Left-wing theatre in Japan

This thesis is a historical account of left-wing theatre in Japan from its early beginnings in the 1910s to the collapse of the organised proletarian drama movement in 1934. It is set within the context of the general history of shingeki from the earliest attempts to reform existing traditional theatre soon after the Meiji restoration. The choice of this subject was encouraged by several factors. The Japanese classical theatre has much of interest to the foreign scholar and several substantial studies of its various forms have boon published. Shingeki, on the other hand, has as yet not been studied seriously by any Eastern scholar and it was at least portly a curiosity concerning the problems that would have confronted a modern drama in Japan that prompted this study of left-wing drama. The subject was limited to left-wing drama for several reasons. Firstly some limitation was required. The history of shingeki can now be said to extend over approximately one hundred years and such have been its vicissitudes and the volume of work contributed to it by its practitioners that only a very choral history would be possible in the limited scope of a thesis. Within the one hundred years of shingeki five separate periods can be discerned: the Meiji period, when the idea of a new drama for the new state was discussed and developed; the late Heiji and early Taisho periods, when the first experiments at a practical realization of new drama took place; the 1920s and early 1930s, when shingeki became an exciting new cultural form in the eyes of young intellectuals and when it became left-wing, as they did; the later 1930s, when a more sober approach to drama was taken by socialists and a more self-confident attitude was observable in those theatre people who were not left-wing; and the post-war period, with its complex mixture of self-examination and experiment. The 1920s and early 1930s - the left- wing period - were chosen because this can be confidently described as the formative period of modern Japanese drama. The struggle with the past was mainly over and the legacy left to future shingeki artists by these years was greater than that of any other period. [continued in text ...]