Strange behaviour
Two men playing at romance
But what artistry!
— Tokyo, January 2025
• • • • •
The etymology of kabuki is contested. Some say its three characters, ka-歌 (‘song’), bu-舞 (‘dance’) and ki-伎 (‘skill’), indicate the composite character of an art that contains elements of music, dance and drama that would usually be performed separately. However, these are ateji, modern Japanese characters used phonetically to represent loan words, and do not reflect actual etymology. It is believed, therefore, that kabuki derives from the verb kabuku, which means ‘to be out of the ordinary’ or ‘bizarre’.
During the Edo period (1603-1868), under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the conditions of Japan’s working class, impoverished by years of civil war, began to improve, and with it the demand for a theatre that, until then, had been restricted to the nobility. This was met when the former shrine maiden, Izumo no Okuni, began performing a new style of dance drama about everyday life, with a troupe of all-female dancers playing both male and female roles. Her success led to a performance before the Imperial Court in Kyoto and the subsequent popularisation of the genre.
However, as the geisha would after it, kabuki soon became associated with prostitution, with clients drawn from merchants of low social standing but newly-acquired wealth. This, together with the mixing of social classes in its audience, led to the banning of women from performing on the stage. However, when female roles in the drama were played by young boys, this provided a covert space for homosexuality, which was pervasive among samurai in the early Seventeenth Century under the third Shōgun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, who had a known taste for pederasty. Finally, the Shogunate decreed that female roles had to be played by adult male actors, a convention that, despite being removed after the Second World War under the US occupation of Japan, has continued to this day.
We went to a Kabuki play at the Kabukiza Theatre on our last night in Tokyo, and found it to be not bizarre but art of the highest order. In Kabuki theatre, male actors who specialise in female roles (onnagata) do not pretend to be a woman but, according to the code of transvestism, signify one. The audience knows he is a man playing a woman and accepts the theatrical conceit. In contrast, the new US ideology of transgenderism, which is officially enforced in the UK in our cultural institutions, educational syllabus, media and laws, is not only a biologically meaningless term but also a semantic misunderstanding of transvestism, which is an ancient cultural form present in many civilisations. In this respect, transgenderism is representative of the inability of US consumer culture to understand the world it has conquered, and of the UK’s servile willingness to embrace the former’s every stupidity.
A Communist in Hong Kong 