Brief Epilogue

Summary

It’s difficult to stop here. The Takarazuka Chōchō-san sandaiki immediately generated a spin-off Comedy of Miss Butterfly (Kigeki Chō-Chō san), which premiered in February 1954 at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo. Pinkerton’s son is among the first troops to land in occupied Japan and soon finds a second Butterfly. Fortunately, his fiancée – not incidentally named Kate – knows about the scandal of the young officer’s father and follows him to Japan to avert a second tragedy.¹ There is a happy ending: Kate II weds Pinkerton II, and Butterfly II finds happiness with a character named – Yamadori. In that same year Takarazuka also furnished the setting for James A. Michener’s Sayonara, whose hero, a Korean war fighter pilot, falls in love with a Takarazuka otokoyaku performing Pinkerton in a musical revue called Swing Butterfly, thus presenting the affair from an American perspective.