5 - Returns of the Native: Madamu Batafurai in Japan

Summary

Surveys the first decades of Madama Butterfly’s reception in Japan, which motivated de-orientalizing productions that changed or deleted passages considered comically inaccurate or insulting, often reimagining the heroine as an exemplar of pure-hearted Japanese womanhood. Discussion concentrates on three landmark productions. (1) A partial first staging (1914), featuring soprano Takaori Sumiko and her conductor husband Shuichi, who created a scandal with encores that included a celebration of strip-tease dances in treaty-port teahouses. (2) A “corrected” production (1930) by composer Yamada Kosaku and translator Horiuchi Keizo. The score and libretto were drastically emended by changing Puccini’s borrowings from Japanese music and deleting the entire wedding scene and other offensive passages, thus suppressing the opera’s location in late nineteenth-century treaty-port culture. (3) A 1936 production of the opera by Miura Tamaki, the most famous Japanese soprano of the period, celebrating her return to Japan from a career abroad. It legitimized the heroine’s marriage by adding a Shinto priest and emphasizing the tragedy of her maternal sacrifice.