The Kishida Prize Winners of the 1960s-70s: Japan's Underground Theater Revolution

Introduction

The late 1960s and 1970s represent one of the most explosive and transformative periods in the history of Japanese theater. Known as the angura (アングラ, short for "underground") movement, this era saw young playwrights and directors reject the established shingeki (New Theater) tradition and create radical new forms of theatrical expression. The Kishida Kunio Drama Award tracked this revolution closely, and the winners from this period remain some of the most celebrated and influential figures in Japanese performing arts.

The angura movement did not emerge in a vacuum. It was part of a broader cultural upheaval in 1960s Japan, driven by opposition to the US-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo), student radicalism, rapid industrialization, and a generational desire to break free from both Western cultural dominance and the ossified traditions of the Japanese establishment. In theater, this meant rejecting the realistic, text-based approach of shingeki in favor of something wilder, more physical, and more authentically Japanese -- even as it drew freely on avant-garde traditions from around the world.

The Shingeki Establishment and Its Discontents

To understand the revolution, one must first understand what was being revolted against. By the 1960s, the shingeki movement -- which had begun in the early twentieth century as an effort to create modern Western-style spoken drama in Japan -- had become institutionalized. Major shingeki companies like Bungakuza, Mingei, and Haiyuza operated with hierarchical structures, performed largely translated Western plays, and adhered to realistic staging conventions borrowed from Stanislavski and Ibsen.

For the young generation of the 1960s, shingeki represented everything that was stale and compromised about postwar Japanese culture. Its reliance on Western models seemed like cultural colonialism. Its realistic conventions felt inadequate to express the chaos and contradictions of contemporary Japanese life. And its institutional structures reproduced exactly the kind of hierarchical authority that the student movement was challenging in every other sphere of society.

The angura playwrights who would soon win the Kishida Prize shared a conviction that Japanese theater needed to be remade from the ground up. But they differed enormously in their visions of what that new theater should look like.

Betsuyaku Minoru: The Japanese Beckett

Betsuyaku Minoru (別役実, 1937--2020) is often the first name mentioned in any discussion of angura theater, and for good reason. Winning the 12th Kishida Prize in 1968 for Match Uri no Shojo (The Little Match Girl) and Zoukeiki (The Elephant), Betsuyaku brought the sensibility of European absurdist theater -- particularly the influence of Samuel Beckett -- to Japanese drama, but transformed it into something unmistakably his own.

Where Beckett's characters exist in metaphysical voids, Betsuyaku's inhabit the mundane landscapes of postwar Japan: empty lots, train stations, anonymous urban spaces. His plays feature ordinary people trapped in circular conversations and incomprehensible situations, unable to connect meaningfully with one another or with their own memories. The effect is both darkly comic and profoundly unsettling.

Match Uri no Shojo reimagines the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale in a contemporary Japanese setting, stripping it of sentimentality to reveal the cruelty and indifference that underlie modern society. Zoukeiki uses the figure of an elephant as a vehicle for exploring memory, trauma, and the impossibility of communication -- themes that would recur throughout Betsuyaku's prolific career.

Betsuyaku went on to write over 130 plays, becoming one of Japan's most performed contemporary dramatists. His influence on subsequent generations of Japanese playwrights is incalculable, and he remained a vital presence in Japanese theater until his death in 2020.

Kara Juro: The Red Tent Provocateur

If Betsuyaku represented the intellectual wing of the angura movement, Kara Juro (唐十郎, 1940--2024) was its most flamboyant and confrontational figure. Winning the 15th Kishida Prize in 1970 for Shojo Kamen (The Virgin Mask), Kara created a theater of excess, provocation, and unbridled imagination that shocked and thrilled audiences in equal measure.

Kara founded the Situation Theater (状況劇場, Jokyo Gekijo) in 1963, which became famous for performing in a red tent (紅テント, aka tento) pitched in parks and vacant lots around Tokyo. This choice of venue was itself a radical statement: by rejecting conventional theater buildings, Kara placed his work literally outside the institutions of mainstream culture.

His plays are sprawling, phantasmagoric works that mix high and low culture, mythology and street life, poetry and profanity. Shojo Kamen embodies this aesthetic, weaving together images of masks, virginity, and social performance into a hallucinatory theatrical experience. Kara's writing resists conventional reading -- his scripts are as much performance scores as literary texts, demanding physical, vocal, and emotional extremes from their performers.

Kara's influence extends far beyond his own company. Actors who trained under him went on to become major figures in Japanese cinema and theater, and his aesthetic of theatrical excess continues to inspire artists working in Japan and internationally.

Satoh Makoto: Political Theater Reimagined

Satoh Makoto (佐藤信, born 1943) brought an explicitly political dimension to the angura movement that distinguished him from his contemporaries. As the founder of the Black Tent Theater (黒テント, Kuro Tento) -- named in deliberate contrast to Kara's red tent -- Satoh created works that engaged directly with questions of power, imperialism, and revolutionary struggle.

Winning the Kishida Prize in 1970 (the same year as Kara), Satoh represented a strand of angura theater that saw artistic revolution and political revolution as inseparable. His plays drew on Brechtian techniques of alienation and political didacticism but combined them with a distinctly Japanese sensibility and subject matter.

His work often revisited episodes from Japanese history -- particularly the Meiji Restoration, the colonization of Asia, and the wartime experience -- to illuminate the political contradictions of the present. This historical consciousness set Satoh apart from the more mythological or absurdist tendencies of other angura artists, and his influence can be traced in the politically engaged theater that has continued to flourish in Japan.

Shimizu Kunio: Poetry of the Marginalized

Shimizu Kunio (清水邦夫, 1936--2021) brought a lyrical, poetic sensibility to the angura movement. His plays focus on characters living on the margins of Japanese society -- the dispossessed, the lonely, the forgotten -- and give them a voice of surprising beauty and power.

Shimizu won the Kishida Prize in 1972, recognizing his contribution to a body of work that combined social awareness with linguistic artistry. His plays are often set in atmospheric locations -- boarding houses, construction sites, urban wastelands -- that serve as metaphors for the spiritual condition of their inhabitants.

His writing is characterized by a tension between tenderness and violence, between the desire for human connection and the forces that prevent it. This emotional complexity, combined with his gift for dialogue that is simultaneously realistic and poetic, made Shimizu one of the most respected dramatists of his generation.

Inoue Hisashi: The People's Playwright

Inoue Hisashi (井上ひさし, 1934--2010) stands as one of the most beloved figures in postwar Japanese theater and literature. Winning the Kishida Prize in 1972 for Dogen no Boken (The Adventures of Dogen), Inoue brought an extraordinary combination of comic genius, intellectual depth, and populist accessibility to Japanese drama.

Unlike many angura artists who cultivated difficulty and provocation, Inoue believed passionately in theater as a popular art form. His plays are often uproariously funny, using wordplay, satire, and slapstick to engage audiences while simultaneously addressing serious themes of history, politics, and human nature.

Dogen no Boken takes the historical figure of the Zen master Dogen and reimagines his life as a picaresque adventure, blending historical fact with comic invention. This approach -- using humor and imagination to make serious subjects accessible -- became Inoue's signature and won him a vast audience that extended far beyond the typical theatergoing public.

Inoue went on to become one of Japan's most prolific and successful writers, working in theater, novels, and essays. He was also a prominent public intellectual and peace activist, using his platform to advocate for pacifism and democratic values.

Tsuka Kohei: The Outsider's Voice

Tsuka Kohei (つかこうへい, 1948--2010) brought the perspective of an outsider to Japanese theater -- literally, as a Korean-Japanese (zainichi Korean) writer who explored themes of identity, discrimination, and belonging. Winning the Kishida Prize in 1974 for Atami Satsujin Jiken (The Atami Murder Case), Tsuka created a theater of intense emotional directness that cut through the aesthetic abstractions of much angura work.

Atami Satsujin Jiken is a tour de force of theatrical storytelling, using the framework of a murder mystery to explore deeper questions about truth, performance, and the stories we tell about ourselves. The play has been revived countless times and adapted for film, remaining one of the most popular works in the Japanese contemporary theater repertoire.

Tsuka's distinctive voice -- passionate, confrontational, often raw -- reflected his experience as a member of Japan's Korean minority, navigating a society that simultaneously embraced and excluded him. His work addressed issues of ethnic discrimination and social prejudice with a frankness that was rare in Japanese theater, and his influence can be seen in subsequent generations of playwrights who have tackled similar themes.

The Legacy of the Underground Revolution

The angura movement of the 1960s and 1970s fundamentally transformed Japanese theater. Before angura, modern Japanese drama was largely defined by its relationship to Western models. After angura, Japanese theater had its own distinct identity -- one that drew on both Western avant-garde traditions and indigenous Japanese performance forms while being reducible to neither.

The Kishida Prize winners of this era established principles that continue to inform Japanese theater: the importance of the playwright's individual voice, the rejection of rigid genre boundaries, the integration of physical and textual performance, and the conviction that theater should engage with the pressing questions of its time.

Perhaps most importantly, the angura generation demonstrated that Japanese theater could be a site of genuine artistic innovation rather than mere imitation or preservation. This confidence in the creative possibilities of Japanese dramatic writing laid the groundwork for everything that has followed, from the small theater boom of the 1980s to the quiet theater movement of the 1990s to the diverse and vibrant scene that exists today.

For international audiences, the angura playwrights offer some of the most exciting and challenging works in world theater. While translations remain limited, the plays of Betsuyaku, Kara, and their contemporaries reward engagement with their unflinching vision, their theatrical inventiveness, and their profound engagement with the contradictions of modern Japanese life.