For years, Japan’s traditional performing arts — exquisite spectacles of dance, costume and music — have suffered declining audiences and dwindling numbers of actors and instrumentalists. Now a hit film is bringing in audiences to theatres that many feared had fallen into terminal decline.
Kokuho, meaning “national treasure”, has been seen by 9.5 million people in the three months since its release and made ¥13.3 billion (£67 million) — making it the second most successful live action Japanese film ever. It has imparted new life to the theatrical tradition that is at the heart of its story, the world of kabuki drama.
Kabuki theatres report a surge of interest and increased ticket sales from fans of Kokuho — which tells the fictional story of the friendship and rivalry between two kabuki actors, one of who comes from a family of yakuza gangsters. Some cinemas have begun filming screenings of the famous kabuki plays that feature in the film.
Kabuki actors are mostly male, and the interest sparked by the film has led to hopes more people could apply to train
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“Kabuki is attracting attention,” said actor Ichikawa Danjuro this month. “I’ve seen more young people and couples in the audience than usual. I have a feeling that they’re identifying with Japanese culture.”
Kabuki is a 400-year-old art form that occupies a place somewhere between Shakespeare and pantomime. It has its origins in Japan’s feudal period, and throughout its history its productions have been theatrical spectacles filled with brilliant costumes, extravagant make-up, exquisite dances, jokes, acrobatic stunts and tragedy — dominated by star actors who are organised into clan-like theatrical “families”.
But like the other most prominent theatrical forms — the medieval dance-dramas known as Noh, and the bunraku puppet theatre — kabuki is struggling to flourish in a world of streamed in-home entertainment and a country with a shrinking population.
In 2006, Japan’s two national theatres in Tokyo and Osaka drew a combined audience of 42,000; last year that number had fallen by more than half. The market for live entertainment in Japan has become bigger than ever since the pandemic, but audiences for the traditional arts are still less than 80 per cent of pre-Covid levels.
A kabuki theatre in Tokyo
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On top of that, they are struggling to attract new young performers. Historically, performers learnt their skills and inherited their performing names from their fathers — almost all are male. But these days, a third of kabuki performers and two-thirds of those in bunraku are outsiders to the art who join acting families after being trained on government subsidised schemes.
Recently the number of applicants for these apprenticeships has been falling drastically. Only seven people applied to spend six years studying Noh in 2022, less than half the number of 20 years earlier. The comparable course for kabuki and Noh received just two applicants.
The number of active Noh performers, which includes actors, musicians and singers, is just more than 1,000 compared with 1,500 at the turn of the century; at this rate it will dwindle to 600 in 15 years’ time. The fear is that certain plays that require large casts may eventually fall out of the repertoire.
The Japan Arts Council, which trains performers, plans to raise the maximum age of apprentices from the current limit of 23. But apart from the shrinking number of young people in Japan’s population, except for the biggest stars, the traditional arts are also very poorly paid. A newly trained performer can expect to earn on average less than ¥4 million (£20,000) a year.
AloJapan.com