More japanized, casual and transgender shakespeares

Summary

Tokyo is alive with Shakespeare productions. In 2007, for instance, there were fifty-two, excluding foreign productions, roughly one new Japanese production a week. This immense popularity of Shakespeare began in the early 1970s. Until the 1960s, Shakespeare's plays could be seen only two to seven times a year. The Royal Shakespeare Company's first visit to Japan in 1970 with Terry Hands's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Trevor Nunn's The Winter's Tale (with Judi Dench as Hermione/Perdita) was presumably a powerful impetus. The term 'Shakespeare boom' first appeared in newspapers in late 1971, when they announced the line-up of Shakespeare productions for the following year: the highly regarded theatre company Bungaku-za held a 'Shakespeare Festival', producing three plays, and the Royal Shakespeare Company visited Japan for the second time with three Shakespeare productions directed by John Barton. There were many more Shakespeare productions in that year: twenty-one in total, an amazingly large number, although rather few by twenty-first century standards.

But 1972 seemed to have been an exception, for in 1973 the number of Shakespeare productions decreased to ten; nevertheless, a sense of momentum was gradually recovered when Yukio Ninagawa directed his first Shakespeare production, Romeo and Juliet, in 1974, and in 1975 Norio Deguchi's Shakespeare Company started producing all the thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare, costumed in jeans and T-shirts, completing the cycle in six years. The ‘boom’ continued in the 1980s, and the construction of the Tokyo Globe in 1988 spurred it on. By the time that the World Shakespeare Congress was held in Tokyo in 1991, the yearly output of Shakespeare productions amounted to well over forty, culminating in fifty-two productions (including foreign ones) in 1993.