Accuracy and Dignity: Staging Madama Butterfly in Occupied Japan

ABSTRACT

Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly has long been viewed in Japan and abroad as demeaning Japan, portraying Japanese women as helpless victims of a cruel society, easily exploited by Japanese and American men. But a remarkable 1948 production by two Japanese men, Fujiwara Yoshie (1898–1976) and Aoyama Yoshio (1903–1976), reimagined the typical Euro-American staging to display their vision of a ‘real’ Japan, one they also believed most faithful to Puccini. Not only did their production mute the inequities present in the opera; it was initiated, funded, and fully supported by the US Troop Information and Education (TI&E) Section in Tokyo. Ultimately, the Fujiwara and Aoyama interpretation became the dominant staging of the opera worldwide for decades to come. Exploring the institutional, political, and popular interest in Madama Butterfly in occupied Japan, this article examines how this 1948 production bolstered the Cold War narrative of the US as a non-colonialist, democratizing power striving to liberate Japanese women while celebrating Japan’s ‘return’ to its native aesthetic traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Fujiwara Opera Company
• Madama Butterfly
• Miura Tamaki
• occupied Japan
• orientalism

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Jan Bardsley for her continuous support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Literary scholar Anderson points out that Long’s novella, Madame Butterfly, is based on actual geopolitical inequalities between the West and the East (Anderson, 2009). Pierre Loti’s 1887 novella Madame Chrysanthème also popularized stories of temporary liaisons between Caucasian men and Japanese women in Japan.

² Kiwa Teiko was born to a Dutch father and a mother who had a Dutch father and a Japanese mother. For more on Kiwa Teiko, see Hosokawa, 1999.

³ For more on sexual exploitation during the occupation, see Molasky, 1999.

⁴ Music critic Miyazawa Jūichi (1908–2000), who saw many opera performances immediately after the war, claimed that the Nagato Opera Company had monopolized the performance requests of the occupation forces before the Fujiwara Opera Company started performing Puccini’s opera (Miyazawa, Fukuhara, & Kimura, 1986: 294).

⁵ In America’s geisha ally: Reimagining the Japanese enemy, Naoko Shibusawa analyzes how postwar American media helped rehabilitate Japan’s image by casting it as an artistic, feminized nation of innocent children and women.

⁶ Despite searching available documents about and by TI&E, I could not find any other record of this request than that described by Aoyama and Fujiwara. They do not recount when or who at TI&E made this request.

⁷ Pacific Stars and Stripes was an English-language newspaper published in Tokyo by Troop Information and Education Section, Headquarters, Far East Command from 1945 to 1999. For more information on Pacific Stars and Stripes, see the book Pacific Stars and Stripes: The first 40 years, 1945–1985.

⁸ The Mikado, long banned in Japan because of its satirical depiction of the emperor, was performed in the Ernie Pyle Theater in 1946 (Lee, 2010: 193). The Japanese artists involved in The Mikado production took a playful approach to staging ‘Japan’. As Rodman argues, they rejected any notion of using The Mikado to reinforce stereotypes of Japanese or pretensions of an ‘authentic’ Japan. Rather, they ‘insisted upon the multiplicity of Japanese identity’, viewing the operetta as ‘source of postwar fantasy’(Rodman, 2015: 298; 296). In contrast, Fujiwara and Aoyama approached Madama Butterfly with a strong desire for ‘accuracy’ in presenting Japan, both to recover Puccini’s vision and to educate audiences. The difference between the comic and tragic nature of these works likely influenced these contrasting approaches, too.

⁹ Gathering sources for this research meant collecting essays in performance programs (some by Fujiwara and Aoyama), newspaper reports, and brief mentions in Japanese opera histories and biographies. The program of the Madama Butterfly performance at the Teikoku Gekijō for the occupation forces in May 1948 contains only a synopsis of Madama Butterfly and basic information about the performance such as its date, place, cast, and so on. Therefore, I mainly refer to the program of the Madama Butterfly performance at the Teikoku Gekijō in September 1948, which was staged almost the same way as the one in May 1948. The program for this performance includes essays by Fujiwara and Aoyama. These essays describe the background of the performance in May 1948 and the details of the production. In addition to these programs, I also use some of Fujiwara Opera Company’s Madama Butterfly performance programs from the late 1940s and 1950s.

¹⁰ Born in the Korean Peninsula, Nagata Genjirō (Hangul name Kim Yong-gil) worked as a tenor singer in Japan from the 1930s to the 1950s. In 1960, he returned to North Korea.

¹¹ The fact that Sasada and Sunahara were young and inexperienced, having debuted only in 1942 and 1947 respectively, likely explains why they received little attention in the annals of this production. There is almost no record of their thoughts on the experience.