Reconsidering the Traveling Theater of Today’s Japan: An Interdisciplinary Approach to a Stigmatized Form of Japanese Theatre

Theater research today tends to give highest priority to scholarly materials based on academic scholarship that typically excludes that which academia sees as marginalized because of its origin or current status. According to this essentialist mindset, Japanese traditional theater is epitomized by nô, kabuki, and bunraku. Yet Japan has another important form of traditional theater on the margins of its society. This theater is called taishū-engeki and it caters exclusively to working-class audiences. Although resembling Kabuki, it nevertheless remains ignored by mass media and scholars alike. The troupes of taishū-engeki travel nationwide on a monthly basis. This lifestyle accounts for their persistent stigmatization and ostracism. This paper argues that the continuing presence of taishū-engeki implies that the traditional Japanese folk mentality, at a subconscious level at least, accepts this marginalized theater form historically deemed extremely vulgar. Not unlike other outcast groups, traveling entertainers’ nomadic lifestyles reinforced their stigma of being awesome monsters. These nomads were the ancestors of taishū-engeki. Such awe-inspiring double stigmatization experienced by today’s taishū-engeki as well as the medieval entertainers provides the basis for empowering the creation of sacred time and space while on stage.