Diverting Desires and Audiences: Kabuki, Fūzoku, and the State in Late Tokugawa Japan

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	O’brien, Suzanne Crawford Marymount, Loyola
Copyright Year	2007
Abstract	Historians have often described kabuki–early modern Japan’s premier form of popular theater–as apolitical although socially disruptive. Presumably this characterization reflects the fact that kabuki was seldom explicitly oppositional and did not foster the emergence of the sort of revolutionary bourgeoisie demanded by models of national becoming based on European experiences. However, kabuki’s supposed lack of political import is premised upon a circumscribed notion of politics that fails to take into consideration the ways in which culture both sustains and contests hegemony by shaping the categories and practices through which people perceive their world, construct their identities, and conceive their desires. Samurai officials of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and their critics, by contrast, had little doubt about the political significance of the desires and behaviors incited by kabuki. They took kabuki’s potential for either uplift or destruction of fūzoku (customs, public morals) quite seriously and devoted considerable energy to regulating it. Official ideology identified fūzoku as crucial indicators of the quality of governance, so threats to well-ordered fūzoku, particularly such “vulgar entertainments” as kabuki, were understood to be inherently political. From the earliest years of the Tokugawa era (1603-1868), kabuki attracted ever greater attention from both audiences and the authorities with its sumptuous displays of eroticism, heroics, scandal, crime, and daily life. While actors and playwrights envisioned their performances as providing nagusami (diversion, pleasure, or solace) for audience members, shogunal officials and samurai critics regarded these displays as diverting audiences from their proper social and moral duties. Kabuki’s ability to stir passions drew official reproach but also inspired official hopes that it could become a force for moral reform, as evinced by perennially reissued shogunal directives that kabuki plays “encourage virtue and chastise vice” (kanzen chōaku). The determination of officials to domesticate kabuki rather than ban it outright, despite their conviction that it had principally pernicious affects on fūzoku, attests to their belief in its affective power and the prospects for mobilizing it to affirm officially sanctioned behavior and values. The power of kabuki, and the nature of the threat that it posed to the political hegemony of Tokugawa authorities, is best understood not simply as “disruptive” but as constitutive. The samurai critic Buyō Inshi’s lament, quoted above, exemplifies this point. In Buyō’s view, the problem was that kabuki no longer merely simulated or
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Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article