Chapter XI

Along Broadway complaints have been heard during recent years of the almost dishonest brevity of some plays. Of all the things that may be said against theatrical performances in Japan, that would be the most unreasonable. I pride myself on a certain amount of endurance, in any good cause, but I confess to a kindly feeling toward that Tokyo friend who did not take me to the “Meiji-za” until the show was half over. Not that it was so far beyond me, or that I am incapable of appreciating, even of enjoying at times, things wholly foreign to our American point of view; but even Fred Stone, I fancy, would begin to grow wearisome if he cavorted about the stage almost incessantly from two until midnight.

By the time we had checked our shoes in one of the adjoining tea-houses—for to do so at the door of the theater itself means a long and severe struggle to recover them—and were shown to a box six inches deep and furnished with cushions and a tray of tea, most of the crowded house had already had four and a half hours’ worth of the admission fee. For most of them it was supper-time, and scores of men and boys flitted back and forth along the “aisles,” level with the tops of patrons’ heads, serving meals contained in lacquered boxes, the inevitable tea, and white vase-like bottles of warm _sake_. Unshod and experienced, they caused little or no annoyance, especially to an audience accustomed to see actors often enter or leave the stage by these same polished wooden runways. In the gently sloping balcony the rice-fed multitude, gathered in family groups in similar square, shallow, mat-floored inclosures, piled about them the plentiful waste of their lunches without for a moment letting their attention waver from the stage.

Unchaperoned not merely by a Japanese but by one capable of appreciating and mitigating a foreigner’s difficulties, the performance would have been as meaningless and unintelligible to me as a baseball game to an Englishman. But a few well-chosen words of explanation now and then disclosed as many unsuspected fine points as pass unnoticed by a novice at a Spanish bull-fight. The one thing the Japanese actor must avoid above all others, it transpired, was “acting,” in the Western sense. The more nearly, apparently, he acts like a normal, genuine, every-day human being, the lower he is rated in histrionic ability. There are, to be sure, topical farces and the like in modern Japan; but the national drama, patronized by the great mass of the recreation-seeking, and offering the greatest stage fame, consists of little more than endless elocution, accompanied by certain stilted actions cut and dried for centuries, any deviation from which diminishes by just that much the player’s applause. His every step, gesture, and inflection is stereotyped by age-long custom and repetition, and his highest goal is to approximate as nearly as possible those steps, gestures, and inflections which won the undying fame of some bygone king of the stage.

That does not mean, however, that the Japanese actor has no chance to develop and display personal advantages. The more nearly, for example, he can make his voice sound like an enraged giant imprisoned in the pit of his stomach the greater will be the uproar that greets the conclusion of one of his speeches. He is given, too, frequent opportunities to imply by facial expression alone the thoughts that are supposed to be passing through his mind, which are often expressed at the same time by a sort of Greek chorus of three or four men dimly seen behind wooden bars in a kind of raised box on one side or the other of the stage, who declaim in a curiously unrhythmic rhythm as they pick at native instruments. The _koto_ and the _samisen_, by the way, are not the last word in musical contrivances, but I confess to a decided preference for Japanese “music” over American “jazz,” and for much of her theater to the unsuccessful striving for originality which often afflicts our own.

There is a reminder of the three thumps which announce the raising of the curtain in France in the beating together of two sticks of wood so hard that they have almost the resonance of bell-metal, faster and faster, until it reaches a deafening crescendo, which constitutes the signal for the next act in Japan. There is lacking the perfect imagination of a Chinese audience, which makes a property-man in black or coolie-blue invisible, or the stick on which a new moon is raised above the cloth horizon quite in keeping with the poetic spirit of the drama; but the scenery is decidedly elementary, and many conventions which strike the Western visitor as ludicrous pass quite unnoticed. Not merely do the actors often make their entrance or exit along the raised aisles through the audience, declaiming as they come or go, but bands of them, representing the _samurai_ of rival _shoguns_, now and then wage pitched battle far out on these passageways, to the seeming peril of the lacquered rice-dishes of auditors beneath them. If a wall or a fence is indicated in the scene, only the gate or door, standing in dignified isolation, is actually in evidence, and must be carefully opened and closed whenever a character passes through it. There is something curiously incongruous between such medieval contrivances and the ultramodern revolving stages of the best Tokyo theaters, on which a group of actors, suddenly coming to the end of their scene, relapse into motionlessness and are spun around in plain sight of the audience until the next group and setting are disclosed and put into action.

But these after all mainly mechanical differences are not the chief ones between the Japanese and American stage. It is more surprising to find that the two corner-stones of our theater, novelty and the sex appeal, are wholly unnecessary to the Nipponese playwright. “Old stuff” pleases best, even in the “movies.” Month after month, year after year, one might almost say century after century, the Japanese playgoer is content to witness the same dramas, to follow with breathless interest some national legend, some event in the history of the island empire as well known to its every school-boy as is Washington’s crossing of the Delaware to us. He is not merely satisfied; he prefers these ancient tales, dressed in the elaborate costumes of shogunal days, ruled by the curious morality of long ago, when parents slew a beloved son for some intangible point of honor, and suicide was considered, under certain circumstances, the height of virtue. The Japanese is decidedly not a demonstrative race, yet the suppressed sobs and blowing of noses of the “Meiji-za” audience all but drowned out the stentorian, cavernous voices of the actors at the climax of a scene between a self-doomed father and his infant son, though every native present had heard the story a hundred times.

The same themes suffice for the now fairly numerous Japanese motion-picture producers. The old familiar kimono-clad figures, whitened faces, and well-tried situations all but monopolize the posters before “movie” houses. As on the speaking stage, the rare female rôles are most often played by men; in the few cases where they are not, the women never under any circumstances give the slightest reminders of the appeal of sex. The result is that when, to fill out its program, the cinema flashes an American or a European picture on the screen, this unfailing motif fairly shrieks at one from the very first foot of film. The traveler from the West is suddenly astounded by the realization of the omnipresence of this appeal in the dramas, good and bad, high and low, of our own land. What would have been at home the most innocent of flirtations, the purest youthful love-story, becomes all at once, sensed in the curiously tense atmosphere of the Oriental audience about one, the height of indecency. If the film is of the type the Westerner would regard in his home land as mildly risqué, a burning sense of shame surges up his spine; he feels an all but overwhelming desire to rise and shout to the now gaping audience that it is completely misunderstanding, to hurry back home and demand that laws be framed to forbid the exporting for the amusement of peoples so utterly different from ourselves of screen-stories which cause them completely to misjudge us, to the appreciable widening of that gulf between nations that so much largely futile effort is being made to narrow.

Misunderstandings of this sort, however, are inevitable. Honest Japanese themselves admit that they are no models for the average of other nations in relations between the sexes, but with them there is almost no indication of this fact on the surface. Nor is this hypocrisy; it is age-long custom, and temperament, for they are above all things outwardly undemonstrative. For a man and woman to shake hands, to take an arm, fills the untraveled Japanese with amazement; for husband and wife to exchange the most perfunctory of kisses in public at parting or greeting is more scandalous than in holy Zion City itself. Even to show such signs of affection to one’s children where others may see is extremely bad form.

“Do Japanese man and wife never kiss?” I asked one of my Tokyo acquaintances.

“Never!” he replied, with an amazement at the question that showed through his habitually expressionless face. “Of course,” he added a moment later, with the air of a man who would be truthful at all costs, but with the cynical smirk of one treading lewd ground, “they sometimes do, but only in the privacy of their chamber.”

It was this same man who, more familiar with the speech of England than with our own, explained that the only outward manifestation which distinguishes a geisha from her more respectable sisters is “too much swank.” Certainly her public manners and personal appearance give no other indication of her calling. Japan’s very _yoshiwaras_, these walled and sternly policed restricted districts of her larger cities, are outwardly models of propriety; the big framed photographs of the inmates, displayed to attract passing clients, invariably show them as properly attired as the most circumspect of dowagers. It may be that the frank, casual disclosure of what in Western lands commonly remain hidden charms, in the public baths and the naturally rather disclosing garb of Japan, makes the Japanese callous to any such incitements.