Theater and the Pursuit of a Sustainable Society
SDGs Japan Portal interviews playwright Oriza Hirata
SDGs Japan Portal’s Director Akira Aoyama spoke to multi-award-winning playwright and director, Professor Oriza Hirata, arguably one of preeminent figures in Japanese theater of this past century. Since establishing his Seinendan theater troupe to further explore his pioneering “contemporary colloquial” genre of naturalistic performance in the early 80s, Hirata’s work has been premiered around the world to rousing acclaim. He has been invited on numerous occasions to collaborate not just with leading performing arts houses overseas but also on interdisciplinary projects including a hybrid human and robot comedy piece with the assistance of leading robotics researcher Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro.
Needless to say, creative expression through the performing arts is fundamental to our culture and enriches people’s lives, and Hirata has long been an advocate for performing arts education which he feels has been lacking in Japan.
Kabuki theater was once like a rite of passage for children growing up in rural Japan, but unfortunately, the development of traditional theater and performing arts was interrupted during the period of intense modernization the country underwent…
What gets you excited about theater?
The theatrical styles you see today originated in ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, but actually theater started even earlier. There is evidence of festivals having taken place from very early archaeological remains dating to the Jomon Period (starting the year 14,000 BC). So you could say that for as long as homo sapiens has been around, so has theater.
My theory, in short, is that the origin of theatrical and artistic expression coincided with that of communication. And the need for storytelling probably derived from the way that humans were both part of a family unit and a wider society, and as such had different perspectives on events, whereas other primates like gorillas and chimpanzees belonged to a single community that experienced events in exactly the same way. So you became skilled at using different means to convey to your family just how big that mammoth you saw today was: through physical gestures, through drawing and through words. Then this story would be told again by somebody else. And, because humans always have the urge to convey something in a better or more interesting way, that is where creativity springs from. In that sense theater is one of the most primitive tools that we have.
Secondly, I mentioned that Greek theater emerged at around the same time as democracy. This meant that the decisions previously made by kings and aristocrats were left to the people. Yet, since everyone thinks differently, you had disagreement, and those with more powerful voices would win such debates.
The Greeks did a great service to humanity by leaving us with the tools of philosophy and dialectics in discourse. But theater is inextricable from these things. If philosophy is the way to reconcile different concepts, theater is a means by which that is achieved. At least, that is how I was trained.
In Europe theater thrives and plays a major role as a function of civil society, and for its sustainability. You could say there’s a “system,” rather like going to church, in that people make a habit of going to the theater once a week or once a month, to watch plays, listen to music and so on. Kabuki theater, for example, was once like a rite of passage for children growing up in rural Japan, but unfortunately, the development of traditional theater and performing arts was interrupted during the period of intense modernization the country underwent during the Meiji Period (1868–1912). In that sense, theater requires you to be “literate” and make a conscious effort, because you have so little exposure to it growing up.
I think you would agree that the impact of theater comes from the experience of simply being there, to feel the presence of others. It’s fun to be a spectator.
I don’t know why but sharing a space seems fundamental to us as humans. It’s the same kind of satisfaction that comes when gathering with others around a table to share a meal, compared to simply eating on one’s own.
When internet livestreaming began, there was a misconception that demand for theater tickets would drop. The Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, has very popular livestreamed events, but these have served to increase demand for their sit-down shows. 90% of livestream spectators who responded to their survey say that they wanted to see the real thing. Even though CD sales in Japan have dropped dramatically in the last 20 years, for example, live entertainment has gone from being a ¥250 billion to a ¥1 trillion industry over that period. And now with the pandemic having stopped these events going ahead, I can only imagine the value attached to live, in-person performances will increase and we can expect ticket prices to go up. And so how to democratize this, and ensure access for all, is another issue.
Theater is also part of child’s play, at home and among friends, yet this is disappearing rapidly.
Of course there are many other things that children can occupy themselves with now. But it was a hot topic in early childhood education at one time, how role playing or “playing house” became impossible with the nuclear family, declining birth rate, the collapse of local community and modern working culture. My experience in theater education is that children love it; they love playing other people. But educators today aren’t trained in theater education. Whereas in Europe, kids are exposed to puppet shows, masked theater…It’s about being able hide oneself and pretend to be someone else. A kind of lie, and a fun one. Again, I think this is a primordial human desire. But there is no doubt that this culture is disappearing.
Society is the birthplace of culture, but what do we call that society in the first place? You have land, nature, and local communities. Perhaps it is most pertinent to talk about society’s connection to land. Incidentally, where were you born, Hirata-sensei?
I was born in Komaba, right by the University of Tokyo. It’s an uptown area, but it’s still Tokyo, and I grew up in the middle of this shopping street. It was the 50s and 60s, a time when it was normal to leave your children alone at home, which was also the case for me. The kindergarten that I went to was a lively place, where events and plays were frequent occurrences, and my father, a struggling writer, was also doing a little theatre, so I was constantly exposed to the world of movies and performing arts growing up.
It makes sense, that you were engaged with theatre from such a young age.
That’s right. My father raised me to be a writer, and I intended to pursue writing. But then I went to university, and that’s actually when I started acting.
You undertook a round-the-world cycling trip before university, at around the age of 16, didn’t you?
That was such a long time ago that I no longer remember why I did it. But going back to Komaba, it was a relaxed place on the one hand, but it is also the area immediately outside the University of Tokyo’s main entrance, the Faculty of Liberal Arts to be precise…the prevailing attitude among locals here is to ensure that children with good grades should be go to the University. And I think as a child — especially as it was an even more competitive society back then — this weighed heavily on your heart. So once in middle school I elected to attend a part-time high school, and after a year going there, saving money, I took two years off to cycle around the world.
Why a world trip?
Well, I think I probably wanted to go abroad. It wasn’t a time when high school students could travel freely as they do now, and in any case I simply wanted to go.
That must have been thrilling, and with so much going on…
It was.
These European acting methods were imported wholesale, right down to way the scripts were written and the choice of wording, and it is simply not how Japanese people speak.
After that, you went to the International Christian University, and you wanted to perform there, but was the role at ICU a significant one?
I think it was a big deal. The university has a very laissez-faire spirit and so I wrote a script myself, brought together a bunch of students who were bunking off class as well as those hanging around in the student lounge, and formed a troupe.
When it comes to theatre in Japan, it is Western culture; a foreign transplant, much like science and other modern developments that we imported, isn’t it? But you wanted to take an approach to theatre that was based upon the Japanese language, the Japanese way of life, Japanese thought. At what point did you resolve to do this?
Originally I began doing theatre because of my interest in language, but I studied abroad in Korea, with the rationale that it would be better to learn a language like Korean that has strong grammatical similarities to Japanese. In the process of learning it and seeing just how similar it was structurally, I was able to look at Japanese language more objectively, and I thought the reason why I had felt such a sense of discord when it came the language of theatre was because, in short, these European acting methods were imported wholesale, right down to way the scripts were written and the choice of wording, and it is simply not how Japanese people speak. After that I began to theorize about whether it a problem with word order, particles, auxiliary verbs and so on.
In that case, it was not just about Japanese language but the way Japanese think and the way of life as well?
Yes, of course there is that too. In the beginning I enjoyed Yasujiro Ozu’s films and wanted to transcribe that world into a play, and I was thinking about how to achieve that at the time, while in my twenties.
Recently I heard about a play called Tokyo Note performed in Toyooka that takes place in seven languages, but by contrast, it’s really about how important and interesting languages are.
That’s right. One of them — and this is the same with Ozu’s films as well — that out of something extremely Japanese, some kind of universal quality will emerge from it. That is perhaps because the acting is less imitation than a genuine pursuit of Japanese people’s peculiarities or uniqueness, but in that you can say culture is being transposed into the realm of art and when we enter the realm of art everything becomes universal and understandable by many different people at once.
So you formed a theater troupe and began performing in Komaba. What then happened?
Yes, it was that student theater company, and I was doing things here and there, but as I mentioned, what with my father being a writer and my having been acting since I was young, my dream was to turn my home into a theater. And that’s just what I did. When I was a college student, I borrowed the money in order to do everything that needed to be done.
You turned your home into a theater?
Yes, and I did it properly, so I took on a lot of debt, and my father wasn’t exactly a businessman, so I also didn’t have much in the way of management skills. When I graduated I became manager of this theater and in essence took over the house; it was now a family business. As a result, most of my twenties was spent being a theater manager and business director rather than a writer or playwright. I did also write plays, though.
That must have been tough!
The hardships I had at that time helped me later. I had a lot of debt that I needed to pay back and that meant I needed to fundraise. At that time, I knew banks don’t lend money to the poor, and so even though I was in dire straits, if I did put on the impression that I had money, I wouldn’t get any financing. This experience was helpful later when I was studying and talking about arts funding, how there should be subsidies for the arts.
I’m going off on a tangent here, but when it came to governmental arts and culture grants, artists and musicians would ask for support on account of their struggling financially, but they would never receive it. We’re bohemian types and we will continue doing what we do regardless, but that is beside the point. If Japan wants to take care of its artists, it will support them. We have to threaten to leave if we aren’t being paid. I am glad I learned this lesson in my twenties in my dealings with the bank.
That’s a good story. So as manager of the troupe, you paid salaries and everything else related to the everyday running of the theater?
Right.
And not only that, but also for the theater to develop into the future, presumably you would encourage the troupe members to pursue independence and other unique paths. How did you do that?
Well that came a long time later, but originally it was a rental theater model, so it is a bit like being a real estate agent. But as I mentioned in the beginning, this is what you call theater in Europe. It’s a place to produce and put on plays, discover and nurture people. It has a public role. My theater is the Agora, and another smaller one in Tokyo, that I rent out to young talented artists almost free of charge. That started in the 2000s, and since then I’ve been continually developing the kind of talent that would go on to represent the Japanese theater world.
Sounds very European indeed. What were the attitudes towards the theater at the time?
The theater is on an ordinary shopping street, the one where I was born and raised, so it’s very special. Everyone around there had known me since I was a kid, and that has been a strength.
Did your neighbors come to watch plays?
Occasionally. But I don’t actually think it’s necessary to go to the theater. I explain it often like this: there are many people who don’t like going to school or hospital, but no one would ever say we shouldn’t have a school or hospital here. The theater is that sort of place. It’s an indispensable part of a town, but you shouldn’t have to go as though it’s an obligation.
I’m grateful that the theater is rooted in the community. Embarrassing events such as the stockpiling of sandwiches and onigiri from convenience stores around Tokyo in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake don’t happen in neighborhoods like ours, for example. Only outsiders were coming to the shopping street to buy three, four loaves of bread. But the bakery owners, knowing there were lots of young people coming and going to and from Agora, they would say: Please let them know that we have plenty of wheat so if anyone wants bread, we will bake some.
So, as a theater, you were rooted in the area. I can imagine you were really empowered by this. It would have been very difficult to just go to the middle of nowhere with nothing but ideas and try to make it work. And so, from there you rapidly developed connections with theaters all over Japan and overseas — tell us about that.
Well, since I had this theater and rehearsal space, and talk was going around that you could stay here, so the connections with local theater troupes came first. Then regional troupes started coming in dribs and drabs. Because of the disorganized nature of their visits, we began to set fixed schedules. There weren’t many local theater companies coming to perform in Tokyo until then, so my role was as a kind of facilitator in that way. And our own company also traveled around the country giving performances in the 90s.
It seems as though it worked out really well.
That’s right. As I mentioned before, the theaters in Tokyo are for rent and it is usually a hobby for the owners. Because I had a lot of debt, I tried to offer a comprehensive service. So in addition to the usual light and sound equipment a theater would have, we also installed copiers and high-speed printers so that leaflets could be made on-site.
I started thinking about the function of theater as a place that produces plays after starting the theater in around the late 80s, and it really clicked in the early 2000s when I started working overseas, as I had only the knowledge of how theaters over there worked from books until that point. The theater as a place of creativity: That’s exactly what it is! And after that we began the training of young talent, and so on.
I see. I think youth-led theater companies and productions are growing. Are you aware of any that are taking a similar approach to you?
They are starting to appear, little by little. Of course the environment in Tokyo for such things is difficult, but it is happening and I think the process will accelerate after COVID.
