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The sōshi shibai (radical youth theater) of 1870s and 80s Japan performed political ideals of liberty and revolution on the streets and in informal yose (local entertainment halls). The sōshi's dramas and songs threw off the bonds of the past and embodied the new nation’s enlightened and political present. Though their scripts disappeared from the stage and popular memory over the subsequent two or three generations, and have been re-forgotten in the years since, their political potential briefly re-emerged in the wake of 1945 as a way to think through the possibilities of theater to help imagine a new political future.
This paper looks to three postwar narratives of sōshi shibai that foreground the physical space of the performances in ways that bring the past into the present political moment. Inagaki Hiroshi’s 1947 film Sōshi gekijō, Mishō Kingo’s Oppekepe: Sōshi yakusha Kawakami Otojirō (1957), and Fukuda Yoshiyuki’s Oppekepe (1963) make use of sōshi shibai’s resistant and combative dramaturgy to model performance of public engagement and to conjure an alternative historical trajectory.Yet this act of remembering, through reading the post-Restoration context into the postwar moment, is also an act of collective forgetting. Specifically, it elides the events that represent the failure of the promise of the Meiji Restoration—failure which fell to its nadir in 1945. Probing examples of this repurposing of sōshi shibai, this paper argues that these performances work simultaneously as collective embodied memory and collective amnesia.
Aragorn Quinn
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee