Word: takarazuka
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Forty-four young women in wide hakama pants stand on stage at the Takarazuka Grand Theater, a 30-minute train ride west of Osaka. With faces framed by boyish bobs or slicked-back hair, they announce in unison that they are the newest members of the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theater group. And while these women - all graduates of the group's own school - might seem unaffected, their performances are anything...
...Takarazuka actresses - there are about 400 in five troupes - have been leaving audiences speechless with these marvelous and at the same time overwhelming works for 95 years. Founded in the town of the same name - by Ichizo Kobayashi, a locally born railway magnate who thought that lively entertainment would attract more tourists and thus increase rail traffic - the theater group now averages about 10 major productions a year, each with a lead time of about eight months. Faced with shrinking audiences and increased competition from all forms of digital entertainment, its producers are trying to make the shows more dazzling...
...Lest you think that there is something very cute and Japanese about the productions, it should be noted that Takarazuka derives most of its inspiration from foreign sources - vaudeville, Radio City Music Hall and Hollywood musicals. In their stylization, codified roles, transvestite stars, rigid themes (which in Takarazuka's case is almost always boy and girl fall in love, conflict ensues and is resolved) and combinations of dance, drama and chorus, there are obvious similarities between Takarazuka and the traditional Japanese performing arts of Kabuki and Noh theater. But these tales of chaste love are told through adaptations of Broadway...
...voluntary" questioning. And now, with tens of thousands of airline passengers' lives at stake daily, officials are intimidated by a civil-libertarian backlash and are equating the threat posed by the very same ethnic group with that of a bunch of Irish nuns? Give me a break! RON VINOKOOR Takarazuka, Japan...
...tour of the Dutch East Indies, Kishi and one of his former Manchurian aides drew up a drastic plan to increase bureaucratic control of Japanese industry and to draft into the factories some 250,000 women, ranging from housewives and geisha girls to prostitutes and the actresses of the Takarazuka Girls Opera-an outfit that was owned by Kishi's boss. The Commerce Minister raced back to Tokyo and denounced the plan as "sheer Communism!" Kishi again resigned. But less than six months later, the Commerce Minister was out of a job and replaced by Kishi...