A Japanese Mirror by Ian Buruma

Author:Ian Buruma
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atlantic Books

In the flashing golden light

The guardsman’s uniform burns red

Fair hair waving, she takes the reins of the chariot.

Ah, those blue eyes, ah, the waving fair hair.

This may sound like a piece of Nazi propaganda staged by Leni Riefenstahl. And indeed the popularity among young Japanese girls of late Visconti films, Helmut Berger and the extravagant posturing of David Bowie, does seem to point to a taste for the Teutonic bizarre. I once asked a Takarazuka actress what had attracted her to this type of theatre. Akogare, she replied, a word usually translated as ‘yearning’, ‘longing’ or even ‘adoration’. It is used for people, places and ideals that seem impossibly far away, such as for example akogare no Pari, Paris of our dreams. It is the idealization of the unattainable, something like building paradise fifty miles from Osaka.

Possibly modern young girls look at fantasy European aristocrats in the same way that Edo audiences watched swaggering samurai on the Kabuki stage: far away and imbued with special powers. But to see this simply as a form of power worship, as some people do, is to miss the point. For there is a streak of deep pessimism running through this, or at least a tragic sense of mono no aware, the pathos of things.

The heroes never win. Kabuki samurai almost invariably end up getting killed or else killing themselves. Oscar and André can be lovers only in Heaven, never in this sad, evanescent world of ours, just like Chikamatsu’s tragic heroes and heroines more than three hundred years ago. As the end poem of another girls’ comic says: ‘Look at the dreams of young girls, who grow up: they are like castles of glass.’ Growing up inevitably means tragedy.

The young girl’s dream, then, is to go as far away as possible, sexually, emotionally, geographically, from everyday reality: in outer space or in fantastic pseudo-European palaces, or even a combination of both, such as in ‘The Adventures of Puppy From the Star Called Mill’. The sets of this play are pure Takarazuka paradise: eighteenth-century French ballrooms in a grand palace filled with tall, long-legged, short-cropped girls in blonde wigs, Donau monarchy guardsmen’s uniforms and speaking in artificial mannish voices – Erich von Stroheim in Japanese teenager land.

The adults in this piece are all corrupt, deceitful and calculating. The young girls suffer terribly, but are rescued in the end by two androgynous extra-terrestrials, who can make time stand still and wear pendants with which they can see through people’s hearts. This causes havoc, for unspoken thoughts become known to all and as one of the E.T.s points out: ‘The people in this world live by cheating each other. They know they are being cheated, and so they cheat others. That is their way of life.’

The despair about growing up and the hostility to the adult world are remarkable for their intensity. The Takarazuka heroines echo the sentiments of Midori, the young girl destined to be a prostitute in Higuchi Ichiyo’s ‘Growing Up’: ‘If only she could go on playing house forever with her dolls for companions, then she’d be happy again.

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