One spring day in 1701 there was an altercation in Edo Castle. Perceiving insult, a local lord drew his sword, an act considered a capital offense. Ordered to commit suicide he did so, leaving his clan leaderless. On a snowy day at the end of 1702, these ronin (masterless samurai), some 45 of them, marched on the mansion of the man they held responsible, decapitated him and offered his head at the grave of their leader. The Tokugawa government demanded their own mass suicide and this was accomplished in the early spring of 1703, nearly two years after the original offense.
Though instances of extreme fidelity were not wanting in Japan at that time, this one appealed. The incident was re-created on the stage less than two weeks after the mass suicide and, though this performance was closed by the authorities after only three performances, others succeeded it.
"Chushingura," properly shorn of contemporary trappings, became a stage hit and shortly it was serving as an inspiration for fashion and popular light reading, and as a subject for the prevalent woodblock prints of the period. It seems to have seized the popular imagination and is still the most popular and lasting of Japanese plays.
Why should this be so? This is the question that this interesting study asks itself, using woodblock prints as a gauge of the play's popularity. One reason is its scale: nearly 50 ex-warriors slicing themselves open. In reality there were only 45, but popularity demands mass and so the band is always referred to as the 47 ronin. A single person committing seppuku was not considered extraordinary, but half a hundred doing it on stage -- that was entertainment!
Another reason for the play's popularity was that the ancient virtues of the samurai -- unquestioning loyalty among them -- had already become tarnished and would in succeeding generations become more noticeably eroded. Since popularity often depends upon nostalgia, this harking back to the good old days was welcome. ("Tora-san," our "lovable tramp," achieved popularity only after the hometown ways of the series had in actuality vanished, while Yasujiro Ozu's pictures, always popular, were postulated upon a largely missing family system, which has now almost completely disappeared.)
Yet another reason is that both the event and its dramatization fit a known genre. This was the drama of vendetta, which, ever since the revenge of the Soga brothers, had enjoyed popularity -- indeed, still does. The audience already knows enough to anticipate, and this always fills theaters. (If we did not understand that the ship was going to sink, would we tolerate "Titanic"? If we did not know that loyalty would be rewarded and that 47 ronin would be lined up, Rockette-like, at the finale, could the groundlings endure 10 hours of "Chushingura"?)
At the same time, admiration for the intrepid 47 was also a protest against a less-than-admirable government. And a hypocritical one: How could fidelity be officially sanctioned when this splendid example of it was castigated? The people of Edo, like the people of Tokyo, rarely criticized but when a safe opportunity was offered it had many takers.
Finally, lasting popularity often exists because contemporary glosses may be cast over a story. There are many later versions of "Chushingura," including a 1943 wartime reading, a ballet reworking, an opera and endless movies. (There have been some 85 film versions, each different from the other, and most of them distinguished by a contemporary take. Most recently there has been an all-female film version, an "office lady" "Chushingura" and an animated "Wan-Wan Chushingura" about dogs.)
This use of "mitate" (parody) is seen in a number of later prints featured in the book. Utamaro has a whole series in which "beautiful women" stand in for the warriors, and the recondite may recognize this reference or that in the flower held or the kimono spread. In addition, there is the agenda of the artist himself. Hiroshige, for example, was mainly interested in landscape and so his prints illustrate only the more outdoor sections of the play. Hokusai was interested in psychological anecdote and so his series skim the story, play down the spectacle, and create a storyboardlike "manga" version of the narrative.
All of this is skillfully deployed by David Bell in this scholarly paper on a popular subject. The plates illustrating the thesis are themselves explicated and there are pages of notes, a glossary, bibliography and various appendixes. "Chushingura" may not count for all that much as dramatic literature, but it is of primary interest in tracing the sociology of Japanese popular culture.
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