LETTER VII

Summary

H.B.M.'s Legation, Yedo, June 7.

On Friday we went by formal invitation to the opening of the new Shintomi Theatre, which is to introduce a new era in the Japanese drama. Hitherto, though a passion for the play is general in Japan, theatre-going has been an enjoyment confined by custom to the middle and lower classes, and the idea of the Mikado, Iwakura, Terashima, or any others of the Ministry honouring public theatricals with their presence would be regarded as simply monstrous; but there are private theatres at the palace, where the Emperor and Court witness the Nô, the mediæval lyric drama of Japan, “the very aristocracy of the histrionic art.” But as Japan is following western example in so many ways, it has occurred to Morita, the enterprising proprietor of this new theatre, that a regenerated drama with an improved stage, and a light and well-ventilated auditorium, “would, as in Europe, be a means of recreation worthy of the highest in the land,” and produce the result indicated in a Japanese proverb quoted by a native paper, the Meirohu Zasshi, on this very subject, “There is nothing that unites the highest and lowest so much as community of entertainment.”

Theatres are called shibaiya, “turf places,” because the first performances were held on grass plots. The origin of the drama in Japan, as in most other countries, was religious, its primary object being to propitiate the gods. At first it consisted of dancing to an orchestral accompaniment by masked and quaintly costumed male dancers.