Understanding "Five Days in March" by Toshiki Okada: A Kishida Prize-Winning Masterpiece

Introduction

When Toshiki Okada (岡田利規) and his theater company chelfitsch presented Five Days in March (三月の5日間) in 2004, the Japanese theater world recognized that something genuinely new had appeared. The play, which would win the 49th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2005, depicted the five days surrounding the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, as experienced not by soldiers or politicians but by young people in Tokyo's Shibuya district whose lives of casual sex, shopping, and aimless conversation continued largely undisturbed by the distant catastrophe. It was a play that changed the rules of Japanese theater -- its language, its physicality, its very definition of what constituted a dramatic event.

Five Days in March did not look, sound, or feel like any Japanese play that had come before. Its performers spoke in a kind of hyper-colloquial Japanese that seemed simultaneously natural and deeply strange. Their bodies moved in ways that contradicted or commented on their words. The relationship between performer and character was deliberately ambiguous. And through all of this apparent disorder, Okada created a work of devastating precision that captured something essential about life in the early twenty-first century: the experience of existing in a globalized world where catastrophic events happen somewhere else while ordinary life, with all its banality and occasional beauty, continues.

The Historical Context: March 2003

To understand Five Days in March, one must understand the moment it depicts. On March 20, 2003, the United States and its coalition partners launched their invasion of Iraq. The invasion was preceded by massive worldwide protests and intense media coverage that made the coming war a topic of global conversation.

In Japan, the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had controversially expressed support for the U.S. action, but public opinion was largely opposed to the war. Yet for most Japanese people, the invasion of Iraq was something that happened on television -- a distant event whose reality was mediated by screens, news anchors, and the same digital infrastructure through which entertainment, advertising, and social communication flowed.

Okada's play captures this specific quality of contemporary experience: the way that events of enormous historical significance are received by ordinary people as information competing with other information for their limited attention. The young characters in Five Days in March are aware of the war -- they mention it, they have opinions about it -- but their awareness does not interrupt the flow of their daily lives. They continue to meet in love hotels, browse in shops, send text messages, and navigate the social landscape of Shibuya with the same mix of desire, anxiety, and boredom that characterizes their existence regardless of what is happening in the wider world.

The Language: Hyper-Colloquial Revolution

The most immediately striking feature of Five Days in March is its language. Okada writes in a style that pushes colloquial Japanese to its extremes -- not the idealized naturalism of Oriza Hirata's "contemporary colloquial theater," but something rawer, more fragmented, and more deliberately awkward.

Characters speak in the actual rhythms of young urban Japanese speech, with all its:

• Verbal tics: The constant insertion of filler words, hesitations, and self-corrections that characterize real conversation.
• Incomplete sentences: Thoughts trail off, are interrupted, restart from different angles.
• Indirect narration: Characters describe their own actions in the third person, or narrate events they are simultaneously performing, creating a strange doubling of experience and its telling.
• Slang and contemporary vocabulary: The language is saturated with the specific idioms and references of early twenty-first-century Japanese youth culture.

This linguistic approach was revolutionary because it refused the compromise that even the most "naturalistic" Japanese theater had always made: the compromise of tidying up speech, giving it a dramatic shape and rhythm that made it more theatrical even when it was meant to sound real. Okada's language was theatrical precisely because of its refusal to be tidied -- its deliberate retention of the mess, the waste, and the apparent meaninglessness of actual speech.

The effect is paradoxical: by pushing colloquial speech beyond what audiences had previously encountered on stage, Okada made language strange again. Words that would pass unnoticed in a real Shibuya cafe became objects of attention in the theater, their sounds, rhythms, and implications suddenly audible and significant.

The Body: Movement as Counter-Text

If the language of Five Days in March was revolutionary, its physicality was equally transformative. Okada developed a movement vocabulary for chelfitsch that was unlike anything in Japanese theater -- neither the formalized gestures of traditional performance, the naturalistic movement of realistic theater, nor the trained physicality of dance-theater.

Instead, chelfitsch performers move in ways that seem to emerge from the characters' inner states without being shaped by conventional theatrical technique. Their movements are:

• Casual and fidgety: Performers shift their weight, scratch themselves, play with their hair, adjust their clothing -- the constant small movements of bodies that are never quite comfortable.
• Contradictory to text: A performer might describe an exciting experience while their body language communicates boredom, or talk about indifference while their physical tension suggests intense engagement.
• Amplified and distorted: Everyday gestures are sometimes enlarged or slowed to the point where they become strange, transforming ordinary physical behavior into something that demands attention and interpretation.
• Neither character nor performer: The movement exists in an ambiguous space between the character's supposed behavior and the performer's real physical experience, blurring the distinction between representation and reality.

This approach to the body was not arbitrary but deeply connected to Okada's themes. The disconnect between words and physical behavior in Five Days in March mirrors the disconnect between the characters' awareness of global events and their physical, embodied existence in the immediate present. Just as the Iraq War exists as information rather than bodily experience for people in Tokyo, the characters' own experiences seem to exist at a remove from their physical selves.

Structure and Narration

Five Days in March does not follow a conventional dramatic structure. Instead, it is organized around a loose narrative that is told, retold, and fragmented across its performance. The basic story involves a young man and woman who meet, go to a love hotel in Shibuya, and spend several days together while the invasion of Iraq unfolds on the television in their room.

But this story is not told straightforwardly. It is:

• Narrated rather than enacted: Characters often describe what happened rather than performing it in the present tense. This creates a temporal gap between the event and its telling that is crucial to the play's meaning.
• Distributed across multiple performers: Different actors take up the narration at different points, so that no single performer "owns" a character. This distribution challenges the conventional theater-audience contract in which we accept one body as representing one fictional person.
• Interrupted and recursive: The narrative doubles back on itself, revisits moments from different angles, and sometimes contradicts its own earlier versions.

This structure creates an experience that is less like watching a story unfold and more like being immersed in a collective act of remembering -- with all the imprecision, repetition, and emotional ambiguity that remembering entails.

Political Theater Without Politics

One of the most debated aspects of Five Days in March is its relationship to politics. The play is set against the backdrop of one of the most politically significant events of the early twenty-first century, yet it refuses to take an explicit political position. Its characters are neither anti-war activists nor supporters of the invasion; they are young people for whom the war is one strand in a web of information and experience that also includes sex, consumer culture, and the mundane logistics of daily life.

This has been interpreted in multiple ways:

• As political critique: The play's depiction of young people's indifference to war is itself a political statement -- an indictment of a culture that has made it possible to ignore state-sponsored violence while going about one's business.
• As honest observation: Okada is simply showing how most people actually experience global events -- not through direct engagement but through the filter of media, physical distance, and the demands of their own immediate lives.
• As a new form of political theater: Rather than telling audiences what to think about the war, Okada creates conditions in which audiences must confront their own relationship to distant violence and the uncomfortable gap between knowledge and action.

What is clear is that Five Days in March refuses the conventions of traditional political theater -- the moral clarity, the call to action, the identification of villains and heroes. Instead, it offers something more complex and more disturbing: a picture of what political life actually looks like for most people in the developed world, and an implicit question about whether that picture is acceptable.

International Reception and Impact

Five Days in March was one of the first works of contemporary Japanese theater to achieve significant international recognition in the twenty-first century. The play was presented at major festivals and theaters across Europe, North America, and Asia, and it established both Okada and chelfitsch as internationally significant artists.

International audiences responded to the play's universal themes -- the relationship between personal life and global events, the experience of living in an information-saturated environment, the gap between awareness and engagement -- while also recognizing its specifically Japanese qualities. The play's treatment of the body, its linguistic experiments, and its structural innovations all resonated with international trends in contemporary performance while remaining distinctly rooted in Japanese theatrical and cultural traditions.

The Kishida Prize committee's recognition of Five Days in March in 2005 acknowledged not just the play's artistic achievement but its significance as a turning point in Japanese theater. The award affirmed that a new generation of theater makers was capable of creating work that was both deeply Japanese and genuinely international in its reach and relevance.

Conclusion

Five Days in March remains a landmark of twenty-first-century theater -- a work that found new ways to address the fundamental questions of how we live now, how we relate to events beyond our immediate experience, and how theater can capture the textures of contemporary existence. Toshiki Okada's Kishida Prize was recognition of a genuine breakthrough: a play that changed the possibilities of Japanese theater and that continues to influence theater makers around the world.

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