[In the following essay, Takahashi provides a survey of Japanese theater from the 1960s to the late 1980s.]

Statistically, there is little doubt that Tokyo is the world's largest theatre town, even surpassing New York. Probably there are many Japanese, especially outside Tokyo, who would be surprised to know that there are in their megalo-capital about 250 theatre companies, about 120 plays put on every month, and about 60 acting spaces. This includes large companies which produce a play per month, and tiny ones which may disappear after a single show; productions ranging from new plays to Noh, Kabuki, Bunraku, and foreign plays in translation; and small studios or other spaces turned into ad hoc theatres as well as regular playhouses.

Statistics, however, is a dreary and deceptive business—revealing more about economics than about culture. One can go for that sort of information to the Japan Foundation or the Japanese Embassy. What matters is the significance of theatre in the context of contemporary Japanese culture, and here quantity must give way to quality, for only the best in quality, though few and small in scale, would offer an insight into the problem. And since, in my view, much of the best in the Japanese theatre in the late 1980s derives from the "revolution of the theatre" which took place twenty years ago, any serious attempt to understand the issue cannot but begin there.

There are a number of scenes, if I may start on a personal note, which spring up to my memory as I cast my mind back to the late 1960s. A couple still retain special vividness: one is centred on the figure of Yukio Mishima, the other on that of Arnold Wesker.

In May 1969, a year before his all-too-famous suicide, Mishima accepted a challenge by a group of radical students of Tokyo University (where I happened to be a young assistant professor) to hold an open debate with them on their campus. I managed to sneak into the packed auditorium and, in a tense yet strangely exhilarating atmosphere, watched and listened to the fascinating harangue in which the "ultra-nationalist" novelist manifested his sympathies with and differences from the radically Leftist students. The students had, earlier in the year, achieved a spectacular succes de scandale in their rebellion when they were expelled by the police force from the clock tower—the symbol of the University and of intellectual authoritarianism—which they had been occupying for some weeks. (It was a really "spectacular" event, watched avidly nation-wide on the TV screen.)

Mishima told the students that he was all for their attacks on the system of modern values authorised by universities and characterised by the false "affluence" of contemporary Japan; he would, he said, gladly have joined them in their occupied "citadel" if only they had cried "Viva Emperor!"—which got a great laugh.

A few months prior to the fall of the "citadel", in September 1968, the project called "Wesker '68" had invited the British playwright to Tokyo to discuss, in a symposium involving half-a-dozen theatre directors and critics of Japan, the situation of theatre in contemporary society and what could be done to change it. I was on the platform, sitting beside Wesker, whispering into his ear as simultaneous interpreter, and interpreting him aloud to the other panelists and the audience. There were misunderstandings on the part of the Japanese about British political and theatrical conditions, and vice versa—which entailed some futile though vehement exchanges of attacks on each other; but there were moments when the sheer force of the critique of the status quo, if not an outline of the possible strategies for "revolution", was movingly communicated. (Quite a few faces on the floor on this occasion could be recognised among the audience at the encounter with Mishima).

These episodes go some way, I believe, towards evoking the kind of milieu in which a new theatre movement was getting into full swing. In a sense, it was part of the global phenomenon of the revolt of the youth in the 1960s. The students' strike in 1968 at the Medical Department of Tokyo University preceded the "May Revolution" in Paris by four months, although without, in all probability, any consciousness of prophecy or synchronicity. By the end of the year, however, no less than 116 universities and colleges in Japan were undergoing "campus turmoils", and the students were fully aware of global solidarity in their revolt against academic authority as well as in their denunciation of the Viet Nam War and their admiration for the Beatles.

At the back of it all lay a profound disagreement with the system of modern Western or Westernised values. In theatre, the younger generation in Japan were reacting no less keenly than their Western counterparts to the contestations of modern realism by Artaud, Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Arrabal, Grotowski and Julian Beck, as well as Wesker.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to ignore those factors which were specifically Japanese. For instance, no account of the new movement in Japanese theatre in the 1960s would be complete without stressing the importance of one political event: the parliamentary ratification of renewal of the Japan-United States Mutual Security Treaty (ANPO) in 1960. The failure to prevent renewal meant not only a debacle for the whole of socialist power in the political scene; it also compelled intellectuals to rethink their political standpoint. On those young people in the theatre, barely twenty years of age, who had been actively committed to the anti-ANPO campaign, the effect was double: the traumatic experience irrevocably cured them of the Old Left dream and, by the same token, brought them into a violent clash with the orthodoxy in modern Japanese theatre. The orthodox modern Japanese theatre known as Shin-geki (literally, "new theatre") had allied itself politically with socialism since pre-War days, and had adopted socialist realism for its artistic method, though another stream alongside it held a less political and more Chekhovian stance of psychological realism. The defeat suffered in 1960 determined the young people's search during the following decade for an alternative theatre with a radically different ideology and methods.

It was in the 1960s that the so-called "High Growth Period" started. A comparatively higher standard of living had considerably dampened the ideal of "post-War democracy", to the chagrin of the Socialists and Communists, and had consolidated the political supremacy of the Liberal Democratic Party. On the other hand, it did not strengthen the sense of national identity. People just seemed to have started drifting, borne along by a new dream of affluence, but at bottom uneasy and uncertain in the aftermath of the disillusionment of 1960.

This is what lay behind Mishima's apparently only half-serious, but deeply-felt, appeal to the students. But the sociological fact had an ironically rich significance for the emerging new theatre. Japan in the 1960s was on the one hand becoming affluent enough—or just about—to allow the aspiring youth to indulge in their own small-scale theatre activities. At the same time, what would now be called "the postmodern era of playfulness' had not yet set in. The moral and intellectual atmosphere, combined with psychological uncertainty, was earnest enough to encourage questionings of everyday reality and deep probings into Japan's cultural identity; there was an urge to talk of eschatology and utopia (Wesker's title, Their Very Own and Golden City, had a special ring to it); of Beckettian futility and yet of a need for transcendence; of madness and carnival. Nowhere did all this bear more stimulating and substantial fruits than in the new theatrical movement of the young.

A cursory look over a chronological table of the late 1960s makes one realise the phenomenal importance of the period. One encounters there all the charismatic names that were to revolutionise the theatre scene in the succeeding decades.

In 1966 Tadashi Suzuki, leader of Waseda Sho-gekijo (Waseda Little Theatre, later re-named SCOT), makes his directorial debut with a play by his friend Minoru Betsuyaku.

In 1966 Juro Kara, leading Jokyo Gekijo (Situation Theatre), directs his own play, achieving the first in a long series of semi-outdoor productions in a famous "red tent theatre".

In 1966 Makoto Satoh declares the foundation of Jiyu Gekijo (Free Theatre) with the production of his own play. The company, later renamed Theatre Centre 68/71, is commonly known as "Black Tent".

In 1967 Shuji Terayama, founder of Tenjo Sajiki, directs his own play.

In 1969 Yukio Ninagawa, founding Gendaijin Gekijo (Modern Man's Theatre), produces a play by his friend Kunio Shimizu.

In 1970 Shogo Ohta, leader of Tenkei Gekijo (Transformation Theatre), directs his own plays for the first time.

These young leaders did not rally round common political slogans, whose lies they had come to know only too well. The most explicit in political awareness was Makoto Satoh, whose plays—such as My Beatles (1966) and Cinema and Phantom (1976)—are probably the best embodiment in Japan of the ideas of the New Left, in a brilliantly Brechtian style. His most recent directorial work (1988) was Brecht's Threepenny Opera, which he completely transformed into a story about Japan at the time of the Meiji Revolution; the great success of the production confirmed that he was still a most devoted Brechtian in spirit and style. What marks the passage of time is the fact that, besides remaining the energetic leader of the "Black Tent Theatre", he is now also among the most sought-after directors of Western opera (most recently Berg's Lulu) in the large commercial theatres of Tokyo.

Though far from being unanimous in espousing "the theatre of revolution", the young theatrical avant-gardists shared a passionate belief in a "revolution of theatre", a revolution which should be total and far-reaching, aiming at no less than a transformation of the consciousness of the audience. No one was more tirelessly experimental than Terayama in challenging the accepted relationship between performance and audience. His transgression was so bold—e.g. Blindman's Letter (1973), performed in total darkness; or Knock (1975), which literally took the streets for an indeterminate stage where actors roamed about according to a rough "time-schedule"—as to cause scandalised citizens to sue him. But it would be wrong to see only a theatrical enfant terrible and scandalmonger in an artist who was a true avant-gardist if ever there was one, and a fascinating "hunter of theatrical images" (in the phrase of the reviewer in The Times of the performance of his Directions to Servants at the Riverside Studios in 1978). Teryama's death in 1983 might be interpreted as symbolic, in that he was the only one among the young visionaries of the 1960s who refused until the last to acclimatise to the all-powerful commercial milieu of the 1980s.

Perhaps it was Tadashi Suzuki who did more than any other to bring about a radical re-examination of concepts involving acting and text, actor's body and mind, theatre and culture. And he did this not by critical theorising alone but also, and more powerfully, by directing. The work which established his reputation in the "little theatre movement" was On Dramatic Passions, Part 2 (1970), a collage of scenes from Kabuki and other Japanese drama as performed by a Japanese variant of "mad woman in the attic".

Suzuki won a wider recognition with The Trojan Women (1974), in which he used for the main roles a Noh actor, an actress trained in the tradition of Shin-geki, and a leading actress of his own company—thus creating a clash of acting styles which forced as it were deconstructive rethinking upon both actors and audience. The work also successfully employed a "framing" device whereby the Euripidean play was performed as a fantasised vision of an old Japanese beggar, a woman loitering in the streets of burnt-down Tokyo immediately after World War II. After Terayama's ultra-avant-garde plays, this was the first contemporary Japanese production to tour Europe (including performances at the Riverside Studios in 1985) and America, to great critical acclaim. Suzuki leads the increasingly "internationalising" trend in Japanese theatre today, with his activities such as founding the annual Toga Festival (which has so far invited Robert Wilson, Tadeus Kantor, Lee Breuer, Welfare State International, etc.), lecturing at Juilliard in New York, and producing his boldly reduced all-male version of King Lear with a mixed international cast.

Another influential director is Yukio Ninagawa, a name quite familiar by now to British theatre-goers. His fame in Japan has long been associated with the playwright Kunio Shimizu—their early collaboration in productions like Such a Serious Frivolity (1969) has now become legend as a most moving portrayal of the revolutionary generation. After a period of separation, they again started working together, and Tango, at the End of Winter (1984), for instance, bore eloquent witness to Shimizu's unfailing dramaturgical skill in mixing memory and reality, yearning and despair, as well as to Ninagawa's staggering manipulation of the dynamics of the stage.

Ninagawa is also a witness to the devouring power of time in the sense that, alone among his rebellious colleagues, he has proved himself capable of success in big commercial theatres—something totally unthinkable before his advent. His first venture in this new direction was Romeo and Juliet (1974), followed by King Lear (1975), Oedipus Rex (1976), a new version of Chikamatsu's Kabuki plays (1979), the famous Macbeth (1980), Medea (1985), and The Tempest (1987).

The only other name in Japanese theatre today that can claim international recognition is that of Shogo Ohta, whose completely silent piece, Water Station (1981), has more than once toured Europe and America. Another major work, Komachi Fuden (1979), which is intended for performance on the Noh stage, consists mainly of an old woman's silent reenactment of her memories. These apparent tours-de-force make a significant contribution to theatre in general because of the amount of participation which has to be extracted from the audience in order to make it possible for the theatrical experience to exist at all. But they are of particular interest to the Japanese because they seem to tap the deep root of the nation's aesthetic sensibility: the aesthetics of silence and void, the refusal to articulate, or the body's resistance to logos.

Ohta may resemble in this those Butoh dancers whose grand master, Tatsumi Hijikta, seeking the basis of his art in the decrepit body discarded by the mind in the process of modern civilisation, learnt a great deal from the primitive forms of Noh and Kabuki. It should be stressed here that Japanese theatrical modernisation started in the Meiji era with a conscious denial of the indigenous tradition of performance. Be that as it may, it is a sad pointer to the state of culture that Ohta, unable to maintain his ascetic activity any longer, was last year forced to disband his troupe.

Juro Kara's revolt against modern intellectualism was arguably fiercer than that of any other Japanese playwright. Though European surrealism was one of the great influences on him, his instinctive sympathies were blatantly committed to the eroticism, freedom, and yearning of popular imagination. His dramatic text, incredibly sophisticated and breathtakingly spontaneous, matched well with the magical power of his actors' "privileged body", which he famously eulogised. His works, ranging from the series of "John Silver" plays (1965-68), The Mask of the Maiden (1969), to The Black Tulip (1983) and so on, continue to be a stubborn thorn in the affluent theatrical flesh of contemporary Japan.

Last but not least, Minoru Betsuyaku is exceptional in the list of experimenters of the late 1960s in that he alone was and remains a pure playwright, an ascetic in his own right, never involved in any kind of "movement". He started his dramatic career under the decisive shadow of the absurdist theatre, especially Beckett. But he was quick to realise the dangers of the cul-de-sac that it might lead him into, and has developed a unique style of his own whereby he can treat serious subjects such as the sufferings of Hiroshima (The Elephant, 1962) or a family crisis involving the killing of an old woman by her grandson (The Cherry in Bloom, 1980) with the same perfect expertise that he shows in dealing with abstract problematics such as the nature of social institutions (Conference, 1982). What this style might possibly remind one of would be, if anything, that of Pinter. Betsuyaku's quietly methodical mind seems to set his work apart from the vociferous and often amateurish stagecraft of the younger generation.

So those are the "big names", or the so-called "first generation of the little theatre movement", all of them born between 1935 and 1943. They are the ones who, having brought about the "golden age" of experimental theatre twenty years ago, now constitute the solid core of theatrical creativity.

A few words about a solitary figure from the same generation: Hisashi Inoue. He did not belong to any of the "radical" groups, nor did he come from the modern Westernised Shingeki tradition. His roots were in popular vaudeville entertainment, which he refined with something of a Brechtian verve. But it would certainly be quite unfair to disregard the sheer joy he has given to theatre-goers in the past two decades, with his fantastically complex chinese-box dramaturgy (The Navel of the Japanese, 1969) or his savagely entertaining portrayal of evil (Yabuhara the Priest, 1973). And he is still prolific.

Another playwright who resists classification is Rio Kishida. Having long worked for Terayama in many of his important productions, she triumphantly established her own fame with the performance of her play Itojigoku (The Hell of Threads) in 1984—a hauntingly realised story of Japanese women working in a weaving factory, and one which only the female imagination could have produced. Other female playwright-directors to be mentioned, even though in passing, are Koharu Kisaragi (Doll, 1983) and Eriko Watanabe (Ge-ge-ge-no-ge, 1982), though they are to be grouped with the "third generation".

The "second generation", comprising playwright-directors now in their early forties, tried to establish their difference by shedding the tragic gestures and revolutionary visions of their immediate predecessors and concentrating on the scaled-down ordinary realities of life.

The most prominently talented among them was Kohei Tsuka, whose special importance, however, lies in the fact that he was at the same time responsible for tipping the balance in favour of the following generations. It was his play The Atami Murder Case (1973) which turned the tide by pushing the interchangeability of fiction and reality on the stage to the furthest extreme. His characters were intent on playing roles with a dizzying and desperate devotion which somehow both madly intoxicated the audience and left them excruciatingly blase. That was his way of provoking what he considered to be the growing complacency of Japanese society; and when he thought his "malice" no longer worked, he left the theatre to become a novelist and work in films. Last March, after seven years' absence, he came back to the theatre, with a new play about a film actress. It remains to be seen whether he has found the times sufficiently changed to stimulate him into continued exercise of theatrical "malice".

It would be too scholastic to dwell on the distinction between the "third" generation and the "fourth". Suffice it to say that, despite the differences in individual talents, they do share certain characteristics: a lack of serious concern with social reality, or rather a precocious awareness in advance of the futility of all efforts; an abundant energy of playfulness which might be labelled "post-modern" in contradistinction to the "anti-modern" or "pre-modern" concerns of the "first generation"; a science-fiction-oriented fascination with eschatology or imagery of androids, and so on. The forerunner among them is Hideki Noda, whose company, Yumeno-yuminsha (Idle Dreamers), performed his play Descent of the Beast in Edinburgh in 1987. Following him closely in both vitality and popularity are Shoshi Kokami's troupe, Daisan Butai (Third Stage), and Takeshi Kawamura's troupe, Daisan Erotica (Third Erotica).

The present prosperity of theatre in Tokyo, unprecedented in Japanese history and probably unrivalled in the world, owes much to these young playwright-directors. One would, however, be rash to state categorically how much of their work is ephemeral, and how much of enduring substance.