Local Kabuki in the Center of Japan: An Ethnography of Transition

Abstract

Kabuki theater has long been characterized as a quintessentially urban art form, and it is the refined precision of Tokyo’s elite professional traditions that scholars uphold as an archetype of Japanese culture. In communities throughout regional Japan, however, the only kabuki that matters is one resident amateurs perform themselves, in sweat- and tear-soaked productions that take place once a year but resonate in local memory long after. With often untrained bodies and makeshift stages, these local performances rarely match kabuki’s polished, formulaic reputation, offering instead cathartic celebrations full of improvisation and unanticipated “happenings.” Yet rather than hide these “flaws,” practitioners embrace them, critiquing over-determined portrayals themselves as misdirected: “Kabuki isn’t something you watch—it’s something you do.” This dissertation is a long-term study of this “local” kabuki in central Japan’s Gifu Prefecture, which blends local theory, intellectual history, and decade-spanning ethnography (2010-2020) to reconsider entrenched understandings of kabuki and Japanese culture alike. The two chapters in Part One draw from participants’ critiques to reconceptualize two bodies of scholarship, whose interrelated assumptions of structural continuity leave little room for the contingency or agency of local kabuki’s practice: Japanese-language theater research that defines the genre as an eternally premodern foil to urban kabuki, and English-language ethnography which depicts Japanese culture itself as undergirded by an anti-modern principle of predetermined forms or kata. Part Two pursues an alternative approach, through a five-act ethnographic narrative that follows practitioners across ten years of transition—a period when Gifu’s kabuki has been adopted by prefectural heritage and tourism industries, and its aging “master” choreographers have retired or passed away. Even as specters of “tradition” and loss introduce pressures to codify and memorialize local choreographies in line with normative ideals of singular aesthetics and linear transmission, I show how emerging successors develop approaches to style and legacy that locate continuity not in the fixity of the genre’s forms but in their flexible multiplicity. By following practitioners in provincializing dominant scholarly frameworks and placing local kabuki’s dynamic doing at the center of “Japan,” I provide new perspective on Japan’s most representative art form and Japanese culture at large.