THE MAN WHO SAVED KABUKI: Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censorship in Occupied Japan
By SHIRO OKAMOTO
Translated and adapted by Samuel L. Leiter. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. 228 pages, $52 (hardcover), $24.95 (paperback)

Michael Guest

In March 1940, twenty-three-year-old, ex-Universit¨¦ de Poitiers and ex-Juilliard student Faubion Bowers was en route to the Netherlands East Indies, where he planned to study Indonesian gamelan music. He disembarked at Tokyo for a stopover, chanced into the famous Kabuki-za theater-having mistaken it for a temple-and was so affected by his initiation into the spectacular 350-year-old genre that he extended his stay to a year. During this time, the man who would later become known for helping preserve this popular form of Japanese drama and introducing it to audiences in the West lived frugally as a part-time English teacher and devoted himself to constant theatergoing. After the onset of the war, Bowers excelled at Japanese at the army language school in San Francisco. He returned to Japan in 1945 as interpreter and aide-de-camp to General Douglas MacArthur.
The aesthete Bowers, the subject of The Man Who Saved Kabuki by Shiro Okamoto, soon found himself in a position to influence the processes of Occupation as they came to bear on what had become his by now beloved Kabuki. Its feudalistic, and occasionally bloodcurdling, themes were soon to catch the eye of those in the censorship detachments whose first and fundamental guiding principle was the thorough "democratization" of Japan. For example, Chushingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers)-which happened to be the play Bowers watched in the Kabuki-za on that first day-treats the famous historical vendetta from the early 1700s in which forty-seven samurai avenged an insult to their late master, resulting in ritual suicide for forty-six of them. Other plays featured "head inspection" scenes, in which a severed head is exhibited for identification. Characteristically, it is the head of the protagonist's own son, whom he has decapitated so that his master's son may be spared. The measures calculated by the Occupation to eliminate the feudalistic implications present in a large proportion of the plays seemed a threat to decimate the art.

Bowers played clever politics, interpreting Kabuki plays as anti-feudalistic and anti-militaristic. In the play Kumagai Jinya (Kumagai's Battle Camp), for instance, a general who has sacrificed his own son in place of his lord's subsequently renounces the world to become a priest. Therefore, argued Bowers, the play actually opposes the warrior code (bushido) rather than commending it. Bowers threw embassy dinner parties so that the censorship personnel could get to know the actors, and he implemented a program of recreational trips to the theater for entertainment-starved servicemen. After some burst into laughter at the actors' mie poses-frozen climactic moments of tumultuous emotion-Bowers gave pre-performance lectures about the plot and Kabuki conventions. In November 1946, he managed to obtain the position of chief theater censor, and the theater was relieved of its restrictions in November 1947, two years after the first prohibitions.
Faubion Bowers may well have helped Kabuki regain its autonomy sooner than other art forms. But need we think of him as literally the man who saved kabuki, rather than as a benevolent and resourceful individual who happened to be at the right time and place? For one thing, Donald Richie already declares in The Confusion Era (1997), edited by Mark Sandler, that Bowers's superior, Earle Ernst, did more in practical terms to help the ideological scapegoating of Kabuki. For another, Shiro Okamoto himself notes that the Occupation authorities went along amicably with Bowers despite his public opposition to their initial stance on Kabuki. In other words, perhaps the heat went off Kabuki anyway when, as Richie suggests, the Americans ceased perceiving feudalism as much of a threat and turned their attention to communism.
Okamoto, a freelance writer and former journalist for the Mainichi newspaper, a leading national daily, first heard about Bowers from an actor-director friend in 1996 and decided to research the story as a way to "fill in the blanks." (Okamoto was born in 1946, and like many of his contemporaries, knew surprisingly little about the Occupation years.) His book, published in Japan in 1998, struck enough of a chord to enable Okamoto to produce a television documentary about Bowers, which the public broadcaster NHK aired across Japan the following year. In Japan, Bowers is not widely known outside Kabuki circles, with whom he maintained contact over the years. Hence Okamato's "discovery" of Bowers takes on a symbolic character in the broader, murky context of the national post-war psyche, and Okamoto tends to elevate Bowers to a mythical status. Actor Matsumoto Koshiro IX is quoted as sincerely believing that "Bowers was a messenger sent by the gods of theatre." Okamoto's narrative itself seems to orbit around the task of justifying the proposition, seriously entertaining the notion that Bowers was destined to be Kabuki's "savior." This is perhaps among the reasons why the translator, Samuel L. Leiter, a theater professor at the City University of New York, judged it necessary to adapt Okamoto's work substantially for an English-language readership. Yet a related uncritical note of nihonjinron ("thesis of Japanese uniqueness") still resonates in the book.
For instance, Okamoto discerns in Bowers a singular sensitivity to Japanese art and culture, believing that "something of [Lafcadio] Hearn resided in him." According to Okamoto, both men were skeptical about the materialistic civilization of the West, and Bowers found in the Japanese culture of his own time remnants of the refined grace and sensibility that had so captivated Hearn a half century earlier. Bowers admired the aesthetic stylization of Kabuki as opposed to what he saw as the mundane realism of Western theater. This was, indeed, evidence that he brought to the defense of Kabuki: that it was a nonintellectual theater with no influence over the values of the Japanese. In Okamoto's documentary, however, the elderly Bowers (who died in new York in 1999 at the age of eighty-two) says that he had needed to lie about that part, and that the samurai code is really "the soul of Kabuki"-which now sends Okamoto into raptures about how Bowers had compromised himself for the sake of Japanese tradition.
The tendency to mythologize reflects an ingenuous attempt to comprehend a complex reaction to the American occupiers, whom the kindly paternal figure of Bowers ultimately represents. The book feels deeply about its subject, and if it is slightly out of step with the scholarly approach, it makes up for that with plenty of inside material on Bowers and the institution of Kabuki in general, as well as on its run-in with the Occupation censor. Leiter's appended "Kabuki Chronology, 1940-1948" and "Kabuki Plot Summaries" make the book an even more enriching and useful reference.

Michael Guest is a professor at Shizuoka University, where he teaches media and cultural studies.