Kabuki theater and sumo wrestling

Our biggest cultural event in Tokyo was our foray into kabuki theater.  We saw an early evening show, but it was a 3.5 hour affair.  Apparently when the Japanese do theater, they do theater. We heard about the performance from another random traveler in our ryokan and got a foreigner's discount on tickets.  It was probably the highlight of my trip, and not just because we got to sit still for a long time in a controlled climate after walking almost constantly for two and a half days.

Shimbashi Enbujo Theatre

The matinee was completely different than the evening show, so the troupe performed four plays that day!  Each event was a double feature; individual plays were about an hour and a half apiece with a 30-40 minute intermission. This poster provides an image from all four performances.

The seats really filled up before the show, but we snapped these shots early.  In the first picture, you can see a long wooden walkway that is part of the stage and is used for entrances and exits throughout the performances.  We rented earphone receivers, so before the show and during intermission we got to hear about the history and art of kabuki.  During the plays the commentary described what was going on in the plot, what the characters had said, or gave the historical background for the story itself.

The demographic of theater-goers seemed to be middle-aged to elderly women, some of whom dressed up in traditional kimonos.  We may have been some of the youngest people in the building, and the female to male ratio was likely 10:1.  This is really strange to me since kabuki has for centuries (since the 1630s) been performed by all-male troupes.  However, it started out as an all-women's performance before some Japanese head honcho thought that women should be neither seen nor heard.  The most renowned kabuki actors are those who have refined their art of playing a wide range of female characters. 

Kabuki is all about the actors, not the plot, so the pace is really slow.  Once I got over that, I really enjoyed myself and the over-the-top histrionics.  Apparently most plays are legends or historical accounts and are well-known by the audience, so there's not usually an issue of not knowing what's going to happen.  Kabuki also doesn't care about reproducing or representing reality on stage, so the costumes and the feats performed are unbelievable.  There were some great musical and drumming segments as well, and the musicians are a part of the staged performance, not hidden away in a pit as in Western-style musical theater. 

Kabuki is also a career you are born into, so if your father was an actor, you get to be one too.  The highest praise for an actor is to yell out his name, or even better, his father's name during a particularly impressive moment of his performance.  These posters are of the lead actors from our two performances, and both were amazing.

On the left is a picture of Mitsuhide, a soldier (true story) who was beaten and humiliated by his lord for very little reason (at least from a present day perspective), and who spends almost the entire play being loyal, grinning and bearing it.  After the jerko lord Harunaga pushes things just a bit too far, Mitsuhide decides to overthrow him and start a rebellion.  The moment when you know he's been pushed past his breaking point was amazing.  None of the battle is actually staged, however.  Remember, not about plot, just about giving the actor a chance to emote. 

On the right is the main female character from the second play, which specifically highlighted this actor's dancing abilities.  There were several amazing costume changes as the woman performed for the dedication of a new temple bell, dancing the many aspects of a woman in love.  She was, unbeknownst to the monks, the spirit of the woman who had caused the old bell to fall because she was separated from her lover, and she eventually turned into a serpent-like demon before being felled by the hero. The program claimed that this was the most famous of all kabuki dances and was considered to be the pinnacle of the art of the female role specialist actor. 

The sumo wrestling museum was next door to the very impressive Edo-Tokyo Museum.  Though we ventured to that part of the city for the one-room sumo museum, we did the whole place in about 20 minutes after spending several hours in the Edo.  Unfortunately, we just missed the yearly sumo tournament by one weekend.  The schedules for bouts (matches?) were up at the arena and there were ads all over the place.

The mural was outside the museum/arena, but the excellent cutout, starring an angry K, was outside a nearby restaurant that we initially thought might be the museum.  Maybe the guy holding the fish should have given it away.