CRITICISM

Shakespeare in Japan: a Great! collaboration?

Dominic Shellard* and David Warren

De Montfort University, School of Humanities, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH UK

Keywords: Japan; Theatre Archive Project; De Montfort University

i. Dominic Shellard: Shakespeare in Japan

Although 6000 miles apart and an 11-hour plane journey away, the United Kingdom andJapan enjoy a series of strong political, economic and cultural links, be it in the number oftimes the two countries vote together at the United Nations (the strongest compatibility ofany states), the palpable love of British designers on the streets of Tokyo, a shared reverencefor their respective monarchies, or a mutual attachment to the works of Shakespeare.

The origins of this special issue of Shakespeare and Japan are equally multifarious.In April 2012, both Jamie Andrews, the Head of English and Drama at the British Libraryand my fellow collaborator on the British Library Theatre Archive Project and I – Vice-Chancellor of De Montfort University (DMU) and Project Director for the TheatreArchive Project – undertook a visit to Tokyo, as part of the Great! Campaign. Organisedby United Kingdom Trade and Industry (UKTI), Great! was a celebration of Britishcreativity around the world as part of the Cultural Olympiad in the run up to the LondonOlympic Games. Such was its impact that it has now been extended until 2015.

Aiming for the elegant British Embassy in the Hanzomon district of Tokyo, justopposite the moat that surrounds the Imperial Palace, we did not travel alone. Occupyingtheir own seat on the plane – and met by armed guards at Narita airport in Tokyo – weretwo priceless artefacts from the British Library’s literary collections. The first was themanuscript of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Mystery of the Missing Three Quarter. SherlockHolmes is extremely popular in Japan and it had recently been decided that the 2019Rugby World Cup would be hosted in Japan. It was felt, therefore, that this was aparticularly resonant work to display in the main residence of the Embassy, given itssporting theme.

The second was the finest of the five copies of the 1623 First Folio that the BritishLibrary possesses. Aware of the large number of societies in Japan devoted to the study ofShakespeare, the rich heritage of intercultural productions in Japan and the increasingprevalence of Shakespearean characters in Manga publications, the British Library andDMU responded positively to an invitation by the British Council and the BritishEmbassy in Tokyo to host the works and stage associated events. These were eclectic intheir scope. Jamie Andrews conquered jet lag to give a large number of talks on the originand provenance of the works in front of the special case built to house the Folio andprotect it against humidity and earthquakes. Such was the popularity of these insights into

*Corresponding author. Email: djcartmell@gmail.com

Shakespeare, 2013Vol. 9, No. 4, 373–382, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2013.833980

© 2013 Dominic Shellard and David Warren

the Folio’s history and provenance, as well as the notable queues to come and see theFolio, that the Embassy opened specially on a Sunday to cater for the interest.

Conscious of the slight irony of someone long persuaded by Kiernan Ryan’s writingsabout Edmond in King Lear that claim that context is all in determining behaviour(“men /Are as the time is”) participating in what might have (erroneously) been perceivedas a hagiographic exercise, I offered cathartic lectures interrogating the Folio’s misguidedclaim that Shakespeare was “not of an age, but for all time”. (We all now appreciate thathe is both, of course.)

The British Council staged a whole day of activities for local schoolchildren, rangingfrom drawing Manga cartoons of Shakespearean characters to role-playing extracts fromthe Folio, that animated the Embassy in a most extraordinary way, and a dinner was heldto allow curious members of Japan’s political class, including ex-Prime Minister Fukuda,to inspect the almost 400-year-old edition.

One of the advantages of working with the British Embassy was that our host was thekeen theatre devotee, Ambassador Sir David Warren. Sir David’s stock was particularlyhigh in Japan at that time, having made the courageous decision not to evacuate hisEmbassy in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in March 2011 (as opposedto several other countries), and this added to the lustre of the event. Sir David shared someinsightful personal observations on the reception of Shakespeare in Japan since the Meijiperiod both during the Great! event and at the ‘Shakespeare in Japan’ conference held at DeMontfort University on 26 February 2013, and he has kindly rewritten these forincorporation into this Introduction to give an insight into why Shakespeare has madesuch an impact in Japan through translation and performance.

ii. David Warren: Personal reflections on Shakespeare and Japan

It was a great pleasure, just under a year ago, in April 2012, to host in the British Embassy inTokyo a series of events around the exhibition of the British Library’s First Folio ofShakespeare’s plays; and to be able to bring into the Embassy so many Shakespeareanscholars and academics, as well as students, schoolchildren, actors and lovers ofShakespeare.

I was delighted to have been able to do this. This was not just because I have myselfderived enormous pleasure over 50 years from reading Shakespeare, from watching hisplays in performance, and, as a university student reading English Literature, fromstudying the texts, but also because my job as Ambassador was to promote the UnitedKingdom – its culture and its values – as actively as possible in Japan.

Speaking about Shakespeare as a former British Ambassador is an act of culturalpresumptuousness. “He was not of an age, but for all time”, as Ben Jonson said. By thesame token, he is not of one country, but the whole world. However, he was also Britain’sgreatest poet and playwright, and there can be no more powerful way to convey thecreativity and influence of British literary culture, and the society from which it sprang,than to present Shakespeare to an audience of Japanese interested in the United Kingdom,its history and its art. In writing a short piece on the history of Shakespearean translationand performance in Japan, I want to focus in part on how Japan provides a context inwhich Shakespeare can be seen in contemporary rather than purely classical terms.

Japan might not be the obvious environment for this perspective. Cultural diplomatsstress the vibrancy and diversity of modern Britain, and the way in which the country hasdeveloped over the last 50 years into a less hierarchical, less deferential society, in order

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to convey a sense of Britain as a source of challenge and innovation rather than simplytradition and conformity. This can sometimes be a difficult message to get across inJapan, where Britain is often seen as a centre of traditional values, sometimes enshrinedin a very traditional reading of English literature.

There is a folk memory, at least among some intellectuals and politicians in Japan, of thehistorical period in which Britain and Japan developed a close relationship, culminating inthe Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, as great powers containing the rise of Tsarist Russiawere making territorial claims on Imperial China. It may well be that that image ofBritishness – which many now see in Britain as outdated, redolent of the Victorian andEdwardian imperial ages and of a social and political structure to a large extent swept asideby twentieth-century liberal progressive movements – remains more powerful because itwas never replaced by anything else as powerful.

The post-World War I era was dominated by progressive estrangement from the UK, asthe Treaty was allowed to lapse and nationalists and the military took over the JapaneseGovernment, leading to the physical and moral catastrophe of the Second World War.

The post-World War II period saw the US occupation followed by the rebuilding andeconomic reconstruction of Japan under US military protection. The UK became a muchless important partner for Japan – until economic reforms in the UK and to a lesser extentin Japan opened up prospects for the development of trade and investment between thetwo countries in the 1980s and 1990s, which, in turn, have led to the establishment of anincreasingly close and friendly relationship, where the UK is seen as a good basis forJapanese investment in Europe, and Japan as a reliable ally of the UK on many problemsfacing the world.

Our current links have strong elements of modernity and innovation while stillsometimes feeling locked into a sense of tradition and conservatism. In this context – avery positive, but often confused, Japanese image of Britain – how would we expect theJapanese to respond to Shakespeare, as both a poet and playwright of universal power andinsight, and as an iconic figure in English literature? Is Shakespeare a modern or aclassic?

Audiences in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries certainlyexperienced Shakespeare as a literary classic, as part of a barnstorming tradition begun byGarrick and developed in the styles established by Henry Irving and Herbert BeerbohmTree – massive, monumental productions conveying the power of the poetic texts, andwith a degree of psychological realism, but heavily adapted to provide even morecommanding star parts for the principals. The history of twentieth-century performance isof liberation from that constricting tradition.

However, Japanese readers and scholars – and eventually audiences – initially sawShakespeare as another example of imported modernity in the context of the dramaticdrive for innovation and development in the 40 years after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.This saw an intense focus on building a new Japan as an industrial and economic force,coupled with the establishment of military power, learning from the experience of theWestern powers after 250 years of effective isolation from the world under the TokugawaShogunate. Shakespeare was at times an instrument through which traditional forms ofdrama could be modernised. The history of Shakespeare in performance suggests a strongcontemporary resonance for Japanese audiences from the very beginning. The consistentchallenge has been to find an appropriate form of Japanese text for his unique poeticvoice.

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There are a few examples of Shakespearean performance in Japan during Meiji.1

Indeed, the first actual mention of Shakespeare in Japan predates the arrival of Perry’s“black ships” in 1853 by 12 years, with a citation of Shakespeare in a section on syntax in aJapanese translation of Lindley Murray’s English Grammar. There were a few partialtranslations of scenes from the plays, some of which were actually made from Charles andMary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.

However, the first complete translation, of Julius Caesar, by Kawashima Keizo,appeared in 1882, entitled “Rōma Seisui no Kagami” (“A Mirror of Roman Vicissi-tudes”). By 1886, Kawashima had completed nine further translations, and TsubouchiShōyō had also translated Julius Caesar, calling his version “Shizaru Kaidan, Jiyū noTachi nagori no kireaji” (“The Sword of Liberty Shows its Keen Edge”).

The titles show that the works were political as well as scholarly. It was a time ofpolitical ferment. An Imperial edict had been issued for the inauguration of a JapaneseDiet, or Parliament: political parties were being organised; the Liberal leader, Itagaki, hadbeen wounded by an attempted assassin in 1882. The names “Caesar” and “Brutus” werewell-known among intellectuals.

When the first systematic attempts began to be made to translate the whole canon, itwas very much as part of a move towards modernisation, broadly defined. TozawaKōyō’s and Asano Hyōkyō’s versions in the first decade of the twentieth century wereinfluenced by Lafcadio Hearn, who urged that “the way to make a translation ofShakespeare is to try to reduce the original thought in the popular speech of the tongue”(Cairns 33). Asano and Tozawa had read western literature and were convinced that thelanguage of daily life should be the normal prose style of any language.

Tsubouchi Shōyō’s first translations were aimed at readers and students: his initialversion of Julius Caesar was in ballad mode. He did not begin his full translation ofShakespeare’s works until 1909 (with Hamlet), completing them at the end of the 1920swith Henry V.

Tsubouchi mixed the literary and the colloquial, balancing literalism (“chokuyaku”)and literariness (“iyaku”). For colloquial passages he chose archaic diction and for literaryones more modern Japanese (Milward 2004). He settled on a contemporary style oflanguage, with “rhythm and sonority, and, in the words of the British scholar Peter Milward,“a free selection of words, antiquated and newly coined, simple and ornate, elegant andvulgar, native and foreign, which would remain within the grammatical structure ofcolloquial Japanese (kōgo) and would be intelligible to the average people by hearingalone” (1965, p. 191). However, Tsubouchi believed that contemporary conversationallanguage would be too limited for Shakespeare. And he was never satisfied with the balancehe had struck, fearing that he was still too attached to the mannerisms of Japanese literaryand dramatic tradition.

Tsubouchi was both reflecting and transmitting the idea of Shakespeare as a newplaywright to Japanese audiences. Shakespeare was seen as “shingeki” (new drama)rather than classic. He appeared in Japanese theatres as a contemporary of other newEuropean dramatists like Ibsen and Tchekhov (Kennedy 262). The disadvantage of thiswas that “shingeki” texts were seen more as to be read and studied rather than performed.

Japanese theatrical traditions were flourishing in the early twentieth century. Kabukihad developed initially at the same time as Jacobean drama, and Nōh long predated theElizabethan theatre. However, Shakespeare was seen in Japan as both an extension ofmodernism and an example of prestigious drama with universal significance. He was awriter who fulfilled two roles – a valuable example of a Western cultural model to be

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copied and emulated, and an equally valuable source of archetypes to be reinterpreted fornew audiences.

None of this was happening in a political vacuum, and Tsubouchi was both influencedby and helped to influence the debate. He had supported the development of morerealistic Kabuki drama in the 1880s, and wrote a number of such plays in the historicallyaccurate and psychologically realistic manner popularised by Ichikawa Danjuro IX.Indeed, his undertaking a more systematic translation of Shakespeare in the 1900s waspart of his project of improving Kabuki by cross-fertilisation with other theatricaltraditions (Powell 233–34).

And although in Britain Tsubouchi’s name is most famous as a translator ofShakespeare, his work in this field was only part of an extraordinarily wide range ofwritings and activities – his Selected Works, published in 1926/7, comprised 15 volumes(including only two Shakespeare plays). All this was on top of teaching at WasedaUniversity nearly 40 hours a week and reading an encyclopaedically broad spectrum ofcontemporary British and American writing in the original language, if the articles in theSelected Works referring to Western books in the year in which they were written are areliable guide (Powell 225).

Tsubouchi believed that all educational facilities should be used for the regenerationof Japanese culture. He initiated the Bungei Kyōkai (the Association of Literary Arts),affiliated to Waseda, mounting Hamlet in 1911 with the radical step of using non-Kabuki-trained actors. It was not a success, in part because Tsubouchi and the cast were notconfident enough with Western-style drama. Despite employing native Britons in Tokyoto advise the actors, he had cold feet three days before the production and changed it backto a more traditionally Japanese style. It appears to have fallen badly between two stools(Cairns).

Tsubouchi was also an activist in the educational field, writing on the history ofethical scholarship in Japan, helping to shape the consciousness of younger Japanese inhow drama might be developed as an educational and social force, and establishing theBunka Jigyō Kyōkai (the Society for the Study of Cultural Projects), which both men andwomen could join (Powell 227).

Much of this was happening during the late Taishō era, when many young intellectualswere exploring the ideological dimension of Taishō democracy (Powell 224), a move awayfrom absolutism, which was short-lived as Japan became mired in militarism andgovernment by assassination in the 1930s, leading to the disastrous war in China and thePacific.

Shakespearean performance reflected the politics of the era. The most innovativedirector before World War II was Senda Koreya, whose political stance was explicitlyleftist and who had had close links with political theatre in Berlin. With the rise ofmilitarism in Japan, most of the Shingeki companies, which were heavily associated withforeign drama, disbanded or were suppressed. Senda’s 1964 Hamlet attempted torecapture some of this zeitgeist, but appears to be have been thought overly didactic bythe standards of the post-war, “Japan reopening to the world”, era (Kennedy 262).

In addition to the vivid and intense cinematic re-workings of three Shakespearean playsby the film-maker Kurosawa Akira, the most famous post-war directors, Suzuki Tadashi,Ninagawa Yukio and Noda Hideki, have all brought great innovation and originality ofstyle to their productions, often relying upon a cross-fertilisation of theatrical traditions.

Noda has staged Much Ado About Nothing in a sumo stable – because, as he haspointed out, the world of sumo suggests a sense of class distinction to a Japanese

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audience more powerfully than the aristocratic hierarchies who feature in the originalplays (Matsuoka in Ryuta, Carruthers and Gillies 149). He also set A Midsummer Night’sDream among a group of cooks in a Japanese-style restaurant and in an amusement parkat the foot of Mount Fuji (Ryuta in Ryuta, Caruthers and Gillies 149). He is unafraid toadapt Shakespeare’s texts, incorporating Iago, as a more charming and interesting villainthan Don John, in Much Ado, and the rarefied world of formal Japanese ikebana flower-arranging into a production of Richard III.2

Ninagawa, probably the best-known Japanese director in the UK, is very open aboutthe difficulty, indeed the undesirability, of finding equivalents for the heightened poeticvoice of Shakespearean characters. He has described himself as a “listener” to foreignculture, and not a director who works from a theory of drama (Kennedy 262). His 1989production of The Tempest related the story of Prospero to the exile of Zeami, the founderof Nōh, to the island of Sado,3 fusing Eastern and Western theatrical styles to theconfusion of some Japanese and, ironically, the fascination of some British audiences,who see his work as exotic in an inter-cultural way (Kennedy 263).

The work of these directors, which reflects the way in which alternative styles of theatrehave replaced more conventional Marxist approaches, in Japan as in other countries, ismirrored in the work of Shakespearean translators building on and developing thefoundations laid by Tsubouchi.

Fukuda Tsuneari, who also translated Bernard Shaw’s plays, established “GendaiEngeki Kyōkai” (the Association of Modern Theatre), Anzai Tetsuo produced a MuchAdo set in Yokohama at the end of the Sino/Japanese War, and Odashima Yūshi began hiswork in the 1970s, working with JeanJean, the avant-garde theatre in Shibuya.4

Fukuda’s productions in the 1950s, heavily influenced by the pictorial Old Vic style,which he had seen on a visit to England in 1953, had their own influence on Shingekiproductions in the 1950s and 1960s (Ryuta, Carruthers and Gillies 3). However,Odashima’s translations are seen as the major breakthrough in the history of Shakespearetranslation in Japan, conveyed more in conversational terms rather than in the sort ofequivalent to blank verse that creates an archaic and stilted effect (Ryuta, Caruthers andGillies 3).

Odashima has subsequently been challenged by Matsuoka Kazuko, the first femaleJapanese translator of Shakespeare, whose work uses language to underline gender-related themes in the plays. Both Odashima and Matsuoka have worked with specificdirectors, which has helped to make their texts more effective in the theatre.

This summary of different approaches to Shakespeare in translation and performancein Japan since the Meiji Restoration is not comprehensive and makes no pretence tooriginal scholarship, but I have tried to identify some of the themes relating to modernand classical readings of Shakespeare in Japan.

In Anzai Tetsuo’s essay in the 2001 anthology “Performing Shakespeare in Japan”, hemakes the point that it is no more appropriate to call Ninagawa’s Macbeth “a JapaneseShakespeare” than it would be to call Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream “anEnglish Shakespeare”. He adds that “Shakespeare is [to Japanese directors] a theatricaltouchstone to prove their artistic identities, or a mirror held up to nature on which theyhave to project their own ideas of theatre. The apparent Japanese features of theirproductions are nothing more than an incidental outcome, and not the goal, of their owncreative activities” (Anzai in Ryuta, Carruthers and Gillies 20).

The irony of Japan as a country attached to tradition, and respecting, perhaps overlyrespecting, tradition in British culture, is that the Japanese have seen no difficulty in also

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reinventing Shakespeare as our contemporary, in so many cases with enormous imaginativepower.

iii. Dominic Shellard: Shakespeare and Japan

The Great! event and, in particular, the “Shakespeare in Japan” conference had raised somany interesting issues about interculturality, intermediality and the challenges oftranslating Shakespeare that a special issue of Shakespeare was a logical outcome. Itcontains some particularly insightful critical articles by academics from the UK, US andJapan, covering an eclectic range of topics including theatre productions, films andcriticism and interrogating both Japanese engagement with Shakespeare as well as theportability (or not) of Western cultural values. A compelling leitmotif is the theme ofShakespearean “universality” and the legitimacy of intercultural approaches in a Japanesecontext and Todd Borlik intriguingly addresses these notions by examining theShakespeare criticism of the esteemed novelist of Meiji Japan, Natsume Soseki. Throughan entertaining analysis of Soseki’s less than satisfying experience as a tutorial pupil ofW.J. Craig (“an authority figure against whom Soseki would wage an intellectualrebellion”) and a depiction of Soseki’s antipathy towards the hagiography of hisimmediate predecessor as Professor of English Literature at the Tokyo ImperialUniversity, Lafcadio Hearn, Borlik explains how Soseki – most unusually, given theMeiji Restoration’s sycophantic adoration of Western literature and mores – refreshinglyrefutes the notion that “Shakespeare’s greatness is an index of the greatness of theEnglish race”.

Hearn was strongly influenced by A.C. Bradley’s notion that Shakespeare’simagination was too wide and pervasive to be adequately contained on the stage of atheatre and Soseki’s decisive rejection of this – in 1904 – reminded me of the excitingintellectual challenges posed to my own Western-centric views of the reception ofShakespeare by the Cultural Materialists in the 1980s. Borlik rightly celebrates Soseki’sexciting proposition “that a Japanese person’s evaluation of an English poet may be justas valid as that of a native English speaker”, highlights his belief in the theatricalinadequacy of Tsubouchi’s scholarly translations and ends by positing the notion that“Soseki’s criticism of Shakespeare finds its most eloquent expression … in the acclaimedfilms of Kurosawa Akira”.

Mark Thornton Burnett’s “Re-reading Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, aJapanese Adaptation ofHamlet: Content, Genre and Context” cogently illustrates the beliefof Soseki that a literal transposition of Shakespeare to a Japanese setting is likely to be lessartistically rewarding than one which exploits the mutability (as opposed to “universality”)of the playwright. This is something that Kurosawa has demonstrated on several occasionsand the article focuses on “a richly multivalent film whose rewriting of Hamlet provides ablueprint for a subsequent generation of filmmakers”. Thornton Burnett argues that theerroneously undervalued film, which is a searing expose of corporate and politicalcorruption, derives its force from a series of inter-textual connections with Hamlet (forexample, a triad of “intersecting personalities”, Furuya, Nishi and Yoshiko parallel OldHamlet, Hamlet and Ophelia) that allow the didactic criticism of the deeply dislikedcontemporaneous Japanese Prime Minister, Kishi, to appear less literal and more effective.This richly complicating intermediality, which is deepened through visual allusions toOlivier’s film adaptation of the play, creates a work that demonstrates a healthy willingnessto draw on Shakespearean impulses without feeling a slavish obligation towards the

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literalness that many of the first Japanese admirers of Shakespeare felt was so necessary toobserve.

The potential for reinterpretations of Shakespearean dramaturgy in a Japanese contextto stimulate and challenge is also a theme of Reiko Oya’s investigation of the Englishmodernist theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig’s influence on the work of thefounder of the Little Theatre (Tsukiji Shogekijo, 1924–29), Kaoru Osanai. The LittleTheatre has been called Japan’s first “director’s theatre”, but Oya offers an intriguingexample of an interpretation that directly goes against a director’s wishes, when the actorKoreya Senda stunned the first night audience for The Merchant of Venice in 1928 by“acting Antonio as he originally conceived: a grotesque male spinster chasing after hisyoung Adonis, Bassanio”. While the spectators recoiled from this disruption of anexpected festive production, one critic, Tsunehiko Tsuji, celebrated the disruptivepotential that this acting “out of harmony” created, pointing out that, in an era ofcensorship, “such ‘distortion’ could help theatre to address controversial contemporaryissues”. It is intriguing to learn how the subversive potential of theatre – so foregroundedin the British industry’s battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the 1950s and 1960s – wasbeing recognised in Japan in the 1920s through the form of a playwright considered(misleadingly) by many as the epitome of English class values.

The question of translation is a crucial one to consider when examining the receptionof Shakespeare in Japan and Daniel Gallimore points to the country’s reputation as a“translation culture” to explain why Tsubouchi – whose translations remained pre-eminent until the 1960s – revised his great work considerably towards the end of hiscareer. The crux of Gallimore’s fascinating article, however, links the fact that the “sea isa rich source of Shakespearean imagery and knowledge” with Japan’s emergence as asignificant Naval Power at a time when Tsubouchi was beginning his great project in1907. The opening up of Japan in 1868, with the removal of the fierce prohibition againstsailing beyond Japanese waters, coupled with Tsubouchi’s own personal empathy withthe sea, is seen to have a profound influence on the type of translation that is created,given that Tsubouchi’s belief of Shakespeare “is quite clearly that of a powerful andultimately unknowable force that cannot be tamed, and which therefore contains thepotential for subversion”. This article, therefore, intriguingly posits the notion that whilst“Tsubouchi’s strategy for translating Shakespeare was simply to translate the plays as heheard them” he does so “not necessarily as a rejection of Shakespeare’s contemporaryrelevance … but as a response to the force of Shakespeare’s rhetoric”.

The final two articles of this issue remind us that Shakespeare’s works were written tobe performed and the richness that can ensue from intercultural theatre. Ken Takiguchiobserves that “When Shakespeare is adapted into Asian traditional performance styles,the canonicity of the English text confronts the authenticity of the canonical performancesin Asia”. By utilizing the excellent resource of the Shakespeare and Asian ShakespeareIntercultural Archive (A∣S∣I∣A), he explains the process of “translation in Asia” – whereShakespeare’s English becomes an Asian performance language – and then the intriguing“reverse” translation of Asian languages into English, “translation of Asia”. By analysingboth Kurita Yoshihiro’s King Lear: His Shadows and Miyagi Satoshi’s Othello in NohStyle, Takiguchi demonstrates that while the two productions were “similar in aesthetics,as Shakespearean adaptations to Mugen Noh”, their approaches “differed greatly andwere almost opposite in terms of the canons they most respect”, i.e. the former paidobeisance to the canonicity of Shakespeare, whereas the latter was more eager to respect

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the traditions of Noh. This interweaving of traditions is seen as less of a clash than ahealthy and enriching symbiosis.

Tetsuhito Motoyama and Kaoru Edo posit a similarly vibrant thesis in theirexamination of the Tokyo Shakespeare Company’s production of The Three Daughtersof Lear, which boldly adapts the ur-text to highlight contemporary social concerns andconsiders events after the plot of the original play has been concluded. They alsopowerfully urge a consideration of Shakespeare productions in Japan less through theprism of the “foreign” than through the “indigenous”, resist the authority that translationsappear to exert on performance and demand a recognition of the sheer multiplicity ofproductions, which demonstrate the popularity of community, university and fringeShakespeare. The indignant energy of the writing is as much a challenge as a rebuke andserves as a useful reminder of not just the quality but of the heterogeneity of the articlesincluded in this issue.

The final contribution to this issue comprises a report of the conference “Shakespearein Japan”, which took place at De Montfort University in February 2013, a year after theoriginal visit to Tokyo with the First Folio. Barclay Rafferty, a PhD student at DMU,helpfully describes a stimulating day, from which several of the papers in this issueoriginated.

As we move forward towards 2016, when the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’sdeath will doubtlessly be marked in many countries, these articles all raise significantquestions about the reception of Shakespeare worldwide, the “ownership” of his impactand, implicitly, the value or otherwise of British-led celebrations of culture and creativity,such as the Great! initiative. The British Library and DMU Theatre Archive Project(TAP) has spent the last 10 years recording oral testimony from practitioners andaudiences alike that about the evolution of British theatre between 1945 and 1968. That itis now extending its scope to focus on the reception of Shakespeare and interculturalproductions bears testimony to the importance of the issues raised in this issue.

Notes1. I am indebted, for some of the information on pre-Meiji and Meiji era Shakespearean translation

and references in this essay, to David Cairns, “Translation and Adaptation of Shakespeare inJapan”, an unpublished dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Oriental Studies, OxfordUniversity, 1992.

2. “King Edward of the White Roses” becomes the head of a prestigious flower-arranging school(Iemoto Ikenobo-the-Sick): Suzuki Masae, “Noda Hideki’s Sandaime Richâdo” (Ryuta, Carruthersand Gillies 137): see also the interview with Noda Hideki cited above in the same volume.

3. See Ninagawa’s more detailed account of how this production was conceived in his interviewwith Matsuoka Kauko and others (Ryuta, Carruthers and Gillies 213–14).

4. More details of the work and careers of Fukuda, Anzai and Odajima are given in Peter Milward,“Three Great Japanese Translators of Shakespeare.”

ReferencesCairns, David. “Translation and Adaptation of Shakespeare in Japan.” Unpublished dissertationsubmitted to the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University, 1992. Print.

Kazuko, Matsuoka. “Interview with Hideki Noda.” Performing Shakespeare in Japan. Ed. MinamiRyuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 220–29. Print.

Kennedy, Dennis. “Shakespeare Worldwide”. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Ed.Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 251–64. Print.

Milward, Peter. “Shakespeare in Japanese translation.” Studies in Japanese Culture. Ed. JosephRoggendorf. Tokyo: Sophia UP, 1965. 187–207. Print.

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Milward, Peter. “Three Great Japanese Translators of Shakespeare.” Britain and Japan: Biograph-ical Portraits, Volume V. Ed. Hugh Cortazzi. Global Oriental, 2004. 376–82. Print.

Powell, Brian. “Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935): Sherborne and Japan –An Episode in Cross-CulturalRelations.” Britain and Japan 1859–1991: Themes and Personalities. Ed. Hugh Cortazzi andGordon Daniels. London: Routledge, 1991. 223–34. Print.

Ryuta, Minami. “Shakespeare Reinvented on the contemporary Japanese stage.” PerformingShakespeare in Japan. Ed. Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies. Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 2001. 146–58. Print.

Ryuta, Minami, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (Eds). Performing Shakespeare in Japan.Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

Tetsuo, Anzai. “What do we mean by Japanese Shakespeare?” Performing Shakespeare in Japan.Ed. Minami Ryuta, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 17–20.Print.

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