The Kabuki of Kabuki

The Kabuki of Kabuki

I have spent a fair bit of time in Japan (mostly “Blade Runner” Tokyo and a little bit of Kyoto) and I am very fond of the visual imagery of Kabuki theater, but I have never seen a live Kabuki performance, only a short depiction on TV. When I think of Kabuki, I think of guys stomping around for effect in elaborate robes and with dramatic, exaggerated make-up. Kabuki does not strike me as subtle. It is a stylized dance-drama that began in the early Seventeenth Century with a female troupe and then became so popular that women were banned from performing and it became an all-male art-form. Like many Japanese kanji words, Kabuki can be read to mean several different things and is somewhat subject to interpretation. It can be as simple as a form of singing and dancing all the way to meaning a bizarre performance. Given the rather dramatic way these performances seem to go, I lean towards thinking of it as a bizarre and almost grotesque manner of expression. It is play-acting in the extreme and leaves little room for doubt about the expressions that are intended.

Kabuki reminds me of the early days of film and even some vaudeville, where slapstick was appreciated as people were first introduced to play-acting to portray the comedy of everyday life. Kabuki went one step further that harkens to its female performer roots. Most of those performers were prostitutes, so Kabuki took on a risqué theme very often and was not inconsistent with the history of erotic art (Shunga) in Japan. Watch out for repressed cultures, they are the ones that most often find value in pornographic pursuits and all manner of pleasure-seeking (behind the scenes, of course). When I used to travel to Brazil, the country with the largest population of transplanted Japanese in the world (1.5 million people of Japanese origin), I would stay in a Japanese-owned hotel called the Caesar Park in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. About half the floors in the hotel were still dedicated to tatami-mat-sleeping Japanese visitors. When the traveling businessmen would bed down there, they would do so with local “Amazonian” prostitutes who looked to be twice their size. This was done under the watchful eye and fully condoned (discretely, but yet openly) by the hotel management and the businessman’s colleagues. That was something that Western businessmen would never do so openly, but it seemed the Japanese knew that their repressed culture needed its outlets, I guess.

I have found Kabuki to be a very useful expression that I have used for thirty years or more as a way of expressing some fully anticipated process of wailing and gnashing of teeth over something that was happening in business that everyone knew would happen, but needed to be met with feigned shock and awe. To me, while it was a culturally Japanese custom, it was a far more universal notion that went well beyond the Japanese in a rhetorical sense. I must not be the only one who feels this way since UNESCO has declared Kabuki to be “an intangible heritage possessing universal value”. It was put in 2008 into the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. I think that qualifies it as being broadened out as apart of global cultural history, not just Japanese. No one from Japan should view that designation as anything but a compliment for their art-form.

I have now written several books on a ghost-written basis for friends. One of them is a very serious and (I believe) noteworthy business memoir that my friend and subject of the memoir intends to drive to a full-fledged publication commercialization. This is a book that I started writing for my friend four years ago. I took 234 pages of jumbled and disjointed notes (some typed, some handwritten) and turned it into a 435-page first draft of his story. This was a second effort at ghost writing this story as he had thrown out the first version after 50 pages for not embodying his voice. My draft did a better job of that apparently, but from a professional writer’s perspective was lacking several things (actually enumerated in a critique as 23 specific failings). After grumbling a few profanities I locked down and rewrote the book to 430 pages and ticked off (literally) each of the criticisms. That draft sat in my friends inbox for the better part of three years until he dusted it off earlier this year and asked if I was willing to re-engage for another edited rewrite. I agreed and was sent a detailed, line-by-line edit with a five-page summary of suggestions for changes. I found these edits very worthwhile (the editor was an accomplished writer of business memoirs) and went about cutting the book down to 329 pages (143,000 words to 93,000 words) and recasting it as he recommended. He was pleased with the final product.

At a recent gathering of our motorcycle club, our dear friend Maggie, who spent her career as a literary editor, offered to read the “final” draft and suggest edits. She has sent the first 180 pages of those and I have just reviewed and commented on them. I would say that 90% were valid and worthwhile changes that I accepted on the spot and changed accordingly. 8% or so were changes that were more like optional suggestions that involved adding explanation or examples and needed the Author and subject to opine on and determine. The remaining 2% were things that I simply disagreed with and gave my explanation as to why. An illustrative example was my use of the word “shit” in one sentence. I believe as a business book it can and should reflect the things that business people actually say to one another and trust me, shit is the among the least offensive profanities that gets used every day in the business world. This is a matter of style and not so much right and wrong. She referenced gratuitous labeling of an ethnic minority as potentially racist and while the reference was not derogatory, the mere act of labeling can be deemed racist and should be avoided. I willingly made that change. And then there was her comment about my use of the term Kabuki.

Don’t get me wrong I admire and respect Maggie, so when I read that my use of the term Kabuki in reference to a business situation going on with Koreans in Korea was “show(ing) cultural ignorance” that would be insulting to both Koreans and Japanese, I was taken aback. I get called lots of things, but culturally ignorant has not been one of them. I have spent twelve years living on four different continents and lived in Tokyo for one short three-month stint. I have traveled to Korea several times and done business with Koreans. All of my business career involved being responsible for global activities over forty-five years, including working for Germans and Israelis along the way. I am an open-minded man who believes in the value of self-reflection and admitting my faults and failings, of which there have been plenty. But Kabuki to me is a wonderfully expressive art-form that is a wonderfully meaningful metaphor for a style of doing business. As I said in my counter comment to Maggie, I would use it to describe a German business situation as easily as a Korean one. I felt I had been misunderstood and Pidgeon-holed into an Ugly American stereotype.

That said, anything that must be etymologically explained and rationalized (as I have tried to do in the beginning of this story) is probably not going to be fully understood by many readers. Readers who are far less “culturally aware” and more “culturally ignorant” than I are likely to jump to the same conclusion that Maggie did. That tells me that Maggie is a fine editor and that despite my outrage at the comment, she is probably giving good advice to change the reference. The book does not suffer from eliminating the term Kabuki. I still like it as a stylistic term of art, but there is no point is letting pride of authorship get in the way of what is sensible. The Kabuki of Kabuki demands that I stomp away with a big frown on my face and live to fight another day.