Out of the cross-dressed history of Japanese Kabuki and Noh theater comes Takarazuka Revue, a butch/femme drag show of mammoth proportions. The 86-year-old revue renders Western musicals in an all-girl extravaganza of romance and chivalry. In 1914 Ichizo Kobayashi, a Hankyu...
[more]Out of the cross-dressed history of Japanese Kabuki and Noh theater comes Takarazuka Revue, a butch/femme drag show of mammoth proportions. The 86-year-old revue renders Western musicals in an all-girl extravaganza of romance and chivalry.
In 1914 Ichizo Kobayashi, a Hankyu railway magnate, founded the Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka means "treasure mound") as a way to entice visitors to a hot spring resort on his railway line. He wanted to create actresses "more suave, more affectionate, more courageous, more charming, more handsome, and more fascinating than a real man." The result is a cultural fixture equivalent to the American soap opera.
Japanese women (the Revue's audience is 95 percent female) flock to see their favorites in "West Side Story," "Kiss Me Kate," and "Oklahoma!" In fact, Japan's biggest stars tend to be former "Takarizienne." And -- surprise surprise -- the most-revered Takarazuka stars are its drag kings, or otoko-yaku. "I wish that Japanese men could be as passionate as the otoko-yaku," says one female fan. "The otoko-yaku are so much cooler and more manly," another chimes in.
Takarazuka performers are either otoko-yaku, women-as-men, or musume- or ona-yaku, women-as-women. Performers must hone their performative gender after the first year of training and then spend the next two perfecting it.
Not only does the Takarazuka Revue rival Kabuki and Noh in popularity (drawing an annual attendance of 2.5 million), but its three-year training program surely challenges theirs in rigor. The Takarazuka Music School is a hybrid of the Julliard and a military academy, complete with a ranking system and the bullying that accompanies it. The school puts its 400 15- to 18-year-old students through tough daily course loads that begin in the morning with two hours of cleaning and culminate in ballet, modern dance, choral singing, traditional Japanese music, and the art of the tea ceremony.
Since theater at the turn of the century was an occupation of ill repute, Ichizo Kobayashi strove to make his school a moral, upstanding place for respectable women in the theater. The company's Meiji-era motto, "Kiyoku, Tadashiku, Utsukushiku," ("Purity, Righteousness, and Beauty") still hangs in the school's entrance, and the company still aims to uphold it by requiring its members to remain unmarried while they are part of the revue.
A well-established cultural phenomenon that revels in issues of sexual and ethnic identity as much as in the spectacle of the big musical show, the Takarazuka Revue is the female counterpart to the venerable all-male Kabuki theater. Depending on their moods, Japanese theater-goers can work either side of the trannie line, knowing that either way, the show will be both convincing and over the top.
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