Lecture 2000-06-12
The Role of Women in Kyogen

Dr. June Compton

Summary of the June meeting:

Those who braved the seasonal rain were rewarded by a sparkling presentation given by Dr. June Compton on "The Role of Women in Kyogen". After making a number of announcements, our President introduced Dr. Compton, adding certain items not included in the last Bulletin, such as the fact that she had lectured on Kyogen at the National Noh Theatre in Tokyo and the Japan Society of New York.

It was customarily thought that there were three genres of Japanese performing arts, Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku, said Dr. Compton, but to these a fourth, Kyogen, should be added. It had a 600-year history as an interlude to Noh, providing comic foil or relief. The plays were short and usually had a cast of only two or three main characters, the roles being played by male actors. Dr. Compton had viewed, performed and studied Kyogen for over ten years, and had developed an appreciation for its pure comic genius, the appeal of which was universal. She had first been introduced to the Japanese performing arts when she had come to Japan in 1964 with a travelling theatre company, and they had come as a revelation to her. She had taken up the study of classical Japanese theatre at graduate school, and had eventually narrowed her focus down to Kyogen, thanks to the suggestion of a professor who had recommended that she write her Ph.D. dissertation on the role of women in the modern Kyogen world, and had introduced her to the Kyogen family of Nomura Mansaku.

At this point Dr. Compton turned to a description of the part traditionally played by women in the Japanese performing arts. There was evidence in both the Kojiki and the Nihongi of women taking part in dances in homage and supplication to the gods; this is reflected in the story of the goddess Uzume performing an obscene dance, which provoked the gods to laughter and aroused Amaterasu's curiosity so that she came out of the cave where she had hidden herself. There was also archaeological evidence in the form of Yayoi figures of a female shaman and a nude dancing girl. These female shamans, known as miko, performed dances in a trance when possessed by a god, and then passed on the messages they had received from the god. Some of them, the aruki miko, would go from village to village. Later forms of dance, such as shirabyoshi and kusemai, can be traced to the dances of the miko, and the origin of Kabuki is likewise attributed to an aruki miko. Today the miko still perform the sacred dance, the kagura. Among the elements of the early miko dances that were passed first to the kagura and then to Noh and Kyogen are the rhythmical stamping of the feet and the lifting of both hands in invitation to the deity to take possession.

During the later Nara and Heian periods, women took part in popular performances such as gigaku and gagaku, and in forms of street entertainment such as sangaku and sarugaku, which included juggling and acrobatics and also some dialogue. The scholar and courtier Fujiwara no Akihira has left a record of a performance of a farce as part of a sangaku entertainment, in which a man and his wives and sons and daughters all took part. At that time women were also active in court entertainments, though it must be said that there was only a fine line between entertainment and prostitution. The vast majority of shirabyoshi performers were women, and some of them ended up by becoming the wives or mistresses of leading men in Japanese society.

It has been claimed that the popularity of shirabyoshi was one factor at work in the development of Noh, and Kan'ami, co-founder with his son Zeami of present-day Nohgaku, made the daring innovation of incorporating kusemai, an unorthodox style of dancing which developed out of shirabyoshi, into Noh. By this time kusemai dances were performed almost entirely by women, and Kan'ami had as his teacher Otozuru, an accomplished artist from the women's school of kusemai, perhaps because he found women's kusemai less harsh than men's. Kan'ami was interested especially in the unusual beat of the dance, while Zeami placed more emphasis on the musical component. Today the climax of most Noh plays consists of an epic dance inspired by women's kusemai forms.

After Zeami's time there are records indicating that as the early sarugaku Noh increased in popularity it stimulated the growth of Noh and Kyogen played by women. By the mid-sixteenth century we find women playing an integral part in amateur performances of Noh and Kyogen, but there is no documentation to show what impact this tradition may have had on the development of Kyogen. By the end of the Tokugawa period women were banned from public performances of Kyogen, even those of a semi-professional nature. Dr. Compton then came back to her interviews with the Nomura family, especially with Mansaku's mother, Umeko. Before her generation, women in Kyogen families did not work outside the house, but inside they handled the money and controlled family matters. She herself had come from a family of lacquer merchants, but her mother had wanted her to have more than the basic six years of compulsory education, so she had enrolled in a four-year course in household management, and had mastered mathematics and the abacus. She had also studied shamisen and koto, and Noh chanting. Her marriage to Nomura Manzo was an arranged one, and she had no idea what kind of a family she was marrying into. Her social life was limited to the extended Nomura family. The women of her mother-in-law's generation, besides handling the money, helped with the costumes, doing all the mending and ironing, though they had nothing to do with designing or making them. Umeko was still responsible for these tasks when she was in her 80s, though she had another person to help her with the actual work.

In addition to performing these traditional tasks, Umeko's was the first generation of wives to assist at public performances, selling tickets and greeting patrons. In the early days they all wore kimonos, but this tradition ended when Umeko did not have enough use of her hands to dress herself. (The younger wives were quite pleased to be relieved of this, as they had felt like attendants at a Japanese inn; Dr. Compton also told of an incident where Australian women had taken the kimono-attired ladies for geisha!) All the wives, even those who have careers of their own, go to performances produced by their husbands. Dr. Compton had often seen Umeko in the lobby between performances by her sons, grandsons and nephews, meeting people and greeting old friends. She was also the prime organizer of the wives in the management of the family's business. This included taking reservations on their own home telephones and following up with the mailing of tickets and brochures. These days the scale of the operation has increased; Mansaku now has a secretary to do some of this work, and some of the families have moved from home phones to business offices.

Backstage the women are also responsible for traditional "wifely" jobs such as ordering the o-bento lunches for the actors and putting the costumes away. They have also acted as dressers when on overseas tours. Umeko went on one such trip in 1963, when the entire family went to Seattle; but it has been Mansaku's wife, Wakabako, who has been the most active in this respect. She has gone on ten major tours with her husband, acting as general factotum. Life during the war was hard, as there was no demand for Kyogen performances. After the war, Umeko and Manzo worked hard to create their own audiences, giving performances first at schools. Umeko used her connections with her old school, which was attached to what is now Ochanomizu Women's University, to get performing space at the university. She personally handled all the publicity and they gave hundreds of performances, making enough money for the family to live on, providing a training ground for her sons, and building up a new audience for Kyogen. (One of Umeko's important contributions towards the family venture was producing four sons!) Even so, she never meddled in the artistic side of the performances. Instead she focused all her energy in ensuring the success of her menfolk, repressing her own feelings.

The Nomuras are one of the most conservative Kyogen families. The situation is somewhat different in the Izumi family, which has produced the first professional women Kyogen actors, Izumi Junko and Miyake Tokuro. (There has never been a rule prohibiting women from performing, merely a tradition.) On this point, Mansaku felt that amateur all-women troupes were acceptable but that there was no future for professional women performers, as the roles were unsuitable for women. At the same time, the daughters of the family have continued to be trained, and Mansaku's second daughter, Saeko, was quite talented; after debuting as the Monkey at the age of three, like all the Nomura children, she continued in this role, and later in others, until she entered junior high school. The Izumi sisters, on the other hand, went on from that initial training and made their professional debuts at the age of twenty. Much of their time today is spent teaching students, most of whom are women. However, they still feel that the iemoto (head of a particular school of Kyogen) should be a man, in their case their younger brother. Despite their hopes of opening up the field to women, the future seems bleak. Dr. Compton had traced their careers over the last ten years, and their support base seems to have eroded since the death of their father five years ago; in the early days they played to packed houses, but now to only a handful of people.

In spite of this it can be said that the traditionally all-male world of Kyogen has changed. Today, not only the daughters of Kyogen families train, but also women from outside the families are studying as amateurs in significant numbers. The National Noh Academy now offers its professional course in Noh and Kyogen to women. Some graduates have become professional Noh actors, but none so far have become professional Kyogen actors. This is not to say that they may not do so in the future. It should be noted, however, that most of these "professional Noh actresses" are relegated to the realm of teaching. The Izumis stage annual Kyogen events at which all the performers are women, but realistically there is still a difficult battle to be fought before women can share equally with men in this 600-year-old tradition. Speaking from her own experience of acting in Kyogen, Dr. Compton noted one of the big problems. The roles had to be reinterpreted when played by women; a man playing a shrewish, nagging woman was funny, but a woman was not.

Only a short time was left for questions after Dr. Compton's presentation, and the meeting was brought to a close with a vote of thanks proposed by fellow-actress Elizabeth Handover.

Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 7", September 2000, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.