Misinterpretation and Misplacement in Intercultural Theatrical Communications between China and Japan: Ichikawa Sadanji’s and Morita Kanya’s Kabuki Tours in 1920s China

Abstract

In the 1920s, Ichikawa Sadanji and Morita Kanya conducted two rounds of kabuki tours in China, which clearly revealed the mechanism of misinterpretation and misplacement in the (re)construction of the cultural identities of Chinese and Japanese theatre. Both had been modelled upon each other in the context of intercultural communications in the early twentieth century. Some Chinese theatre critics indicated that Chinese xiqu should absorb the values of modernity identified by them in the Morita troupe’s kabuki performances. In contrast, Ichikawa Sadanji’s tours in Northeast China and his subsequent visit to Beijing inspired kabuki to imbibe a new spirit of the times from Chinese xiqu, an impure ‘Eastern Spirit’ paradoxically manifested in a ‘purified’ theatrical Chineseness. The positive aspect of ‘misplaced misinterpretations’ by kabuki and xiqu of each other’s cultural images and values lies in the fact that it afforded the two theatre traditions a huge momentum for assimilating each other’s ‘Otherness’ to break their own tradition’s exclusiveness.