Word: takarazuka
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...last we have reached Takarazuka, a unique town dedicated to laughter, spectacle and melody." For 30 yen (8?) the travelers can stare at the town's zoo, flock through its botanical gardens, jitterbug on its spring-mounted dance floor, or get married in its Shinto chapel. But the main event is the big show in the rambling, 4,000-seat theater-a rare, sukiyaki-like mixture of the Folies Bergeres, Radio City Music Hall, the Metropolitan Opera and native Kabuki. It is the Japanese teenagers' most popular musical entertainment...
...traditional in the beginning, but undergo metamorphoses as the show wears on. Even such a popular set piece as the famed Kabuki Lion Dance gets a startling new tail twist: it starts off traditionally with a dancer in a furry, tasseled leonine head, but in the end scores of Takarazuka girls, dressed as butterflies in tight leotards and wings, abandon their fluttering and go into a high-kicking routine to rival the Rockettes...
Glamorous Aura. Four decades ago a businessman named Ichizo Kobayashi became president of the 30-mile-long electric railway from Osaka to Takarazuka (Treasure Mound). To improve his road's languishing business, he decided that he needed a major attraction at the end of the line, began to convert the terminal town into a super music hall. For a stage he covered a swimming pool with boards...
...talent he recruited the daughters of well-to-do families. Takarazuka flourished in the '305, but it was not till after World War II that it really came into full bloom. Today Takarazuka is a thriving city of 35,000, and the railway (also serving other suburban stops) carries some 700,000 passengers a day. Two of the four Takarazuka troupes (named Snow. Moon, Flower, Star) stay at home, while the others tour the rest of Japan. Showman Kobayashi, now a multimillionaire, also owns theaters, restaurants, a baseball club and a movie company...
Some of the 350 Takarazuka girls are daughters of early members. They live in the Takarazuka Operatic School for Girls, which fatherly Impresario Kobayashi runs with a strict, decorous hand (no dating, pupils to leave the school only in pairs, weekday curfew at 7). To teach them their musical trade, the girls are given a solid year of voice, ballet, Japanese Western dancing, English. After a year, they are graduated to the chorus (pay: 10,000 yen a month, or $27.77). The 30 stars make ten times that much. The girls wear blue jeans, sweaters, and horsetail hairdos in school...