Last week I looked at two plays depicting the lives of women. This week, the focus is two excellent contemporary comedy dramas about modern Japanese history -- and that means it's big-shot male politicians, bureaucrats and gangsters who hold center stage.
"Yume no Namida (Tears of a Dream)" is the second play in a "Tokyo War Crimes Trial" trilogy for the New National Theatre. Like the first part, 2001's "Yume no Sakeme (Torn Dreams)," "Yume" is a musical comedy written by 69-year-old Hisashi Inoue, the renowned author, scriptwriter and current president of the Japan PEN Club, and directed by Tamiya Kuriyama, the NNT's artistic director.
Asked in 1999 why he was moved to address this subject, Inoue replied that "as well as examining responsibility for the war itself, we Japanese -- along with other nations -- have a duty to examine responsibility for what has followed. But after the war, Japanese were too busy with economic recovery to look at the historical evidence from before, during or after the war."