Asian American Mikados

This book began by describing The Mikado’s elusiveness: how, under the guise of nonsense, the opera seems to disavow any intentional hurt or misrepresentation. Thus its productions, whether quaintly queer or more openly hostile, provide little footing on which to pin charges of racial malice or injury. The opera’s versions of Japan, excusably pure invention, escape largely unscathed from protests. Even when confronted with direct criticism, playing The Mikado seems a habit that is hard to break. Yet, as we have seen, there are ways of disrupting this placid history. The preceding chapter focused on how The Mikado’s Japanese productions responded to political and popular perceptions of Japan as a nation. Here, we might also reinforce the opera’s significance as a racial fantasy with a representational power that extends well beyond national and ethnic lines.

Critics of the opera are not only from Japan. We also have protests of The Mikado from the West, emphasizing the fact that the West is itself not a homogeneous entity. Events such as the Pomona College protest of the Opera  à la Carte production in 1990 establish the racial sensitivities of the opera: its power to represent not only the Japanese but also Americans of Asian descent. This chapter concentrates on several instances of The Mikado as directed or performed by Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans. As we will see, there is no uniformity of approach in the Asian American Mikados, nor has there been a concerted large-scale attempt at a revisionist reworking of the opera. However, even in these singular instances we learn something about how this opera might work on the contemporary stage in ways that are quite different from Victorian nostalgia or contemporary anti-Japanese or anti-Asian sentiment. The engagement of Asian Americans highlights particular questions of racial visibility within the United States at a moment of multicultural awareness.

On Western stages dominated by white actors, the practice of yellow-face—the playing of oriental characters by non-Asian actors—marks the privilege to represent. Whiteness has traditionally been granted the power of racial transformation: white actors could successfully enact a variety of colored others, whereas nonwhite performers, as we have seen with the black performances of The Mikado, were invariably marked by what was seen to be the indelible and natural features of their race. Even when allowed more artistic freedom than as a quaint curiosity or display of brute primitivism, the nonwhite performer was rarely credited with the ability to transform into a full range of characterizations. The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado might well be considered milestones insofar as they seemingly extended the power of playing Japanese characters to African Americans. But in the eyes of white mainstream audience members, these productions did not fully allow African American performers to embody the vision of Titipu and colored The Mikado musically and theatrically with what were thought to be an essentially black music and style.

This history raises a similar question with regard to the employment of Asian Americans in Mikado productions. Might this be taken as a sign of a more general racial progress, in that the stage includes more directors and performers of color? Or is it a continuation of the very limited roles given to Asian American performers in stage and film, whereby Asian American performers run the risk not only of reproducing racial stereotypes but of affirming them as authentic with their very participation? This chapter looks at how an awareness of Asian American racial consciousness plays out in the history of this opera. These examples, while quite different in style and effect, all address how the opera represents a living people, whether Japanese or others of Asian descent who are inevitably associated with them. In other words, these productions, no matter how lighthearted, do not simply assume that The Mikado bears no responsibility for racial and ethnic representation.

In her study of contemporary Shakespearean production, Susan Bennett describes the dilemma of “whether there are, in fact, new ways to play old texts. . . . Theatre is, anyway, generally and rightly regarded as a conservative art form, and the devotion to Shakespeare a manifestation of that inherent conservatism.” Yet she asks also whether there might not be possibilities in new productions that are not entirely fettered by the past: “can a new text, by way of dislocating and contradicting the authority of tradition, produce a ‘trangressive knowledge’ which would disarticulate the terms under which traditional gains its authority?”1 Translating Bennett’s inquiry to The Mikado, we ask whether there are elements of the opera that can be so transformed. Is there another way to understand the participation of Asian Americans in such works as The Mikado?

At the heart of Asian American discontent with a history of orientalist images and practices, such as have been amply demonstrated in The Mikado, is a desire for stage presentation to reflect some offstage authenticity, usually imagined as the laboring bodies of the disenfranchised. This was clearly voiced at the conclusion of the 1990 protest of the Opera  à la Carte production when Pomona College students and faculty read lines from a poem by Carlos Bulosan.2 The poem’s title, “If You Want to Know What We Are,” echoes the opening lines of the opera; however, Bulosan gives the words sung by the “gentlemen of Japan” living “on vase and jar” to the voices of immigrants and working-class laborers (“We are multitudes the world over, millions everywhere; / in violent factories, sordid tenements, crowded cities”). The very coolies so conspicuously absent from the opera now appear in Bulosan’s words as “the living testament of a flowering race.” Their riff on Gilbert’s lyrics becomes the starting point for their poetic utterances of hope for a new future:

We are the desires of anonymous men everywhere,

who impregnate the wide earth’s lustrous wealth

with a gleaming florescence; we are the new thoughts

and the new foundations, the new verdure of the mind;

we are the new hope new joy life everywhere.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If you want to know what we are—

We Are Revolution!3

The juxtaposition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s quaint opera with Bulosan’s writing presents a startling contrast between the decorative orientalism of light bourgeois entertainment and the earnest representation of Bulosan’s protest literature depicting Asian Americans and other immigrant workers. As I suggested earlier, the 1990 Pomona College protest provoked resentment and backlash from devotees of the opera, but it also made the opera meaningful in a different way by making us think about how The Mikado might be reappropriated by those heavily invested in the history of racial exclusion and questions of racial representation.

Not all the examples we might consider are radical restagings of the opera—in fact, far from it. The 1990 reworkings of Gilbert’s line into Bulosan’s words contrasts dramatically with another college production several years later at the Wisconsin–Madison University Theatre and University Opera in 2003. The Wisconsin production, from the remarks of one reviewer, was received as yet another familiar cherry blossom spectacular; he comments:

William S. Gilbert would have loved the Union Theater’s current production of “The Mikado.” . . . The moment the curtain went up Friday night, the audience reacted with audible delight. And with good reason. The set, designed by University of Wisconsin Professor Joe Varga, transformed the Union Theater from an ordinary Western-style stage into a gorgeous Japanese theater.

A temple-like structure and backdrop of painted cutouts depicting cherry blossoms, Japanese houses and mountains framed the stage and created a sense of mystery and exotic beauty. The men’s chorus (otherwise known as the gentlemen of Japan), onstage as the curtain went up, resembled beautiful plumed birds with their vivid kimonos, elaborate hairpieces and brightly colored fans.4

Interestingly enough, comments made by director David Furumoto on certain aspects of the production, while not challenging a conventional interpretation of the opera, ask us to read the production as somewhat different from a purely nostalgic oriental fantasy. Furumoto declared his intention to use The Mikado to correct misperceptions of Japanese culture. For him, the racial stereotyping of the opera lay not in its yellowface but in its ethnic confusion: “When you talk about stereotyping, the biggest thing that gets to me about the typical performance of Gilbert and Sullivan is that it’s a mishmash. They throw Chinese and Japanese things together.” His production made a considerable effort to correct such inaccuracies of movement, props, and language:

The choreography of other productions has bothered me. Because they were done by Western choreographers, there’s been an odd kind of movement that isn’t authentically Japanese. What I’m trying to do is return it to authentic Japanese dance. We’ll use the classic “mie” (pronounced MEE-ay) pose being struck.5

I also made a special trip to Japan to make sure we had enough authentic dance fans and parasols—not the oversized Chinese ones that so many other productions use. They help to express the emotion in the story.

Will there be accents? If anything, you’ll hear more of an authentic Japanese tone for the actual Japanese words that are actually used in the text. I’m trying to get the cast to pronounce them authentically.6

Through a careful incorporation of the movement and aesthetic of Japanese performance styles, Furumoto tried to redeem The Mikado from charges of racial insensitivity: “I think it will be a beautiful production to look at and listen to. . . . And maybe I can change some people’s minds who felt ‘The Mikado’ was insulting to the Japanese. Maybe this production will take away some of the negativity.” Furumoto attempts to redeem the opera from charges of misrepresentation and to frame it instead as a prototype for contemporary intercultural experimentation, in which his own training as a Kabuki performer becomes significant.

Thus Furumoto’s production The Mikado references less the 1885 Savoy’s strategic use of “real” Japanese objects and gestures than the more contemporary idea of interculturalism. In one interview, he spoke of his desire to incorporate elements of Kabuki into the production as well as make the objects and setting more authentically Japanese. Commenting, “I want to return it to the country where it’s based,” Furumoto stated his hope of showing what The Mikado might have looked like if Gilbert and Sullivan “had access to people who really knew kabuki theater”: “I want to show that ‘The Mikado’ still works as a Japanese play. . . . There’s a lot of correlation between Japanese society and British society. Hopefully, we’ll be able to show that these cultures have a lot in common.”7

The move to make The Mikado an intercultural work echoes the attempts to authenticate the vision of Titipu in the 1885 Savoy productions by strategically borrowing elements of design and gesture. Furumoto’s attempt to make his 2003 production more authentically Japanese runs the risk of again reducing “Japanese” to certain predictable icons and gestures of yellowface. As critic Michael Billington described: “The key question is whether you go for Japanese authenticity or quintessential Englishness. The solution here is to keep a foot in both camps so that the result is a kind of Kensington Kabuki: white make-up and pigtails are prevalent, but so too are bowler hats and lace underwear.”8 Such intercultural Mikados intensify the risk that interculturalism faces in general, “fixing on easy cultural markers or signs of cultural difference as a shorthand that precludes research or cultural understanding and reduced culture to a stageable sign,”9 what Una Chaudhuri calls “museum interculturalism” that “literalizes difference itself, reducing it to the grossest and most material of conceptions.”10 Robert Young has suggested that European imperialists have long marked bodies by rigid classifications of race and gender in order to justify colonial enterprises.11 Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins have extended this to describe a “taxonomic” version of intercultural theater, whereby performing bodies are imagined as being isolated from one another by rigid and inflexible boundaries of nation, framed by “supposedly pure and authentic cultural essences.” This approach to intercultural performance seems to celebrate a blending of world cultures, but in fact represses certain “anxieties generated by globalism”: “On the one hand, the fear of conflict was ameliorated by a utopian vision of global collaboration and harmony, and on the other, economic injustices and inequalities were justified by a re-affirmation of the innate and essential differences between races and cultures.”12

While intercultural exchange could be viewed as a “‘two-way street,’ based on a mutual reciprocity,” Rhustom Bharucha suggests that “in actuality, where it is the West that extends its domination to cultural matters, this ‘two-way street’ could be more accurately described as a ‘dead-end.’”13 Producing The Mikado, with its attendant illusions of lightness, weightlessness, and lack of representational responsibility, is particularly rife with such dangers. Thus the care with which The Mikado is made authentically Japanese for a Madison, Wisconsin, audience in the end only seems to confirm a pleasing vision of aesthetic foreignness that in fact covers over any more complicated understanding of exchange, commodities, labor, and commerce.

However, one aspect of Furumoto’s attempts to redo the opera as authentically Japanese may be of further interest, and that is his perhaps tongue-in-cheek claim to fit the opera by virtue of his own hybrid identity: “Ethnically, I’m a mixture. My father is a second-generation Japanese-American born in Hawaii and my mother is of Scottish and English descent. So what more perfect show for me to do than ‘The Mikado’”?14 On the one hand, we might read this statement as being in keeping with his intercultural sensibility, in which Furumoto claims affinity with different cultural essences that correspond to what is Japanese or British in the opera. On another level, though, this ethnic mixture points to a different relationship both to what is Japanese in the play and to the labor of making it authentically Japanese.

The Mikado seems to be most immediate in reinforcing national affinities; Japanese spectators and commentators as well as performers (the subject of our next chapter) have a distinctive investment in who The Mikado represents and in what way. Furumoto’s comments, however, identify a related but also distinctive racial investment in the opera. Asian Americans have a stake in the accuracy of The Mikado. Like the native informants so often appealed to for their opinion of the play’s accuracy, they are called on to either discount the opera or to claim its verisimilitude. Their relationship to the opera also suggests a certain weightiness or gravity that belies The Mikado’s lightness; with their presence, attention again shifts to the opera’s depiction of Japanese as a human interaction. Titipu becomes a world overrun with not only objects but also people whose presence cannot be ignored.

Thus there is a certain logic as to why Asian Americans might want in fact to participate in The Mikado rather than just protest against it. To do so is to recognize the enormous yet subtle power that this comic work has and to begin to move this power in other directions. That Furumoto’s intense interest in reclaiming some dimension of authentic Japaneseness in his personal history is significant, for it claims, however humorously, that an element of Japanese heritage allows him to have an edge in making a better version of the opera. His statement mocks a racial association—how we might assume an instant affinity between a second-generation Japanese-Scottish-English man born in Hawaii and the Japanese of the opera—but it also promotes it as a way of correcting racial misrepresentation. In the end, Furumoto’s production of The Mikado seemed to use authenticity in much the same way as the original Savoy production did, to support a predictably decorative vision of Japan. At the same time, his words point to a somewhat different perspective, whereby his production of the opera serves not only as a familiar re-creation of a Gilbert and Sullivan fantasy but also as a way of thinking about how certain racial identities make themselves visible and legible.

This emphasis on using the opera to think through Asian American identities and affinities appears with another Mikado, directed by Henry Akina at the Hawaii Opera Theatre in 2004. In many ways, this production also does not fall far from the D’Oyly Carte tree. Unlike an earlier adaptation, Kabuki Mikado, directed by James R. Brandon at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1996, Akina did not radically alter the lyrics or plot of the opera. This led to praise from reviewer John Berger, who interpreted Akina’s production as an “anti-PC” stance against “self-appointed guardians of political correctness” who might find The Mikado offensive. Berger contrasted Akina’s production with the 1996 “bowdlerized version” at the University of Hawaii–Manoa’s theater department:

A professor and four students changed the characters’ names, eliminated everything they took issue with in the “quaint (yet racist) libretto,” and restaged it as kabuki. Well, here comes Hawaii Opera Theatre’s production, and artistic director Henry Akina doesn’t buy into the racist argument.

“It’s really sort of a comedy about human frailty . . . and basic human absurdities,” he explained, calling from his office last Friday morning. Akina is directing the company’s precedent-setting, first-ever, summer production of “The Mikado” that opens this weekend, and he promises that it will be faithful in form and spirit of the story that Gilbert created in 1885.

Berger quotes Akina as saying that “We take ‘Mikado,’ I would say, pretty straight” and notes that the production, while updated in some ways, stays “pretty close to what Gilbert wrote.” Akina comments on how productions of The Mikado should not be affected by the racial sensitivity of contemporary times:

Political correctness is sort of an issue of the ’90s—the idea of people being offended by various things has reached a fevered pitch in our age—and we didn’t really want to deal with that (because) “The Mikado” is not supposed to be offensive to the Japanese or to the British.15

He reprises the argument that Gilbert was “satirizing the manners and mores of late-Victorian England,” and that potentially insulting misrepresentations, such as the names of the characters, might be dismissed as pure English fun: “As for the characters’ names, they weren’t intended to be Japanese at all, but were simply in-joke references to various slang terms and products that were in vogue at the time.”

However, casting Akina as a brave keeper of Gilbert and Sullivan tradition mistakes the extent to which so much of the energy of this production focuses on making The Mikado enjoyable to his contemporary audiences in Hawaii. For Akina, the vision of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Japan is intrinsic to the opera; at the same time, with the substantial Japanese American population, ties to Japanese culture, and the visible presence of Japanese tourism in Hawaii, the production opera needed to highlight its own incongruities:

It didn’t seem to me that it would be right to go in the direction of the New York City Opera or the English National Opera . . . and ignore the whole Japan thing. Productions like that have been very fashionable nationwide, but that’s not exactly the way I wanted to do it and I don’t think that’s something for Honolulu. On the other hand, we know that the way these (characters) act is not terribly Japanese, and so we’ve put in points of confrontation in the performance where things that are sourced on authentic Japanese things are used.16

Akina inserted multiple allusions to political figures, community, and culture that referenced local Japanese American communities and the Japanese presence in Honolulu, enlisting renowned taiko drummer Kenny Endo to add taiko drumming to much of the action, casting sumo wrestler Ace Yonamine as the Lord High Executioner’s sword bearer, and bringing in Masatoshi Muto, then Hawaii’s consul general of Japan, as an extra. At the beginning of the second act, Muto walked onto the stage in a business suit and declared in a somber, deadpan tone, “On behalf of the Hawaii Opera Theatre and the government of Japan, I assure you that what takes place in this opera has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the country I represent.”17

In an interview with Mari Yoshihara, Akina explained his directorial choices: “I wanted to make this silly opera into something that is relevant to us today. . . . In trying to make it less offensive and more fun for everybody, the idea was to include lots of Japanese elements that we like and bring in characters like the sumo wrestler.”18 Because of Hawaii’s large Japanese American population, the familiarity of Japanese American elements and the incongruity of the faux-Japanese elements had special relevance; as Akina commented, this is “an audience who would appreciate the absurdity of the theatrical staging of such elements for what it is—deliberately absurd staging—rather than to take it literally and be offended by it, as audiences in other locations might do.”19 He suggests that preserving the original script is not inconsistent with this revision:

There are traditional areas of updating (the script) and there are other areas where people are very religious about not changing. I’ve tried to make the human comedy clearer rather than look at it as something ethnic or cultural or whatever, and we’re rather unabashed about (sticking to the original story)—but we do have the joy of taiko, too!

It seemed a way to include the Japanese community in maybe enjoying “The Mikado” and being inclusive rather than exclusive (by going) either in the British or the Japanese direction. I think there’ll be a rich theatrical event that people can enjoy and, hopefully, on many levels.20

That Japanese American audience members did enjoy the production was confirmed by its being advertised in the newsletter for the Japan-American Society of Hawaii, which praised the production’s “hilarious antics and innuendos highlighting Japanese customs” and noted:

Artistic Director, Henry Akina, revised some of the character lines to bring this classic 1885 “light opera” up to modern times. The result was a presentation that the audience could easily relate to, despite Japanese Consul General Masatoshi Muto’s humour[ous] claim (made in his cameo appearance) that “this is a different Japan than the one I know and represent.” Add to this, the distinctive sounds of the taiko (Kenny Endo), beautifully-designed costumes (Anne Namba), and an authentic sumo wrestler (Ace Yonamine) and you have a show that was thoroughly enjoyed by all who attended.21

In opera productions in Hawaii throughout the twentieth century, Gilbert and Sullivan works were immensely popular. In 1890 The Mikado drew full houses in the Hawaii Opera House for its four performances, and in 1935 The Mikado marked the very first production of the Honolulu Community Theater.22 These earlier productions are in marked contrast to the Akina production, which had a multiracial cast and played up its connections to Japanese and Japanese American audience members. Janos Gereben comments that the 1890 production, for instance, though advertised as “set in Japanese style—presented by local talent,” did not reflect the racial diversity of Hawaii at the time; instead it “once again underlined the all-haole [all-white] nature of the opera world in the Islands of this period.”

In 1890, the population of the Hawaiian Kingdom was 89,990, with native Hawaiians (and part-Hawaiians) still in the majority (34,000 and about 20,000), followed by Chinese and Japanese (15,300 and 12,300), and Portuguese (8,600)—and a rather small white minority, including 1,900 Americans and 1,300 Britishers.

Two-thirds of the population lived outside Honolulu, but almost all the Caucasians were residents of the city and they formed the influential minority which acted as both producers and consumers of such European-type entertainment as opera.

Gereben notes that “although there were more Japanese in the Islands by this time than English and Americans and the 1890 Mikado production had a Japanese setting,” the cast for this production “excluded any non-haoles,” with names such as “Monteagle, Hoogs, Bishop, Lewers, Widemann, Nolte, Bowler, Lishman, Dimond, Monsarrat, Brown.”23

If the frequent production and immense popularity of these earlier productions suggest the dominance of “haole” taste, the refurbishing of Akina’s 2004 production for Japanese American audience members is a significant departure from the past. At the same time, it brings up questions about how the opera is used to celebrate contemporary Japanese culture and Japanese American heritage in Hawaii and why it earned so much praise from reviews, such as in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for its “encouraging precedent” of “a light and entertaining spectacle designed specifically for local tastes and conditions.”24

The Akina production is set off from earlier Mikado productions in its turn toward the local, highlighting a sense of community and fellowship, in-jokes and insider knowledge. Touches of real Japanese flavor or allusions to local politics produced a comic dislocation with the opera’s fantastical vision. The production neutralizes the ways that the opera might be insulting to the Japanese or Japanese Americans by celebrating the visible stature of Japanese Americans and the influence of Japanese presence and culture in today’s Hawaii, and Akina’s clever reframing targets those who might be entertained by the contrast between Gilbert and Sullivan’s Titipu and a local culture. Although Gilbert’s Titipu is set up against what is supposedly a real vision of both Japanese influence and Japanese American culture, this representation is itself highly selective. This particular use of the term “local” suggests that the opera has once again been used to put forward a carefully managed racial image defined by the pleasing use of colorful costumes, kabuki makeup, and humorous references to sumo and taiko. This celebratory vision of Japanese American success and cultural ties with Japan does not give much away about the complex background for this visibility: how Japanese Americans rose to contemporary economic and political influence in Hawaii.

The first Japanese immigrants in Hawaii arrived as contract laborers for the sugarcane and pineapple plantations. Japanese and other Asian immigrant coolies were systematically exploited and victimized by racist laws, prejudice, and economic constraints. However, in the years following World War II, the status of Japanese Americans, as well as Chinese Americans and Korean Americans, has changed to the extent that “in the minds of many in the local community, Asians are more central than marginal.”25 In particular, Japanese American success, as measured in terms such as income, home ownership, education, and political visibility and as evidenced by the election of those such as Senator Daniel K. Inouye and three-term Governor George Ariyoshi, has clearly risen. Any celebrations of their prominence, however, tends to obscure how, as Jonathan Oka-mura has suggested, social inequality in contemporary Hawaii is still very much defined along ethnic and racial lines, with whites, Japanese Americans, and Chinese Americans in economic and social positions of power and the “lower levels of the ethnic/racial stratification order” still “occupied by Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and Samoans, a situation that appears unlikely to change in the next generation.”26 Any awareness of social and economic disparities, racial tensions, and native Hawaiian sovereignty becomes obscured by familiar images of Hawaii as an idealized multiracial paradise, with Japanese American success prominently featured.

What capacity does a production of The Mikado have to show this history or this contemporary reality? Not much, and perhaps that is the point. As we have seen, the opera disclaims any responsibility for racial representations even while visions of racial difference are at its very heart. The Mikado, after all, promises an escape from the sometimes ugly realities of commerce and exchange, particularly from reminders of laboring coolies, once so closely associated with the Japanese in Hawaii. Thus even while the Akina production purports to correct the opera’s lightness with a glimpse of Japanese and Japanese Americans, these local references themselves are lightened, turned into easily consumed spectacles that are mobilized to ease the enjoyment of such guilty pleasures.

We want to leave the theater humming, not thinking. But is there a way to produce The Mikado that allows us to do both? To contemplate this possibility, we turn to Lodestone Theatre’s 2007 adaptation, The Mikado Project,27 which restages the opera as a commentary on Asian American theater. Esther Kim Lee has pointed out that Asian American theater is not a unified entity but rather “a huge web of links that are profoundly personal, professional, chronological, geographical, spatial, racial, ethnic, gendered, generational, and multicultural.”28 What seems common to many in this vast web are concerns with racial representation and the long history of orientalist discourse. Thus to look at The Mikado Project is to turn some of the fundamental aspects of the opera (such as its distinctively light racial impersonation and its fascination with oriental commodities) more directly toward commentary on Asian American racial representation.