Paragons of Loyalty on the Japanese Stage

The nō is at once a simple and complex art.The narratives are usually terse and straightforward, but the language in which they are conveyed is elaborate and filled with a wide variety of literary and cultural allusions.The performances themselves follow codified, set rules easily understood by performer and audience alike, but are complex in execution.The two plays under consideration here, both in the category of "real world plays" in the nō repertory, are "realistic" in relation to the religious and ghost plays in the nō tradition but are highly abstract when compared to works of the modern drama (shingeki) in Japan.Western scholars and adepts of the nō are not surprisingly most often caught up in the details of the forms of performance and technique, a facet of the nō which is, of course, a source of inexhaustible fascination.But there is another element involved in the art of nō, and one that deserves more attention than it is sometimes given: the need to examine with care the themes of the plays themselves, and, by extension, of the deeper cultural significance of those themes.There are many crucial aspects of Japanese culture reflected in the types of incidents or stories used in constructing classical nō texts; these often signify social and spiritual values that were, and often remain now, important in Japanese society, even though these values are not necessarily directly articulated or commented upon within the play texts themselves.Sometimes, therefore, it is a useful exercise for us to draw back and observe the way in which a particular value or set of values remain constant in Japanese society.Such a continuity of values can thus provide a recurring element that can underlie a wide variety of dramatic circumstances.These values and attitudes serve as the building blocks that can undergird and sustain individual dramatic narratives.Their existence helps in turn to explain the continuing popularity of certain plays in the repertory.One of these subjects, both in the theatre and in prints alike, is certainly the concept of loyalty.Of course, every society has its own version of this profound social and personal value.In the case of Japan, these concepts, usually ascribed to early Confucian influences on Japanese society, were certainly long in place by the time of the work of Zeami and other early nō playwrights in the late fourteenth century.The concept of loyalty was thus able to serve throughout the tradition as a theatrical framework onto which to construct a wide variety of dramatic possibilities.Indeed, as I will point out below, the virtue of loyalty as a dramatic subject has still continued on, shifting into new guises, as a valuable source of moral energy in the modern theatre as well, where loyalty is still capable of rousing strong emotional responses in audiences in the twentieth century, and even today.The importance of loyalty within the larger Japanese social fabric has always been understood and articulated by Japanese intellectuals of every period.It is surely no surprise then that one of the first important Japanese authors who made an attempt to explain Japanese society to Western readers, once the country was opened to the West in 1868, was Nitobe Inazō (