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

Introduction

The mid-1960s to the early 1970s were among the most transformative years 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 break with both commercial theater and the established shingeki (New Theater) tradition. Several of its leading figures won the Kishida Kunio Drama Award in these years, alongside writers such as Inoue Hisashi and Tsuka Kohei, who stood apart from the movement or came just after it.

The angura movement did not emerge in a vacuum. It was part of a broader cultural upheaval in 1960s Japan, which included the protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo), student radicalism, and rapid economic growth. In theater, it meant turning away from shingeki and reclaiming earthy, popular elements that shingeki had excluded, such as the influence of the sideshow.

The Shingeki Establishment and Its Discontents

To understand the revolution, one must first understand what was being revolted against. The shingeki movement had begun in the early twentieth century as an effort to create modern Western-style spoken drama in Japan, and by the 1960s it was represented by large established companies such as Bungakuza, Mingei, and Haiyuza.

The break was not a clean one. Kara Juro and the Waseda group around Suzuki Tadashi and Betsuyaku Minoru came out of student theater, but Satoh Makoto trained at the Haiyuza school, and the director Ninagawa Yukio began as an actor with the shingeki-lineage company Seihai. The artists who would soon win the Kishida Prize differed enormously in their visions of what a new theater should look like.

Betsuyaku Minoru: Absurdism in a Japanese Key

Betsuyaku Minoru (別役実, 1937--2020) won the 13th Kishida Prize in 1968 for two plays, Macchi Uri no Shojo (マッチ売りの少女, The Little Match Girl) and Akai Tori no Iru Fukei (赤い鳥の居る風景, A Scene with a Red Bird). He co-founded the Waseda Shogekijo company with the director Suzuki Tadashi, and his early work was shaped by the absurdist theater of Samuel Beckett.

His stage typically holds little more than a single pole, often a utility pole, and his characters often have no names beyond labels such as "Man 1" and "Man 2."

The Little Match Girl takes its title from Hans Christian Andersen but does not retell the tale. On New Year's Eve, a woman visits the home of an elderly couple and claims to be their daughter. An earlier play, Zo (象, The Elephant, 1962), concerns atomic bomb survivors and their alienation from society.

Betsuyaku wrote 144 plays through 2018, along with children's stories and essays. He remained active for decades and died in 2020.

Kara Juro: The Red Tent Provocateur

Kara Juro (唐十郎, 1940--2024) won the 15th Kishida Prize in 1970 for Shojo Kamen (少女仮面, The Virgin's Mask).

Kara founded his company in 1963 as the Situation Society and renamed it the Situation Theater (状況劇場, Jokyo Gekijo) in 1964. It became famous for performing in a red tent (紅テント, aka tento), first raised in August 1967 in the grounds of Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku. The tent gave the company a place to perform outside conventional theater buildings.

The Virgin's Mask was not a tent play: Kara wrote it in 1969 for Suzuki Tadashi's Waseda Shogekijo. It is set in Nikutai ("Flesh"), a basement coffee shop run by Kasugano Yachiyo, a legendary male-role star of the Takarazuka Revue, who rehearses Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights while waiting for her Catherine. A girl who adores Takarazuka appears, and the play ends as subway construction bulldozers break up the coffee shop.

Kara disbanded the Situation Theater in 1988 and formed Kara-gumi (唐組) the same year. He also won the Akutagawa Prize in 1983 for his fiction.

Satoh Makoto: Political Theater Reimagined

Satoh Makoto (佐藤信, born 1943) won the 16th Kishida Prize in 1971 for Nezumi Kozo Jirokichi (鼠小僧次郎吉), named after a real Edo-period burglar. The Fukuoka Prize citation places him with Terayama Shuji and Kara Juro as a leading underground playwright and director.

After training at the Haiyuza school, he co-founded the Free Stage Theater (自由劇場). In 1968 it joined two other troupes to form Theater Center 68, the company now known as Black Tent Theater (黒テント). From 1970 it toured Japan in a large tent, visiting 120 cities by 1990.

His Comedy Showa trilogy (1975--79), which he wrote and directed, established his reputation as a director and playwright. A program biography notes his focus on the works of figures such as Bertolt Brecht. He later became known for his exchange with theater artists across Asia.

Shimizu Kunio: The Partnership with Ninagawa

Shimizu Kunio (清水邦夫, 1936--2021) won the 18th Kishida Prize in 1974 for Bokura ga Hijo no Taiga o Kudaru Toki (ぼくらが非情の大河をくだるとき, When We Go Down That Heartless River), sharing it with Tsuka Kohei.

Around 1968, Ninagawa asked him to write a play to direct. When Seihai rejected the result, Such a Serious Frivolity (真情あふるる軽薄さ), Ninagawa and others left that company, and Shimizu and Ninagawa went on to form Gendaijin Gekijo (現代人劇場). The prize-winning play opens at night in a public toilet in Tokyo, and its characters include a poet who has lost his sanity, his older brother, and their father. Its theme is the sense of defeat left by a failed dream of revolution.

Shimizu later founded the company Mokutosha with his wife, the actress Noriko Matsumoto.

Inoue Hisashi: The People's Playwright

Inoue Hisashi (井上ひさし, 1934--2010) won the 17th Kishida Prize in 1972 for Dogen no Boken (道元の冒険, The Adventures of Dogen). He is known for humor and satire grounded in a sense of the contemporary, and he was a prolific playwright, novelist, and essayist rather than a member of the angura movement.

Dogen no Boken takes as its subject the Zen master Dogen. It uses songs and wordplay to portray the anguish and arrogance of a religious figure.

Inoue also won the Naoki Prize in 1972 for the novel Tegusari Shinju and founded the company Komatsu-za to stage his own plays. An outspoken pacifist, he joined Kenzaburo Oe in 2004 in setting up a group in support of Japan's constitution.

Tsuka Kohei: After Angura

Tsuka Kohei (つかこうへい, 1948--2010) won the 18th Kishida Prize in 1974 for Atami Satsujin Jiken (熱海殺人事件, The Atami Murder Case), at 25 the youngest winner up to that time. He was born a second-generation Korean resident of Japan (zainichi), a background he made public in his essay Musume ni Kataru Sokoku (娘に語る祖国).

The Atami Murder Case was first staged by Bungakuza at its Atelier in 1973. It is not a whodunit. A factory worker has killed a co-worker he grew up with in Atami, and the senior detective, Kimura Denbei, finds the case so trivial that he subjects the suspect to absurd interrogation in order to turn a third-rate criminal into a first-rate one. The play has been revived repeatedly in many versions, and it was filmed in 1986.

Tsuka's productions were known for minimal sets, and for dialogue he changed orally through rehearsal.

The Legacy of the Underground Revolution

The angura movement peaked by the early 1970s, but its companies and artists did not disappear. Kara's red tent went on with Kara-gumi until his death in 2024, Suzuki's work continues with SCOT, and Betsuyaku, Satoh, and Shimizu remained active for decades. The theater that followed in Japan included the small theater boom of the 1980s and the quiet theater of the 1990s.

For international audiences, a number of these plays can be read in English. Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays (University of Hawaii Press, 1992) includes The Little Match Girl, The Virgin's Mask, and Shimizu's The Dressing Room. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (Columbia University Press, 2014) also includes The Little Match Girl, translated by Robert N. Lawson, and The Atami Murder Case appears in Half a Century of Japanese Theater V: 1970s (2003).