Takarazuka: Sexual Politics & Popular Culture in Modern Japan

by Jennifer E. Robertson

The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. But that is only a small part of its complicated and complicit performance history. In this sophisticated and historically grounded analysis, anthropologist Jennifer Robertson draws from over a decade of fieldwork and archival research to explore how the Revue illuminates discourses of sexual politics, nationalism, imperialism, and popular culture in twentieth-century Japan.

The Revue was founded in 1913 as a novel counterpart to the all-male Kabuki theater. Tracing the contradictory meanings of Takarazuka productions over time, with special attention to the World War II period, Robertson illuminates the intricate web of relationships among managers, directors, actors, fans, and social critics, whose clashes and compromises textured the theater and the wider society in colorful and complex ways.

Using Takarazuka as a key to understanding the "logic" of everyday life in Japan and placing the Revue squarely in its own social, historical, and cultural context, she challenges both the stereotypes of "the Japanese" and the Eurocentric notions of gender performance and sexuality.

Genres: Japan, Nonfiction, LGBT, History, Anthropology, Academic, Sociology

294 pages, Paperback

First published June 21, 1998

About the author

Jennifer Ellen Robertson is Professor of Anthropology and the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a former director and member of the Center for Japanese Studies, and an associate in the Science, Society and Technology Program and Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies.

Robertson is the originator and general editor of Colonialisms, a book series from the University of California Press that explores the historical realities, current significance, and future ramifications of imperialist practices with origins and boundaries outside of "the West." She is also a co-editor of Critical Asian Studies (http://criticalasianstudies.org/). Her six books and dozens of articles and chapters address a wide spectrum of subjects ranging from the 17th century to the present, including nativist and social rectification movements, agrarianism, sex and gender systems and ideologies, mass and popular culture, nostalgia and internationalization, urbanism, the place of Japan in American Anthropology, sexuality and suicide, theater and performance, votive and folk art, imperialism and colonialism, and eugenics and bioethics.

Reviews

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Academic monograph about the famous Japanese all-womens' theater troupe, the Takarazuka Revue. Starts with the group's origins, its performances during the war era, and a description of its fans. Also interesting to see the assignment and performance of gender roles - literally!

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I was in Osaka a friend of mine had an extra ticket to the Takarazuka Theater. Which by the way, is very hard to come by - due to the fact that it's fan base are all women - from early 20's to middle-aged. And they never ever give up a ticket for a performance with this performance group or school of theater.

Basically what the Takarazuka specializes in doing is sort of a low-rent style of bigger theater broadway pieces or classic narrations - such as 'Gone With The Wind.' The catch is all the roles are acted out by females, and the stories are highly romantic. Not erotic mind you, but uber-romantic. Kind of like sugar romantic. No basis for realism whatsoever.

Lesbian theater? No, I don't think so. It is just that males are so disappointing these days - none are the hero or shinning prince types. So obviously only females can play that role. So it's females in drag - but highly made up by make-up, etc.

There is very little information about the Takarazuka Theater in English, so one is grateful for this book. It's kind of dry, but nevertheless it's history is a fascinating look at 20th Century Japan.

The theater is run like a school. So there is a lot of cleaning the theater itself with toothbrushes, etc. by its students/actresses.

And what is even more fascinating is the obsessive all-female audience!

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book, and relied on it heavily for my thesis on Japanese rock music. I made comparisons between the all female theater and otokoyaku with the visual kei males who sometimes played female roles. I also referenced kabuki and onnagata, writing about how all these performers portray the opposite gender, and how the performers use it to cater to their audiences.

[MH · Rating 3 out of 5]

The hundred year-old Takarazuka Revue offers a lot of theoretical lenses for scholars - gender, queer theory, East Asian and post-colonialism, and performance and touristic theories all immediately suggest themselves when looking at this popular all-female Japanese theatre company. Robertson utilizes many of these theories to mixed results - there's an excellent chapter on how the Revue participated in Imperial Japan's colonizing project before and during WWII, some engaging first-person experiences with the Japanese drag scene and the Revue's highly defensive archivists, and some fine writing on the Revue's dedicated fan culture, but there are a lot of areas that don't work quite so well. The first two chapters' deep dives into gender theory, from both Western academia and their (wildly changing) Japanese equivalents, are terribly dense and all now seem a bit dated (the book was published in 1998 and she's using the usual suspects from the 70s and 80s - Butler, Rich - whose insistence on gender binaries doesn't often work so well in 2023); her work on performance theory and proper theatre history is really lacking - she writes that Stanislavski "used the theatre as a pulpit" (67) and that "the political dimensions of theatre in general have been neglected" by theatre scholars (90), ideas that are just amazingly wrong; and it feels that there are a bunch of missed opportunities - understandable when a theatre company has been around for a century, of course, but it's still frustrating that so much ink is finding translations, and negotiating the differences, of Japanese versions of heady 1980s gender theory, when there are so many other avenues that could have been fruitfully explored.

[tatterpunk · Rating 5 out of 5]

FIVE STARS: Can't imagine not keeping this one to re-read and re-analyze at will.

Expertly written, beautifully researched. Fascinating insights which do not pretend at cultural or academic authority but still manage to draws some interesting conclusions -- or, at least, raise very pertinent questions about the intersections of performance and identity, politics and theater, gender and rebellion. Despite being more than twenty years out of date, this approach manages to make it feel oddly timeless.

[Bianca · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book trying to talk about Takarazuka as best as it can but not quite getting there. While it gives an interesting history I wish that there was more discussion of how it functions in modern day and its cultural significance. I understand that it is a challenging subject to get any information about but I was hoping for a little more than I received.

[abby]

read for history of japanese popular culture and everyday life (shoutout to tumblr for introducing me to takarazuka in like 2016)

[olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

drag kings in Japan are superior to American ones on every level. America has much to learn

[yengyeng · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author definitely cares very much about the subject matter and took great pains to research it thoroughly. The only grouse I have is that the hyped-up expose of the tawdry, shady world of Takarazuka never happened in the book, Or did I miss it?

Takarazuka, from the performance I saw at the Takarazuka Theatre in Hyogo Prefecture a couple of years ago, is a well-oiled entertainment machine with a successful business model that is determined to thrive and profit. The stable of stars ensure the show is perfect and not a feather is out of place, and work hard to sell a 3-hour dream of glitz and glamour. Fans expect to have a good time and pay a lot of money for tickets and merchandise. It's no different from Disney or Hollywood. No one is being exploited, as far as I could see.

[CL Chu · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idol/theatre of takaratuska, like other shoujo culture developing in the 1920s and 1970s, offered much materials that the male-centered popular culture (i.e. otaku) later appropriated.

I'm not familiar with the scholarship of Japanese popular culture in the 1990s. With the explosion of the study of intersections between gender and fan culture (especially anime, manga, etc) in the past 20 years, the theoretical comments scattered around the book read somewhat defensive, risking to overshadow the excellent ethnographical and historical research Robertson has conducted. But I highly recommends Robertson's papers on eugenics and robots - which provides a useful lens to understand the technology of gender and empire discussed in the book.

[kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Meticulously researched, clearly written. The topic is utterly fascinating. Robertson, an anthropologist, writes about the all female Takarazuka review theater in Japan, outlining its history, unpacking the complex gender issues at play in the performances and the institution established, looking at its collusion with the age of Japanese imperialism, and finally a fascinating look at the fan clubs that have been established around it. Anyone interested in world theater, Japanese culture, or comparative gender studies would love this.

[Mely · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Takarazuka is an all-female theatrical revue famed for its splendor and its otakuyaku -- women playing male roles, offstage as well as on.

More theory than history. Focused on the immediate pre- and post-war years; not much sense of the current Takarazuka. Despite Robertson's claims that femininity is as learned as a masquerade as masculinity (which I believe), she mostly focuses on the otakuyaku instead of the musumeyaku.

The pictures are great. The androgynous otakuyaku are seriously hot.

[Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really great book about the Takarazuka Revue, which is a theatrical company producing all-female musical spectaculars in Japan. This well-researched tome focuses on the psychology of the people who go to see the Revue, and the gender politics which have shaped the Revue's place in the entertainment industry.

Takarazuka provides a scholarly as well as entertaining view of the Revue. I came away knowing much more about the institution as well as Japan. I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in theatre, gender politics, or Japanese history.

[Jocilyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robertson's Takarazuka is easily my favorite non-fiction work to date. I loaned this book to a friend a few years ago and have yet to get it back. I will post a fuller review when I have obtained a new copy.

[Lindsey Alcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I genuinely enjoyed this, despite it being rather dry in places. It definitely reads like a thesis! However, the research had been well done, and thus provides a wonderful overall view of Takarazuka and its place in modern Japan.

[Ninja Notion]

This is obviously Jennifer Robertson's thesis. And it reads like one. Very dry but I swear I will finish it. It took me 4 years to read Proust's Remembrances, so I think I can do it.;-)

[Sus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating.