, played by baritone Shimada Keisuke, as he mimicked the Shōwa emperor, Hirohito. Every time Shimada said “ah so” with a nod of the head, a chorus of laughter arose as the audience recalled their late monarch’s endearing verbal tic.

Reviewer Minoru Okamoto noted the enthusiam of the audience and the introduction of the local dialect and topical references.79 The production signaled pride and recognition of local and national identity that became a way of taking back The Mikado for Japanese audiences, just as having performers return to Chichibu to perform enacted a literal homecoming. In this light, the claims of the opera’s origins become even more interesting. As we have seen, several stories of how the opera originated appear in accounts of The Mikado, from an imagined trip to the Knightsbridge Japanese Village to a sword falling from Gilbert’s wall. What is particularly interesting is not so much the degree of plausibility as the different meanings these origination stories have. Each story revises the opera’s meaning; seeing The Mikado as inspired by a peasant uprising against unjust authority makes the opera more about challenging official injustice. The New York Times described how at the time of the production, Chichibu was a “down on its luck mountain city”: “Silk farming was down, going the way of kimono sales. Closed shops lined Bamba Dori, the main street. Rising above the town, sacred Mount Buko had been permanently disfigured by abandoned limestone quarries.”80

Thus performing The Mikado was less important as deference to a foreign work of art and more significant as a way “to boost municipal spirits.”81 Stories about the origins of The Mikado become references to a past moment of historical pride that was even more important to recall in light of contemporary economic hardship. Tsukagoshi declared, “Chichibu silk was shipped all over the world, and its name reached England,”82 and he and others strongly urged the production of the opera as a means of civic pride. These stories of the origin of Gilbert’s Titipu revise the basic terms of The Mikado’s commodity racism. Touting the opera means furthering Chichibu’s own claim to fame through a history of exporting; the Japanese object turns back into a local product made by actual workers who become the proud forbears of the current community.

Reviews of these productions from Western sources cited the theories of Chichibu-as-Titipu more out of curiosity than credibility. But however tentative their belief in the theories of Ei or other Japanese on the connection between Chichibu and Gilbert’s Titipu, the production generated was warmly received by non-Japanese fans of Gilbert and Sullivan. When the Chichibu production played at the Buxton Gilbert and Sullivan festival in 2006, one longtime fan commented:

This was an experience which I will never forget—it has been one of the highlights of the Festivals over the last thirteen years. The costumes were magnificent—and of course, being a Japanese company they would be very accurate! All the actors were excellent and how they enjoyed the performance. It is not often we have a standing ovation at the Festival but we had one tonight. Demand for seats was so great that they had to put a large screen in the Paxton Theatre and pipe the live show into there.83

The production itself, with its beautiful costumes and scenery, confident singing, and broadly comic characterizations, confirmed the charming fantasy of the opera as an uncomplicated instance of cultural exchange between Japan and England. The inconvenient historical conflicts over The Mikado as racial representation seem to be smoothed over. In so doing, the production erases the long history of Mikado protest, the uneasy circumstances of the military production during the U.S. occupation, and any subsequent qualms about yellowface production. The Chichibu production could be hailed as proof that Gilbert and Sullivan fans no longer need be embarrassed by their adulation of this yellowface opera.

The story behind the Chichibu Mikado—that the town of Chichibu deserves recognition as the inspiration for Titipu—revised accounts of how Gilbert’s opera was created and tips the emphasis back onto the real Chichibu. As this production moved away from Chichibu, however, it lost some of this hometown resonance. By the time it was presented at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton, where it was featured alongside other groups also performing The Mikado, the local stars, inside jokes, and specific appeal to a community were long gone. Instead, the humor was directed at making the dialogue and lyrics, now translated into Japanese, accessible to an English-speaking audience, and the production was received in many ways as a quaint novelty. The illustrations for the program—so strikingly different from other Mikado images—had been altered, reset against a much more Japanese background of ornate cranes and with faces made more yellow in tone.

The praise for the Chichibu/Tokyo production was most definitely occasioned by the larger circumstances of its production, not just for its artistic merits. These productions represented an idealized version of collaboration between East and West in which the encounter of cultures takes place as a generous exchange of culture, without coercion, hostility, or suspicion. In this light, the Chichibu productions are imagined as the antidote to a difficult racial history. Yet even this apparent anodyne has other sides, reminding us that The Mikado does not carry the same meanings for its Japanese audiences as it does for Gilbert and Sullivan fans in the West. Productions such as the Chichibu Mikado, despite their humor and spectacle, defy the overwhelmingly light spirit of the original by bringing the fantasy back down to earth.

In closing this chapter, it is wise to keep in mind that there is no one Japanese response to the opera. Nonetheless, these productions and various responses to them indicate a critical awareness of the power of the opera to misrepresent Japan. Even early in the history of Japanese Mikados, there are reminders that not all participated in the adulation of the opera; their guarded judgment undercuts the fantasies of the opera and its yellowface practices and provides a fitting conclusion to our study.

In 1887, under pressure from legal proceedings instigated by complaints from the Japanese Government to the British Consulate, Mr. N. Salinger finally agreed to cut offending representations of the Mikado out of his company’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera. Salinger’s English Opera Bouffe Company performed the expurgated version The Little Maids from School at the Gaiety Theatre in Yokohama on April 29 and 30, the Gymnasium Theatre in Kobe on May 3, and the Public Hall in Nagasaki on May 5. The changes made to the opera affected more than just the role of the Mikado; commentary in the Japan Weekly Mail on the Yokohama performance noted that the opera opened with a truncated version of “If You Want to Know Who We Are” in which the men’s chorus declared, “We are Gentlemen of Siam.” Pish-Tush’s “Young Man, Despair” was omitted, and “So Please You, Sir, We Much Regret” was sung by the men’s chorus.84 Perhaps hearing Sullivan’s melodies as sounding more Chinese than Japanese, this commentator also described several “Chinese” airs in the overture and at the beginning of act 2. Audiences packed the theater in Yokohama, but the Rising Sun and Nagasaki Express reported that in Nagasaki “there was but a meager audience, which included a fair proportion of Japanese.”85 The reception was enthusiastic—according to the Japan Weekly Mail, the laughter at the Yokohama performances “never ceased from beginning to end”; and the Hiogo News found the Kobe performance to be “most heartily enjoyed by everyone present,”86 despite the apparent lack of a ladies’ chorus. Still, in closing, the commentator on the first performance in Yokohama concluded, “We question if the opera will ever again draw so good a house,” complaining, “the actors and actresses have a great deal to learn in the matter of gesture, bearing, and attitude,” even if “the parts . . . were fairly well filled according to the lights [sights?] of Westerns who were supposed to be acting Eastern characters.”

The dresses were good as a spectacle, but that is about all that can be said in their favour. If Gilbert and Sullivan had spent a couple of months on the spot, the work would certainly have been very different in every respect, for the music entirely lacks local colour, if a few bars of a Chinese air be excepted, and the plot and incidents would do for any country. The libretto is funny in a few places, but is applicable to no particular country or people, and the names of the characters are nonsensical.87