Im Zeichen des Aufbruchs. Kulturelle Identität als stille Herausforderung der Tradition in der Takarazuka Revue
Temporary Authenticity. Cultural Identity in Takarazuka Revue’s Quiet Challenge of Tradition

Summary/Abstract: Nowadays, it is an open secret that Japan is redefining superpower – though as cultural issue; a faithful interpreter of its ambitions is Takarazuka Revue. Alongside its 95-years history, Takarazuka Revue, an exceptionally famous all-female popular music theater and Japan’s leading figure in entertainment industry has proved itself a contradictory symbol of the Japanese world, an imaginary battlefield between gender, culture and politics in modern Japan. Concurrently anachronistic in its gender exhibition and progressive in its performance practice, Takarazuka Revue reconstructs in a specific way asymmetric interactions between identity and alterity, challenging traditional concepts such as model and copy, all wrapped up in sparkling tunes, luxurious productions and gorgeous costumes. While focusing on the postwar period, since the re-opening of the Grand Theater in Takarazuka in 1946, which marked an unexpected tendency in Takarazuka Revue’s self-orchestration through the increasing lavishness of its performances and the intensified commercialization of its increasingly androgynous otokoyaku figures, it is this paper’s goal to underline some of Takarazuka Revue’s strategies to implement its – namely the Japanese – historical worldview by means of a new form of cultural imperialism: the staging of identity as simultaneously ideological base and aesthetical superstructure of late-modern conservatism. The transition from ethics to aesthetics and from imagination to ideology reflects Takarazuka Revue’s metamorphose from an insignificant socio-cultural medium to a powerful political-economic message in postwar Japan.

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