Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan
by Jennifer Robertson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jennifer RobertsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1998-07-21
ISBN: 0520211510
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Reviews of Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan
Book Review: This book is not about Takarazuka or "Sexual Politics."
Summary: 1 Stars
The Takarazuka Review all-women's theater company is very popular in Japan and would make a fascinating subject for a book, but it is not the subject of this book. This book is about gender theory and is full of academic jargon. It's the sort of thing you might have to read in an undergraduate sociology course. It's not news that gender roles are more rigid in Japan then in the US. Dr. Robertson was generally unsuccessful in making contacts with the actresses, choreographers, directors and other staff people who create the over-the-top, fun, sparkly musicals that are Takarazuka. Any number of young Americans and other foreigners have been welcomed into the Takarazuka world, so Dr. Robertson must have used the wrong approach. Her book is dull.
Summary of Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan
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.
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