“The Threatened Cloud”: Production and Protest

Censorship at the Savoy (1907)

At the end of April 1907, Mrs. Helen D’Oyly Carte, who managed the D’Oyly Carte Opera and the Savoy following her husband’s death in 1901, received a notice from the Lord Chamberlain informing her that beginning August 4, performances of The Mikado would be forbidden. This took place under Regulation 20, part of the Theatres Regulations Act of 1843, which stated, “No offensive personalities or representations of living persons to be permitted on the stage, nor anything calculated to produce riot or a breach of the peace.”

As Antony Best relates, this incident was part of an overall pattern in which British officials tried to determine the correct course of diplomacy with Japan. After perceived slights to Japanese royalty on previous official visits, Japan was sensitive to any suggestions of offense. For instance, British officials had debated over whether to present the Meiji Emperor, a non-Christian, with the Order of the Garter, the most prominent decoration that the British king could give a fellow monarch. Eventually, the award was given when Japan proved itself a rising world power in its defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). After Japan’s victory, a new alliance between Britain and Japan was marked by increasingly preferential treatment. In 1907 Prince Fushimi visited London in order to express the Emperor’s gratitude at receiving the Garter; shortly before he arrived, officials at the Japanese embassy in London expressed their concern about the impending Mikado production to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Likewise, these officials feared that “conductors of military bands might well think that tunes from The Mikado might provide an appropriate welcome to the Japanese prince. A hint to the contrary was therefore urgently conveyed to the Services.”1 The ban covered all professional and amateur productions as well as concert performances and even arrangements for band or orchestra. The Secretary to the Admiralty forbade naval and marine bands to play selections from the opera. The license of the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield was withdrawn after a D’Oyly Carte company performance was staged there in defiance of the order.

An angry Gilbert wrote that he learned “from a friend, who had it from the King, that the Japs made the objection to The Mikado and that it was on their instance that it was suppressed.” Gilbert blamed the British as well as the Japanese for his financial losses: “I suppose you have read that the king (with his unfailing tact) has forbidden that the Mikado shall ever be played again. That means at least 500 pounds out of my pocket. It is so easy to be tactful when the cost has to be borne by somebody else.”2 Many ridiculed the decision; one editorial in the Pall Mall Gazette declared, “Really, this withdrawal of ‘The Mikado’ licence, after twenty years of inoffensive fooling, seems to argue a lack of sense of humour somewhere, and does set people asking how many classical English plays may have to disappear unvenerably at the capricious hest of an excessive diplomatic delicacy.”3 The subject was raised on the floors of the House of Commons, and even the Prime Minister took part in the subsequent debate about the responsibility of the Lord Chamberlain to the House of Commons. However, The Mikado remained barred until April 28, 1908.

The censorship of the 1907 revival of The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre reflects both the opera’s continued popularity and its seeming incongruence with the changing status of Japan on the world stage. The “excessive diplomatic delicacy” of the 1907 censorship was born out of uneasiness at how to deal with Japan in its new status as a world power. Japan could assert cultural influence as well as military power on the world stage. Suddenly, playing The Mikado was seen as an overtly political act, and its representations became subject to scrutiny from new perspectives. K. Sugimura, the Japanese special correspondent of the Tokyo newspaper Asahi and sent to England to cover the Prince’s visit, was invited to the Sheffield performance to assess the situation. He reported that the opera was, in fact, humorous rather than offensive, and that “the only part of the play to which objection might be taken by some is the presentation of the Mikado on the stage as a comic character.”4 Yet even this slight was, according to Sugimura, excusable:

This would be impossible in Japan, where my countrymen regard the person of the Emperor as too high for such treatment. Yet, even with us, one of our most famous novelists, Saikako, of the Genroku period, did treat the figure of the Emperor humorously, describing one of his characters as the Emperor Doll. That novel is still circulated in Japan. It has not been prohibited there.5

Sugimura finds censorship unnecessary, giving approval to the opera’s “bright music and much fun” and declaring that “the English people, in withdrawing this play lest Japan should be offended, are crediting my country with needless readiness to take offence.” Nonetheless, he also under-cuts the arguments that the opera might be purely innocent merriment by taking the opportunity to point out inaccuracies and misrepresentations:

I cannot understand from what part of Japan the author got the names of characters. Yum-Yum I thought at first to be Num-Num, an incantation to Buddha. Real Japanese girls would not be called Yum-Yum or Peep Bo. The name of the man Pooh-bah is not a Japanese name. Of course, the play shows quite an imaginary world, not in the least like Japan. The characters embrace and kiss quite publicly. In my country this would be quite shocking. No properly brought-up young lady like Yum-Yum would ever dream of doing this.6

In Sugimura’s terms, The Mikado does bear comparison with a real Japan; its misrepresentations, such as the names Yum-Yum and Peep-Bo and the overt kissing, define it as “an imaginary world, not in the least like Japan.” It is the English who are presumptuous in their assumption that Japanese people lack humor or the ability to differentiate between “a comic character” and “real insults.”7

Though he is primarily employed to counter charges that the opera is offensive, Sugimura importantly does not read the opera as pure fantasy, insisting instead on the relevance of The Mikado as a representation of Japanese people. His comments highlight how The Mikado never truly succeeds in escaping the responsibility of representing Japan or Japanese people. Even in claims that it is pure invention, the opera retains a certain power to signify, to stand in for, and to speak for Japan.

The Mikado and the Yellow Peril

Throughout the twentieth century, certain understandings of the opera registered the tensions between Japan as a construct of pure imagination and Japan as a military force rivaling the European powers and the United States. This is evident in Gilbert’s rewriting of The Mikado as a children’s story in 1908. Still smarting from the censorship of The Mikado revival the previous year, Gilbert begins by poking fun at what he sees to be the pretensions of modern Japan even while defending the depiction he offered in The Mikado:

It has recently been discovered that Japan is a great and glorious country whose people are brave beyond all measure, wise beyond all telling, amiable to excess, and extraordinarily considerate to each other and to strangers. This is the greatest discovery of the early years of the twentieth century, and is one of the results of the tremendous lesson the Japanese inflicted on the Russians, who attempted to absorb a considerable portion of Manchuria a few years ago. The Japanese, however, attained their present condition of civilization very gradually, and at the date of my story they had peculiar tastes, ideas and fashions of their own, many of which they discarded when they found they did not coincide with the ideas of the more enlightened countries of Europe.

Gilbert’s biting commentary is aimed not just at the Japanese but at what he sees to be the excessive deference given to Japanese influence by the British government.

It is important to bear this in mind, because our Government being (in their heart of hearts) a little afraid of the Japanese, are extremely anxious not to irritate or offend them in any way lest they should come over here and give us just such a lesson as they gave the Russians a few years ago. My readers will understand that this fear is not entertained by the generality of inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland who, as a body, are not much afraid of any nation; it is confined mainly to the good and wise gentlemen who rule us, just now, and whose wishes should consequently be respected.8

Gilbert disconnects the world of The Mikado from the real Japan recently victorious over Russia and now asserting an imperial hold over Korea, China, and other parts of Asia. In doing so, he takes the opportunity to mock Japan’s “present condition of civilization” as well as the “peculiar tastes, ideas and fashions” of their past. Interestingly enough, he does not relegate “the story of the Mikado” to the realm of pure fiction but rather claims it as an account of history, “the Japan of that time.” In his children’s tale, Gilbert does not bother to correct any inaccuracies of detail previously invented for his opera; in fact, he adds more, such as describing the song “Miya sama” as the “Japanese National Anthem.”9 As the story unfolds, what was invented for the opera is described to his young readers as customs and practices of Japan. In its revision into fable, The Mikado loses its overt connections to yellowface and instead passes for a real Japan that, even with its fairy-tale elements, comments subtly on a darker and more threatening vision of Japan, ruled by a Mikado with “a habit of punishing every mistake, however insignificant, with death” (3). Gilbert’s anger at the 1907 censorship and his deprivation of the privilege of representation and the profit it entailed translate into a subtle gloss over the Titipu he initially created.

This serious counterpoint to the lightness of The Mikado is not wholly unexpected. As Japan gained increasing military and diplomatic influence in the first decade of the twentieth century, so did its image change. At the turn of the century, some described Japan as a cherry blossom toyland and the Japanese as a childlike people in images familiar to Mikado audiences;10 others, like Japan scholar William Elliot Griffis, assessed the Japanese as “honorary whites,” superior to other Asian ethnic groups.

Like all great nations the Japanese are a composite of various stocks. The ancestral homes of the various tribes had been in both continental and insular Asia, in Tartary, Korea, Formosa and the southern Pacific islands; while in the northern half of Hondo and in Yezo dwelt the Emishi, or the Ainu, whose characteristics and language point to their being a branch of the Aryan family. At the base the Japanese are as truly a “white” as they are a “yellow” race.11

Other, much more negative, images of Japanese also associated them with the frightening archetypes of the Mongol; these racial images proliferated with Japan’s rise to power on the world stage. Gina Marchetti suggests that the stereotype of the yellow peril may have first arisen at the time of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian invasions of Europe. According to Marchetti, “The yellow peril combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties, and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East.”12 Colleen Lye adds, however, that a more particular understanding of this term emerged in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of Japan as a military and imperial power and with a large-scale migration of Asian labor to white settler colonies around the Pacific Rim.13

In 1904, Jack London cautioned that the Japanese seizure of Korea and Manchuria signaled a new race war, a “menace to the Western world which has been well named the ‘Yellow Peril.’” Even if China was weak politically, through its huge population alone it still represented a threat, particularly under the influence of the Japanese, a “race of mastery and power, a fighting race through all its history, a race which has always despised commerce and exalted fighting”: “The menace to the Western world lies, not in the little brown man, but in the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man undertake their management.”14 Such imaginings were broadly promoted in popular culture. While the stereotype of Japanese femininity, familiar from The Mikado but popularized even more by versions of Madame Butterfly for the stage by David Belasco and Giacomo Puccini, remained alluring and exotic, visual representation of Japanese men became demonic, inhuman, and monstrous. These visions of yellow-skinned, slant-eyed, and buck-toothed figures did not wholly supplant earlier renditions of japonaiserie; rather, they worked in tandem with familiar images of a more quaint and decorative Japan, as in a 1905 French postcard depicting a Japanese rickshaw running over figures representing the European powers Russia, Britain, France, and Germany, and which reads “Place aux Jaunes” (Make Way for the Yellows). The Second World War intensified the contrast of these various images. If depictions of the Japanese as evil enemy conflicted with the queer and quaint depictions of The Mikado, later military conflicts and alliances with China, Korea, and different countries in Southeast Asia made depictions of the “exotic” East even more fraught. Popular media representations of allies and enemies fluctuated between positive and negative images, often presented as two sides of the same coin.

Fears of Japan as a world power and threat from the outside were combined with anxieties about Asian immigrants as internal threats to racial homogeneity and domestic peace. As we have already seen in our discussion of the “coolie Chinee,” the idea of the yellow peril was not only applied to Japan as the evil invader from outside but also evoked in tensions about immigrant labor. In the United States, the yellow peril served to illustrate both the threat of world domination by nonwhite races and fears of Chinese, Japanese, “Hindoo,” and Filipino coolie labor. Chinese immigrants were targeted for racial exclusion and socially ostracized; other Asian immigrant groups were subsequently subjected to similar laws and marginalization. Multiple restrictions on immigration, naturalization, and property ownership, such as the 1917 Immigration Act that prohibited immigration from persons whose ancestry could be traced to the Asiatic Barred Zone on the Asian continent and Pacific Islands, were accompanied by prevalent images of multiple Asian ethnic groups, including the Japanese, as debased, sexually deviant, untrustworthy, and unassimilable.

The Mikado’s alluring and decorative Japanese fantasy seems at first quite removed from these much more violent and hostile representations, but there is a marriage between the two in a series of wartime propaganda cartoons by American satirists. The first cartoon, by Edwin Marcus for the New York Times, captioned “Let the punishment fit the crime,” responds to reports during World War II that the Japanese were killing captured American airmen. It depicts the Japanese as a brute ape, to be executed by a gun wielded by “Civilization.”15 The second, by Richard Quincy Yardley for the Baltimore Sun, is captioned “The Lord High Self Executioner.”16 Commenting on the Japanese rejection of the terms of unconditional surrender to the Allies, it translates the “Jap militarist” into a Japanese samurai impaling himself on a giant sword while “Uncle Joe” Stalin watches from the East, and figures representing the United States, Britain, and China wave from the West. Again, the quaint types of the opera are evoked, but a very different vision emerges of a Japan of kamikazes and brutal imperialism.

These edgier forms of Mikado-humor with their virulently anti-Japanese images reveal the violence and brutality latent in the opera itself. As Beatty-Kingston first pointed out in his assessment of the opera as “the grimmest subject ever yet selected for treatment from the comic point of view,” the opera turns on depictions of inhuman punishments and despotic rule, which it renders plausible through its Japanese setting.17 Thus despite its light-heartedness, The Mikado’s maniacal motivations and violent deaths have never been far from the racial typecasting of the Japanese as not only radically foreign but also inherently inhumane. The character of the Mikado, with his demonic laughter and thirst for execution, is consistent with how Japanese rulers were thought to fit into the more generic characterization of the despotic oriental emperor. German physician Philipp Franz von Siebold, who described the despotism of “the sovereign authority ruling Japan” as “one of its greatest evils,” wrote: “Liberty is, indeed, unknown in Japan; it exists not even in the common intercourse of man with man; and the very idea of freedom, as distinguished from rude licence, could, perhaps, hardly be made intelligible to a native of that extraordinary empire.” Japanese despotism, according to von Siebold, resides not in a particular emperor or demagogue but rather in law and established custom, which “unvarying, known to all, and pressing upon all alike, are the despots of Japan”: “Scarcely an action of life is exempt from their rigid, inflexible, and irksome control; but he who complies with their dictates has no arbitrary power, no capricious tyranny to apprehend.”18

Anti-Japanese sentiment grew in the first half of the twentieth century along with Japan’s rise to world power and intensified with World War II. Perceptions of Japan were also affected by anxieties felt over Asian migration, particularly to the United States, where exclusion laws had by 1924 virtually barred immigration from the Asia-Pacific Triangle. But it is not until relatively recently that a more direct anti-Japanese sentiment was allowed free expression in The Mikado. A larger sea change in Gilbert and Sullivan productions happened after the expiration of the D’Oyly Carte’s copyright in 1961, and the demise of the original D’Oyly Carte Company in 1982 provided more opportunities to unleash Gilbert and Sullivan. As Peter Davis remarks, this allowed companies in the U.K. to follow the lead of the earlier, pirated U.S. versions:

In point of fact, the United States has never been much bothered by Gilbert and Sullivan traditions, ever since the “pinafore” craze of 1879, when innumerable versions of that operetta were playing the length and breadth of the land. And, come to think of it, perhaps this is a good thing, too. Consider that bastion of G&S convention, the D’Oyly Carte Company, which has reverently preserved every bit of original business laid down by W. S. Gilbert a century ago, from the patter singer’s raised left eyebrow to the tenor’s dulcet expressions of modified rapture. The D’Oyly Carte productions have become so mummified in recent years that most Britishers have become completely soured on the subject of G&S. The company is apparently even threatened with extinction through lack of audience support. These operettas can withstand almost anything, it seems, except the stifling weight of their own traditions.19

Contemporary Commodity Racisms

The commodity racism of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado sets the stage a century later for a vision of a Japanese economic, technological, and cultural invasion. If the Japan craze of 1885 inspired white viewers to partake in playing Japanese, its counterpart a century later also inspired versions of The Mikado. However, attitudes toward this new japonaiserie were much more negative. Frederik Schodt notes that starting in the 1980s, U.S. popular opinion toward Japan began to shift. “Instead of regarding Japan as America’s star pupil in democracy and capitalism (an ‘economic miracle’),” Schodt describes, “more and more people began to worry that Japan might be operating under a very different set of assumptions about trade and national security,” and Japan became seen as a potential economic threat.20 The U.S. trade deficit and accompanying economic problems, coupled with Japan’s new technological prowess and increasing economic influence worldwide, led to new imaginings of Japan as a seductive and attractive place of new and enticing objects and as a potentially invasive force, a new yellow peril.

This mixture of admiration and anxiety regarding Japan’s economic dominance clearly dictated new Mikados, some more experimental than others. At the Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, New Jersey, in 1990, The Mikado 2001 inserted a subplot that included, according to reviewer Alvin Klein, a robotic “geishanette,” an automated office lady, as well as evoking through Thomas Ikeda’s Mikado “a Far Eastern Howard Hughes” who, in the finale, assures us that humanity “cannot be measured in microchips.”21 Reviewer Mark Mobley described how the Virginia Opera’s 1993 The Not Mikado, a 90-minute version orchestrated in a variety of musical styles including doo-wop, country, ragtime, and rock, significantly revised lyrics to the opening song: “If you wanna know who we are / we are techno of Japan / We make all your compact car / your transistor and your van.” These lines are sung by the men as the women recite names of Japanese corporations, and the whole group then sings, “Our outlook once was rocky / You Yankees very cocky / We remember Nagasaki / Ah!”22

One of the most striking contemporary productions inspired by this new commodity racism and its attendant anxieties was directed by Peter Sellars at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1983. During the overture, young women dressed as flight attendants instructed audiences on the use of seat belts and oxygen masks during their imagined flight to Tokyo. Act 1 took place in a corporate boardroom with neon signs for Fuji, Seiko, Minolta, Toshiba, Sony, and Coca-Cola flashing in the background. Reviewers recognized the conspicuous references to Japanese electronics, cars, and computers: describing the production for the New Yorker, Andrew Porter noted, “Japonaiserie of another kind surrounds us today; we tell the time by it, listen to music through it, hear it being on the hour in our concert halls, ride in it.”23 The chorus of Gentlemen of Japan were identically dressed in business suits, sunglasses, and black wigs. Reviewers described how the Mikado, “bemedalled like a South American dictator,”24 makes his entrance in a red Datsun, with a full contingent of security men, and how Pish-Tush is staged as “a J. R. Ewing-type tycoon” and Pooh-Bah as “a snooty chairman-of-the-board”25 who employed “sly Nixonesque overtones in his characterization.”26

Titipu is transformed into a place of multinational companies and commodities, highlighting the inseparability of Japanese and American influences. Remarked one reviewer, “This Mikado is set in our own time—in a Japan so smitten with Western society that it has joined it.”27 The Sellars production thus suggested a different direction for the opera’s racial mimicry. Instead of yellowface as the straightforward impersonation of Japanese by white performers, here white performers enact a Japan that imitates the United States and vice versa. However, this interpenetration of Japan and the United States is weighted in different ways; while the production caricatured Japanese corporate power, American global influence was represented not as repressive capitalism but as irrepressible and ebullient popular culture. Nanki-poo was transformed into a celebrity rock star with an electric guitar in hand whose comic turns, as one reviewer described, “suggested a cross between the late John Belushi and the Fonz”; he rode a motorcycle onto the stage for his initial entrance into the corporate boardroom that was “filled with Japanese clone-like businessmen.”28 Yum-Yum becomes a mini-skirted Valley Girl with a Snoopy on her bed, and the Three Little Maids “boogied clumsily to the beat of a transistor radio.”29 Katisha’s performance of “There Is Beauty in the Bellow of the Blast” in a nightclub echoed swinging Hot Mikado settings. The avid consumption of American culture by the Japanese suggests that the tables have been turned and that the Japanese now have not only technological prowess but also disposable income; at the end, reviewer Robert Jacobson notes, “We journeyed back to Chicago amid a swarm of Japanese visitors armed with flash cameras.”30

This is not to say that in Sellars’s production the cherry blossoms and other vestiges of traditional Mikado production went away entirely. In fact, Sellars reused a stock 1920s set from Chicago performances of Madame Butterfly (recognizable from the 1955 production of Butterfly with the title role sung by Maria Callas)31 and cast a D’Oyly Carte veteran as the Mikado, Donald Adams, who was known to many reviewers as having done more than two thousand performances of the role. These reminders of old-style Mikado—the queer and quaint Titipu of exotic customs, beautiful objects, and alien inhabitants—provided an immediate contrast with this picture of contemporary Japanese whose performances of American culture and capitalism reversed the traditional racial mimicry of yellowface.

Though clearly presented in a lighthearted style, this double mimicry also suggested some of the complex fears behind the modern version of the yellow peril: Japan as not just the slavish imitator of the United States in business and popular culture but its rival and even superior. Those who had been pictured by Georges Bigot as monkeys dressing up in human clothes—the modernized Japanese—had now produced a superpower that could outdo its European and American counterparts at its own game. George Knox, a British writer and long-time resident in Japan, summed up succinctly this aspect of the “problem” with Japan at the end of 1904, a time when its astounding victory over Tsarist Russia seemed certain. Knox admitted:

In our superficial way we have classed Asiatics together and we have assumed our own superiority. It has seemed a fact, proved by centuries of intercourse and generations of conquest, that the East lacks the power of organization, the attention to details, and of master over complicated machinery. Japan upsets our deductions by showing its equality in these matters, and, on the final appeal, by putting itself into the first rank of nations. . . . Here is a people, undoubtedly Asiatic, which shows that it can master the science and methods of the West.32

Sellars’s Mikado suggests how, with its 1980s “economic miracle,” Japan might be the Asian model minority that threatens to make its Western counterparts obsolete.

Racial Humor and Pastiche

Susan McClary notes that many contemporary productions of classic opera engage in self-conscious and deconstructive presentation: “rather than transmitting them as sacred objects, they are deconstructing them—laying bare their long-hidden ideological premises—and yet reenacting them, so that one experiences a shared heritage and its critique simultaneously.”33 While the Sellars production provided a coherent conceptual framework for using these new racial images, many updatings of The Mikado cannot be credited with encouraging such a radical space of self-critique. These productions do not provide a system for using these racial stereotypes but rather include them as part of a hodge-podge of amusing devices.

That even blatantly hostile racial images can pass as innocent humor seems in keeping with that peculiar quality of the opera that we have been describing all along. Placed in the context of a work so presumably fantastical and light, these casual references can escape the charges attached to any serious racial representation, hence even brazen racial stereotyping declares itself to be harmless fun. The deeper significance of any of these yellow peril images often escapes any notice; reviewers seldom mention these references, even though they are far from indirect.

Tradition is clearly dispensed with in radical revisions such as The Gentlemen of Titipu, an animated children’s feature directed by Leif Gram for Australian television in 1972.34 The show seems similar to that of many cartoon versions of classic literature, theater, and opera remade for a young audience. In this version, the Mikado, Pooh-Bah, Pish-Tush, Katisha, and Nanki-Poo arrive at Titipu for the Cherry Blossom Festival; Ko-Ko winks at Katisha and is sentenced to death. The remainder of the plot, though greatly truncated, is similar to the original. The songs have been revised and reorchestrated in a seventies pop rock style, and the action contains plenty of pratfalls, including the arrival of the Titipu town band and a musical scene in a dungeon, complete with burly executioners. There are some holdovers from the conventional stage, such as Anna Russell, noted for her parodies of grand opera, who voices over an oversized and strident Katisha; however, much of the original Mikado has been excised in favor of the familiar slapstick of cartoons. What is interesting is that these transformations include a host of racial stereotypes added on to the familiar cherry blossom scenery (redone in the bright color schemes typical of early 1970s animation) and characterizations of the opera. Some are nods to Gilbert’s nonsense, with characters such as Om-pah-pah (the leader of the town band), Bow Wow (a servant to Nanki-Poo), or Miss Tut-tut (a schoolteacher to the Three Little Maids). Others, such as the heavy accents of a number of characters and the buck teeth of Pish-Tush, seem more akin to stereotypes familiar from films such as the 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which featured Mickey Rooney’s caricature of a Japanese neighbor to Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly.

In this cartoon, what identifies the characters as Japanese combines the features of The Mikado’s Titipu and racial caricatures borrowed from film and television. Like the hip reorchestrations of what it packages as an “animated children’s classic,” these newer images update the opera for new and young audiences, remaking The Mikado’s fantasy of Japan in ways that easily incorporate other stereotypes. We might identify a number of these that have become standard fare for contemporary Mikado audiences. Gilbert’s nonsensical names—Yum-Yum, Nanki-Poo, Pish-Tush, and the like—inform the naming of multiple extras, such as the cast list for the 1998 production of Hot Mikado by the Catchment Players of Victoria, Australia, with chorus members such as Yucki-Poo, Ping-Pong, Bing-Bang, Sushi, and Kinki-Lee.35 Toward the end of the first act, Gilbert’s libretto calls for the repetition of the nonsensical “O Bikkuri shakuri o” to drown out Katisha’s proclamation; contemporary performers of The Mikado often ad lib with similar faux-Japanese phrases. These jokes verbally typecast Japanese as unintelligible or infantile. Similarly, male and female characters racially identify themselves not only through the mincing steps, bowing, and giggling of Gilbert and Sullivan’s staging, but also through gestures borrowed from other stereotypically oriental characters. Players of the Gentlemen of Japan and Ko-Ko often throw in some improvised martial arts moves  à la Bruce Lee movies or revert to elaborate and ridiculous bows and salutes.

This racial typecasting is a standard part of the new Mikados of the 1980s and after. One such example comes from the 1982 Stratford (Ontario) Festival production, directed by Brian Macdonald, which was broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1986 and later revived at the Virginia Theatre in New York in 1987. With its vigorous and athletic choreography and Broadway musical delivery, it seems influenced by other popular Gilbert and Sullivan productions such as the well-known New York Shakespeare Festival’s Pirates of Penzance, directed by Joseph Papp, which came to Broadway in 1981. The Stratford Mikado production, praised for its innovation and casting, did not cast celebrities nor did it rock the orchestration; however, it did depart from a more traditional D’Oyly Carte staging in some notable ways. The Japanese aspects of the opera were established primarily through an elegant use of intercultural design and aesthetics. Fans, kimonos, parasols, and other oversized objects remained prominent in the opera, but the staging also used devices from traditional Asian performance forms, including a circular ramp reminiscent of the hanamichi of Kabuki theater, stagehands dressed in black (like Kabuki’s kuroko), and acrobats and ribbon dances reminiscent of Beijing opera.

There are also several notable departures from the standard yellow-face look of D’Oyly Carte. Katisha has red hair, and Nanki-Poo appears in a ponytail and without the exaggerated eye makeup typical of the role. Thus important aspects of the production moved away from the familiar racial exaggerations of more traditional Mikados. However, this more neutral take on racial impersonation was counteracted by repeated references to racial types of other kinds. At every mention of the Mikado, characters responded with exaggerated bowing and high-pitched cries. The demonical laugh of the Mikado so often used in Savoy productions became, with Gidon Saks’s performance, a strange high-pitched voice so heavily accented at times that it became unintelligible gibberish. Most strikingly, Richard McMillan as Pooh-Bah worked a variety of references to racial stereotypes into his comic mugging. In his multiple impersonations, ranging from Canadian politicians to movie stars, he frequently employed Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan accents and gestures, fake martial arts moves, and repetitions of stock phrases such as “chop-chop,” “ah so,” and “hi-ya” to highlight his role.

In many contemporary productions of The Mikado, modernizing the opera means referencing a variety of contemporary racial allusions. Many of these are clearly derogatory, commenting on specific images of the Japanese or other Asians as evil threats or unwanted immigrants. However, some productions apply such an amalgamation of racial stereotypes that these subtle distinctions become lost. Such was the case when Simon Gallaher’s Essgee Entertainment of Queensland, Australia, produced an updated version of The Mikado for Australian and New Zealand audiences in 1995, after their success with a modernized version of Pirates of Penzance in 1994. Their Mikado was a great commercial success, leading them to produce H.M.S. Pinafore later. Like their version of Pirates, Essgee’s Mikado included considerable revision of the libretto, reorchestrations of the songs to contemporary rock and pop rhythms, vigorous choreography, and lots of comic improvisation. The women’s chorus was transformed into a trio of three women, the Fabulous Singlettes, who also take on all the parts of Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo. The men’s chorus was full of young, virile men who exposed plenty of skin. The opera featured dance numbers, closing with a Vegas-style reprisal of songs complete with flashing lights, video display, fireworks, and other pyrotechnics.

Though performers wore kimonos and headbands and carried fans and swords, their extravagant characterizations bore little resemblance to Mikados of the past or anything remotely resembling Japan. Instead, this production suggested a postmodern pastiche that seemed to neutralize any effort at racial representation, a popularization that featured handsome young leading men without any hint of yellowface makeup in nearly all the leading roles. But this energetic adaptation also recycled any number of racial jokes: incessant bowing at every mention of the Mikado, the humorous mimicking of martial arts movements, references to familiar stereotypes from stage and screen. The Mikado was played by David Gould who, though dressed fantastically in a futuristic suit with flags protruding from his shoulders, nonetheless delivered his lines in a familiarly stereotypical manner, punctuating his heavily accented lines with utterances of “so sorry” and “come, come, grasshoppers.” In the finale, Gilbert’s dialogue is punctuated by random utterances of Japanese product names such as “hibachi” and “Nintendo.” This version of “Miya sama” is rewritten to end with phrases such as “Sayonara” and “Miss Saigon,” changing the only real Japanese song into yet another list of new Asian commodities. During the final curtain call, the Fabulous Singlettes engaged the audience in how to speak Japanese, which consisted of asking them to say words such as “karaoke” and “Mitsubishi” and ended with the pronouncement of “raw fish—bleah!” These evocations of Japanese brand names seem to be part of the standard mockery of Japanese language that takes place in many productions; nonsensical words and names are often used to reinforce the sense of foreignness associated with what is Japanese.

What happens when The Mikado is inhabited by these buck-toothed, myopic, unintelligible, hysterical characters reminiscent of the Japanese enemy of World War II Hollywood films, Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi, or Fu Manchu? These references to racial stereotypes introduce an overtly representational and racially hostile take on The Mikado that troubles the nostalgic lightness of the opera. These new additions seem strangely retrogressive in light of the new racial politics that have converted The Mikado into a multicultural Hot Mikado that celebrates racial harmony. Yet even the recent Hot Mikados have their share of racist humor. A reviewer of a Hot Mikado that played during March 2004 in the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, suggested, “Between the death-penalty humor and Asian jokes, the musical is rather politically incorrect.”36 Similarly, a reviewer for a Musical Theatre West production of Hot Mikado in the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, California State University–Long Beach, during February and March of the same year, reflected that the show’s “blazing abandon should electrify Broadway babies, but attendees allergic to Asian jokes are alerted, as are purists.”37

These overt racisms can seem very much at odds with what traditional fans of Gilbert and Sullivan feel to be the spirit of the opera. One reviewer, weary of what he saw to be the antics of Sellars, even confessed to feeling a certain longing to return to the D’Oyly Carte tradition:

In fact, when Donald Adams, who was the lovably bloodthirsty Mikado of some 2,000 performances in his D’Oyly Carte days, appeared in this production and did his familiar turn, I found myself thinking kind thoughts about the tradition he represents. Mr. Adams made me realize how much I would like, once more, to see a genuine unashamed D’Oyly Carte performance.38

As I’ve suggested earlier, modernizing The Mikado and the use of new racial images go hand in hand. The strict limits on improvisation set by the D’Oyly Carte’s model kept racial representation within the limits of decorous behavior. While Savoy performers, for instance of Ko-Ko, such as George Grossmith, Henry Lytton, and Martyn Green, did indulge in some authorized ad-libbing,39 for the most part, the tight control of Gilbert kept ruder improvisation at the Savoy under restraint. Audrey Williamson writes of the Ko-Ko role, “The part is full of opportunities for mime and therefore, unfortunately, equal opportunities for clowning. Amateurs fall for the last more frequently than professionals, for in spite of occasional accusations by the die-hards both Lytton and Green [the Savoy’s Henry Lytton and Martyn Green], the principal exponents in our time, seem to me to have preserved a certain ‘style’ in the part which avoided mere rough-and-tumble excesses.”40 Thus in most versions, anything that might openly give offense was suppressed in favor of a more genteel portrayal of Japanese racial difference. In the traditional D’Oyly Carte style, Williamson lauds “Gilbert’s ruling of a traditional spirit avoiding vulgarity”;41 what seems to have happened after the end of the D’Oyly Carte’s influence is that the decorous stagings of the Savoy’s yellowface have given way to broad exaggeration that includes a much more open use of racial stereotype.

The Mikado in an Age of Cultural Sensitivity

In much the same way as it became imbued with the vocabulary of black-face minstrelsy in twentieth-century America, the racial language of The Mikado can easily take on elements of racial humor familiar to contemporary audiences. What is most interesting in these recent productions is that they are played in venues where stronger racial representations, such as the openly racist humor of blackface, have become taboo. These overtly hostile gestures and references exist not just as the nostalgic and accidental remnant of an old vocabulary, but as a demonstration of a new and alarming racial backlash. While it seems as though current sensitivities about expressing racism should make these references to the Japanese as the yellow peril less rather than more likely, perhaps it is the very opposite, whereby the release of racism in front of presumably liberal audiences accentuates the fun.

The derogatory term “nigger” is finally officially excised from The Mikado in 1948. Rupert D’Oyly Carte explained the changes to the D’Oyly Carte libretto in the London Times:

We found recently in America that much objection was taken by coloured persons to a word used twice in The Mikado, a word which I will not quote but which your readers may easily guess. Many protests and letters were received, and we consulted the witty writer [A. P. Herbert, who coined the substitutes most often used] on whose shoulders the lyrical mantle of Gilbert may be said to have fallen. He made several suggestions, one of which we adopted in America, and it seems well to continue doing so in the British Empire. Gilbert would surely have approved, and the alteration will be heard during our season at Sadler’s Wells.42

His comment affirms the necessity of the opera’s conforming to a new climate of racial sensitivity and suggests that even Gilbert, so intransigent on other details, “would surely have approved” of this change. As J. M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson suggest, this assumes ignorance rather than evil in Gilbert’s use of this racist term. Rupert D’Oyly Carte was

practicing an altogether justifiable principle of charity in interpretation: he assumed that Gilbert was a man of his times; the original lyrics manifested mere parochialism rather than conscious malevolence. Surely, it might be argued, a decent person would change a lyric when its offensiveness was brought to his attention, and if the person in question is dead one ought to act on this assumption in the interests of charity. Indeed, if Gilbert were alive today, he would probably never have written such racist lyrics in the first place.43

Thus a work such as The Mikado might easily be cleaned of casual racisms for contemporary audiences, substituting “banjo serenader” and “painted with vigor” for the clearly derogatory lyrical references. These changes are easily made; lyrics to the two songs in question (Ko-Ko’s “Little List” song, “As Someday It Might Happen”; and the Mikado’s song, “A More Humane Mikado”) are often altered.

If the word “nigger” has been thoroughly and neatly excised from productions, why then the addition of new racial insults? One explanation is of course that anti-Asian racial humor and yellowface are not perceived as publicly offensive in the same way that anti-black racism is. Some might say that “yellow” is relatively ignored in racial terms while racial representation has been dominated by discussions of black and white. However, simple parochialism doesn’t seem in itself to be enough of an explanation. What is it about The Mikado that not only its original queer and quaint yellowface but also its even more egregiously offensive racial stereotypes are allowed to be played in front of presumably liberal audiences time and again? If the objections “by coloured persons” to the use of the word “nigger” successfully motivates even the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company to change Gilbert’s libretto, why is the same attention not given to anti-Asian sentiment?

One answer might be that these racial insults exist in a much more veiled form, as momentary gestures. Again, The Mikado deflects any sustained commentary on its racial politics, with some claiming that it is thoroughly English, following G. K. Chesterton’s famous remark, “There is not, in the whole length of The Mikado, a single joke that is a joke against Japan. They are all, without exception, jokes against England, or that Western civilization which an Englishman knows best in England.”44 For them, the Japanese setting of The Mikado can be thought of as just another topsy-turvy setting for the linguistic and musical genius of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan; the world of The Mikado is no different from any of their other settings—a pirate ship, Gothic Scotland, South Pacific islands—that serve as a colorful backdrop for a satire on late-Victorian British life. However, this move only accentuates the extent to which the representation of Japan actually enables this particular mode of satire. The racial fantasy bolsters the sense of who the English are; as Chesterton added in his own remarks:

This sort of English caricature requires a Japanese frame; that, in order to popularize a criticism of our own country, it is necessary to preserve a sort of veil or fiction that it is another country; possibly an unknown country. If the satirist becomes more of a realist, he enters the grosser native atmosphere in which he is expected to be a eulogist. The satire bears no sort of resemblance to an Englishman criticizing Japan. But it has to assume a certain semblance of a Japanese criticizing England. Oliver Goldsmith discovered the same truth, when he found he could only talk truthfully to his countrymen in the stilted language of a Chinaman.45

Chesterton’s additions notwithstanding, an interpretation of The Mikado as “only about the English” has become a commonplace. A certain anxiety about race is inevitably tied up with this assertion. Many have claimed the thoroughly English nature of the opera precisely in order to dispute any claims that it has any troubling racial content. A contributor to the Gilbert and Sullivan discussion list comments on her own experience with producing The Mikado at Oberlin College:

Oberlin was a difficult venue in which to produce Mikado. We had barely any budget (says the Treasurer), and a very politically sensitive student body (my soprano quit because of a single word). So I went into directing the Mikado with the idea that these are English people putting on a show which is set in a country whose culture they don’t really understand. This saved us a lot of money on makeup and hair, as well as keeping us safe from the boycotters. If anyone complained, I could point to the style of the production and say, see, we’re making fun of the English! Isn’t it clear?46

The Oberlin production, of course, is but one of many productions that cite the Englishness of the opera in hopes of deflecting any criticism of its racial representation. This strategy inspires a variety of production choices, such as the introduction of quintessentially English objects—bowler hats and umbrellas instead of fans and parasols—sometime even in productions that are otherwise staged in full yellowface of the D’Oyly Carte variety.

One of the most de-Japanned of these productions is Jonathan Miller’s 1986 production at the English National Opera, which was also brought to Los Angeles and Houston and filmed for Thames TV. Miller sets his version of the opera in the foyer of a grand hotel; Titipu becomes an English seaside resort in the late 1920s. The whitening of The Mikado is literally carried through with Stefano Lazadiris’s opulent white-on-white design for the stage. The male chorus wears full morning dress, monocles, and carnations; Nanki-Poo is in flannels and straw boater hat; Katisha is glamorous in furs and evening gown. Dance numbers with butlers, valets, and maids erupt spontaneously, echoing Hollywood musicals of the 1930s. The staging includes little of the familiar scenery, costume, and props; Japanese fans and swords are transformed to lacrosse sticks, tennis rackets, billiard cues, and lollipops.

Miller is open about his intention to move away from the faux Japanese of the D’Oyly Carte, stating, “The piece had been completely embalmed up till then in this literal Japaneserie.”47 He borrows liberally from Marx Brothers movies, the Ascot scene from My Fair Lady, and Hollywood extravaganzas. This concept was clearly attractive to performers, such as Eric Idle (of Monty Python fame), whom Miller asked to play the role of Ko-Ko. When Miller told him, “I’m going to get rid of all that Japanese nonsense for a start,” he recalls, “that just hooked me—if he was going to take the Japanese stuff out of The Mikado, I wanted to know how on earth he was going to do it!” Idle finds, “Once Jonathan had liberated the piece from its Japaneserie, it was suddenly free of years and years of accretions and jokes that had been built into it by each generation. Consequently we were able to approach it as if it was a totally new text, without worrying about everything that had gone before, and this gave us tremendous scope with Ko-Ko.”48

But however complete the transformation, this Englishness is nonetheless still disturbed by certain reminders of the Japanese origins of the opera. In Miller’s exuberant staging, Japaneseness seems reduced only to a vague echo in the kimono designs of the black-and-white dressing gowns, an outline of Mount Fuji outside the window, and the occasional black bob. These are in-jokes, anticipating the audience members’ previous expectations of The Mikado. What is most interesting, however, are not these sustained stylistic choices but the seemingly more casual racial references. As the men’s chorus sings “we are gentlemen of Japan,” they pull the corners of their eyes back; at other times, they make karate chop motions. These gestures are repeated at various points, when Eric Idle as Ko-Ko comments on the “typical Nipponese attitude” (paraphrasing Gilbert’s “characteristic Japanese attitude”) and when the chorus sings “O ni bikkuri” to drown out Katisha’s revelations.

As fleeting as these moments seem, such gestures convey multiple meanings. The familiar and exhausted racial vocabulary of insult has been reduced to a minimum, yet these movements still signal both yellowface and racial insult. Even the most de-Japanned version of The Mikado can still make room for the racist gesture. The inclusion of this gestural mockery seems all the more troubling because of its gratuitousness. Miller’s white-on-white production seems to bypass all the pitfalls of racial representation by following through on the insistence that the opera satirizes England, not Japan. Compared, for instance, with recent Hot Mikados in which casual anti-Asian jokes seem somewhat corralled, however tenuously, by the overall spirit of good multicultural fun, in this glamorous production the intrusion of the racial gesture is much more blatant.

In terms of anti-Asian racial slurs, the “slant-eyes” gesture is the equivalent of fighting words. How do we understand this openly antagonistic gesture if the point of the production is to de-Japan The Mikado? Are these insulting yet vague gestures meant to reflect on the snobby tuxedoed characters who make them, to reinforce their privilege as white? Or is it that in order to claim the artistic innovation, Japan must be reduced to barely recognizable gestures, like the glimpse of Mount Fuji through the window?

Miller’s production only highlights the puzzling reiteration of openly caricatured racial stereotypes that appear with regularity throughout contemporary productions of The Mikado. One way is to read them as precisely a response to the anxieties of race that have presumably been erased by the whitening of the opera. These casual gestures mark the privilege of whiteness—to take the gesture lightly and to make it with impunity—they also register the dare of a new age of cultural sensitivity. This racial version of flipping off, like so many other instances of momentary insult, are symptomatic rather than atypical of the racial tensions that surround multiculturalism; they are inspired by the perceived policing of free speech and the loss of the apparent privileges of playing fast and loose with race.

This and other references to the hostile imaginings of the yellow peril are used strategically in The Mikado not to offend openly but to give contemporary productions of the opera an irreverent and edgy quality. Challenging what many perceive as the tyranny of political correctness, these productions have a go at a barely sustained, yet perhaps momentarily thrilling, expression of racism. One of the most interesting aspects of the contemporary racial insult is its buoyancy. Disguised as part of the innocent merriment of the opera, it can evade protest even as its meaning is powerfully antagonistic and, to its intended targets, unmistakable.

Pomona College Protests (1990)

As these modern versions all suggest, the revitalization of Gilbert and Sullivan lies in innovative restaging, youthful performers, and energetic performances. Unfortunately, in the case of The Mikado, this also entails a revisiting of stereotypes—the foreign invader or the immigrant coolie—that hammer home an overtly hostile and racist message. These moments reveal how The Mikado can never really disguise its own power to represent Japan and its connections to a political orientalism that exists within its patrician fantasy. These aspects of the opera fuel protest against its production. The 1907 censorship of The Mikado demonstrated how the opera was judged in light of diplomatic relations between England or the United States and a foreign Japan. In the past few decades, a new perception of racial injury informs protests of the opera.

In 1990, faculty, staff, and students at Pomona College protested a production of The Mikado by Opera  à la Carte, a professional company specializing in Gilbert and Sullivan, staged at the Claremont Colleges. In her book About Face, Dorinne Kondo describes her reaction to an announcement of the opera:

I groaned inwardly as I looked at the listing. Not again. The last production of The Mikado I remembered was in Boston, where the Emperor’s Court had metamorphosed into a Japanese company populated by Japanese businessmen, conjoining the Oriental despot trope with that of the corporate soldier. Not again—facing the situation that women, people of color, gays, and lesbians face all too often when oppressive stereotypes recirculate in forms that the dominant considers harmless fun. And as in all such occasions, one must decide what to do. Make a fuss? So much effort, and I just got here. Let it go? Then I would hate myself for being the “silent Asian” who allows an egregious event to slip by without a whisper of protest.49

Kondo emphasizes several ways in which the opera gives racial offense. There is first the opera’s perpetuation of stereotypes, “the problematic Orientalist tropes that permeate the text: nonsensical and offensive renders of Chinese (not Japanese) names, Oriental exoticism and despotism, Oriental proclivities for suicide, and Oriental women as either submissive lotus blossoms or witch-like dragon ladies.” Anticipating the well-worn defenses of the opera, “that The Mikado is a cultural classic; that it is simply a satire; that Gilbert and Sullivan were ‘really’ writing about England,” she argues, “We must ask: for whom is The Mikado a cultural classic?” For her, calling the opera satire “merely excuses the continued circulation of racist and sexist tropes. In this regard, the choice of Japan as the setting for this satire was overdetermined given the contemporary discourses of Orientalism and Britain’s imperialist project.” Also, The Mikado was chosen over newer works that might enlighten viewers with regard to racial topics, and this lack of attention to newer work reflected an ongoing institutional racism: “the choice to stage The Mikado at the Colleges effectively preempted the performances of Asian American plays written and performed by Asian Americans, echoing an institutional history that had failed to confront Asian American issues.”50

The occasion of the opera’s production became transformed into an arena for racial consciousness-raising. What might have otherwise been an unremembered revival instead transformed Gilbert and Sullivan’s work into a forum for activism. Kondo records that faculty, staff, and students formed a Coalition of the International Majority/National Minority that staged a teach-in preceding opening night and organized protests at performances, with signs that read “El Mikado es un pecado” (The Mikado is a sin).51 As a result of these protests, the college administration moved to establish an Asian American Resource Center. So this Mikado actually inspired some concrete institutional change, though it certainly was not the effect that the opera’s devotees intended.

What is interesting as well, however, is that this open disapproval produced backlash as well as open minds. The protest did not result in a boycott or cancellation of the production. Although the protest clearly moved the hearts and minds of those who participated in it, the opera went on as planned. One contributor to an online Gilbert and Sullivan discussion list posted a very different recollection of this event:

Opera  à la Carte’s Mikado was boycotted once in Claremont, California by an ethnic student group who felt it was racist and sexist. There were picket signs out front. It would have been funny except that it was so pathetic. We think they missed the point. As the overture began we were warned there would be a “walkout.” As promised, on the initial downbeat approximately 6 people got up and left the otherwise filled-to-capacity auditorium. I think they would have done well to involve some students of management. WE could not resist a hasty response. In the list song when I sang “Likewise, you know who” our Pooh-Bah obstinately crossed behind me with a large picket sign saying “DOWN WITH OPERA.” Cheap, I know. Hey, it got a laugh.52

There is a striking disconnect between this dismissive account and the heated concerns of those protesting the opera. Here the writer glories in the “cheap” laugh generated at the expense of the protestors, who, he claims, “missed the point.” In this rebuttal, as well as the protest, it can be seen how in contemporary settings the opera has become part of a deeper uncertainty associated with race. This uncertainty manifests itself not in any openness, let alone consciousness-raising, but in an even more obstinate denial that the opera has anything to do with racism. Even while providing a “hasty response,” it was clear that those producing the opera were ill-prepared to engage in any level of debate about who or what their production actually represented.

The question of what this means haunts productions of more than just The Mikado. Many operatic and theatrical revivals must deal directly with questions of racial representation. Whether they rely on racial provocation or try to avoid direct confrontation with the questions they provoke, the questions remain the same. Instead of engaging directly with issues of race, power, and representation, such productions displace the tension and anxieties of racial representation into small gestures of defiance against political correctness. This response can be read as naughty rather than racist, performed through hasty responses or insulting gestures that can easily be disavowed as humorous. Given the opera’s own celebration of flirtation in defiance of royal edict, some might see a censorship of racial slurs to be part of the larger control of the state over individual rights of self-expression. Thus they might see the opera as encouraging a roguish spirit of rebellion or feel relief at getting away with racist language and behavior.

Debates about political correctness become arguments for the artistic right to free expression. But when playing The Mikado ironically becomes a bold statement about artistic freedom, this in turn suppresses deeper questions about the continued privileges inherent in yellowface and other forms of racial performance.