The Takarazuka revue

By the final years of the Meiji period the Ukiyo-e Tradition and Yokohama photography waned in popularity, and new artistic movements and mediums began to fully assert dominance over the aesthetic tastes of Japan both in the realm of fine and commercial art. While Kusakabe Kimbei’s isolated photograph of a geisha in tekomai did not make a significant impact on the visual culture of the time, it would be followed by a new venue designed to produce images of cross-dressed women that created a vision of the cross-dressed woman that continues to be the cultural touchstone for the practice in contemporary Japan. The all-female Takarazuka Revue has fascinated Japanese and global audiences since its inception in the interwar years of the twentieth century. At the center of that fascination was the figure of the otokoyaku, the male role performer. The performance style and carefully curated aesthetic of the otokoyaku has made them the dominant representative of female-to-male cross-dressing in Japanese popular culture.

Since Takarazuka is a theatrical and cultural phenomenon, it has extensive exposure in anthropology and theatrical history. However, few studies have focused on the artistic footprint created by the theater through its copious amounts of fan material, such as bromide photos, fan magazines, photo books, posters, programs, and ticket stubs. These carefully created artifacts capture the appeal of the theater and its actresses in the absence of the inherently ephemeral performance. Like the postcards of artworks created for national exhibitions, Takarazuka’s visual culture was an alternative source for audiences to indulge in the theater. The material also allowed every performance and actress to have a much longer life span, as evidenced in the continued collecting of pre-World War II Takarazuka memorabilia even today. This material created the connection between fans and the stars because these photos and magazines extended beyond the boundaries of the stage. The material reflects how each generation of Takarazuka gains its visual character from the trends of the day.

This chapter investigates the impact of such material in shaping and spreading the image of Takarazuka’s otokoyaku actors, identifying parallels between Takarazuka and the traditions of the nineteenth-century geisha. Takarazuka synthesized and leveraged new and already existing cultural and aesthetic traditions to create an attractive image for their male role performers while also navigating moral panic around gender and sexual expression deemed deviant under new government policy and sexology discourse.

Beginning in the formative years of the 1920s before the designation of otokoyaku existed, I shall first contextualize Takarazuka’s shift from early Nihonmono (Japanese style) productions to majority Western style performance by examining two photographs from either end of the decade (1920 and 1927). These photographs bridged between the performing geisha of the past and the actresses of the modern era. With the stage set and the otokoyaku established, I shall then focus on Takarazuka’s golden age in the 1930s by analyzing the portraits of its star otokoyaku, Ashihara Kuniko (1912-1997). Her portraits exemplify Takarazuka’s negotiation of Taisho gender ambivalence and shojo (girl’s) aesthetics during the interwar period. They create the fantasy of the ideal man, thus shielding the theater from conservative criticism. Moreover, Ashihara’s image facilitates an exploration of the cyclical relationship between Takarazuka and the narrative and illustrative forms of shojo culture. Fitting her promotional material into its historical and artistic contexts will reveal why the otokoyaku survived as Japan’s representative cross-dressed woman longer than her early modern predecessors.