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ekusudei25 ~*~ First National Tour
When I was ken-8, I participated in a national tour for the first time.¹
At two months, it was a fairly long performance run, and we traveled around Japan from Aomori in the north to Okinawa in the south.
The performance started in the beginning of May in hot Fukuoka.
But when we went to Aomori at the end of May, I was shocked to find it snowing.
I was able to really comprehend how far Japan stretches as a country, so it was educational. But although I say that, and although we went all around Japan, all I was really able to see were the hotels and theaters in the area, which is a pity.
When you participate in a tour as an underling, you help transport the upperclassmen's luggage, organize the props, distribute hand towels, and have such a mountain of things to do that it is hard work, but luckily I had just squeaked in as an upperclassman, so I had it easy.
But both the top stars and the underlings alike suffered the horrors of early mornings.
Takarasienne have a disproportionate number of people who are terrible at getting up early, but I take the prize.
And for me, who isn't satisfied without ten hours of sleep, there was no greater agony.
Traveling, in a different place every day and in order to be able to perform on the same day as we arrived, we had to get up at seven in the morning.
(For me, ten o'clock is the perfect waking time. So seven felt like the middle of the night.)
We'd leave the hotel at eight, travel by train or bus for three or four hours, and arrive at our theater destination.
By the time two performances were over, it was usually past nine o'clock at night.
Faster than a speeding bullet, faster than the audience, we fly out of the theater (If we couldn't do it, we couldn't participate in the tour. After the last performance we put away our own costumes, closed up our stage makeup things in our luggage, cleaned off our stage makeup in an instant, changed into our normal clothes, set the luggage we would need at the hotel outside of the dressing room: all of this in about five minutes.) and get onto the bus headed for the hotel.
You eat dinner, shower, and sleep.
No matter how quickly you finish your preparations, it's usually past midnight.
This is the usual schedule. At the time, even though I was rarely horizontal or getting much sleep, I sadly wasn't the type of person who could get any sleep while traveling.
This went on for three days, and by the third day I was half asleep on stage; I apologize to the audience on those days.
*
Whenever I think of going on a national tour, I wonder what it seemed like to the people witnessing the sudden appearance of our troupe of blonds appearing in their quiet towns.
(About half of Takarasiennes have dyed hair. In fact, my hair right now is bright gold. We dye it for the performances, never for our own preferences or to make ourselves conspicuous.)
Some day I'd like to ask them.
Anyway, get three Takarasienne together and we're all blahblah, haha, louder than a group of school girls.
When this troupe gets into a train car, there couldn't be anything more unfortunate for everyone else riding in the car, don't you think?
To those of you living in those areas: Beware the blonds!
*
Every day we performed in a different location, every day in a different theater. Some of them are theaters nearly as small as school auditoriums, some are super-modern, gorgeous and luxurious large theaters; there are many kinds.
(There are a lot of super-modern theaters unexpectedly out in the middle of fields. And in a lot of large towns the theaters are old and small. What kind of phenomenon is this?)
And because of these differences in theater size, the incident at the wedding hall occurred in cold Aomori.
My role was that of a young lord who was hated by his father, and there is a scene where he fights with his father in a wedding hall because he is being forced into a political marriage.
Myself and the princess I was to marry, my father and the advisers, and several ladies-in-waiting were arranged on a series of tiered platforms, like those used to display Hina-Matsuri dolls.² Seven of us in all were sitting there.
Every time when we arrived at a theater I would go and look at the stage before the performance to get a sense of it, and this one was quite narrow, and so I took that into consideration, but,well, it was so cold when the performance began that I completely forgot.
Anyway, it was cold.
Although it was snowing outside, it was the end of May so the heaters had all been turned off.
And then we finally arrived at the marriage scene.
I did a quick costume change after the previous scene, searched out my own cushion, and sat.
No problem sitting, but there was a feeling of oppression that wasn't usual.
And when Asazuki Mario-san, who was sitting beside me playing the role of the father, spoke her lines, her voice had a strange quiver to it, as if I were hearing it frightfully close to my ear.
When I was next going to rebut my father, I moved from facing forward to face my father, and wouldn't you know that Buchi-san (Asazuki)'s face was right before my eyes!
I was so surprised that it took me a moment to catch my breath and say the aggressive lines I needed to in a quavering voice.
Please imagine how all the soldiers and ladies looked squashed together side-by-side on the stage.
We sat looking like we were riding together on a packed morning rush-hour train.
In that tight space we had a close relationship, not at all the postures of a fighting father and son, and how must we have looked to those around us, I suddenly wanted to know.
In my spare moments of free time, when I looked around, the actresses below us were reacting to how funny we looked with shaking shoulders, looking resolutely down and smiling.
Seeing everyone else laughing, I forged on, which was pretty close to being on the rack.
But father and son had a mission to speak their lines and finish out the scene.
With quavering voices we worked to absolutely not look into each others' eyes, sometimes feeling as if we wanted to laugh aloud, and I would clasp my knees and zip my lips to prevent it.
Thanks to that, I was able to completely forget the cold, and even if it got me sacked, I'd have to look back on it and want to laugh.
*
The stages of the tour theaters were polished to a perfect shine.
Some of them almost seemed to have been waxed, they were so slippery.
In the case of a Japanese-style play, we wear straw and wooden sandals, which I hardly need to write but will.
These sandals and the slippery stages had a good chemistry, and I would forget they were for walking and have an illusion that they were skates, and suddenly the stage was converted into an ice skating rink.
The onnayaku mince along when they are walking and have little danger, while we otokoyaku would sometimes need to run across the stage like an arrow.
Moreover, the word going around was about how this play was about ninja.
A ninja who walks slowly won't leave much of an impression. And even those who weren't ninja had to run during some of the battle scenes.
There were many hazardous scenes.
Many methods for anti-skid devices were pondered, such as putting duck tape on the bottom of the sandals, dampening them with water, or even building up calluses on the bottoms of feet and toes, but they didn't have much effect.
There really wasn't much you could do but steal yourself for the inevitable tumble.
And then one day it happened.
It was a scene of sword-training in the garden of the keep.
I was the one receiving instruction, and Rumi-san (Setouchi)³ was the instructor.
We were the only two on stage.
The location, though I'm belaboring the point a bit, was unluckily in the garden of the keep, meaning it was an outdoor scene.
I was looking manly in my sandals, with my hakama slightly rolled up and my sleeves tied back, and I shouted "Eeyah!" as I brandished my wooden practice sword at Rumi-san and attacked.
I was running forward, aimed at Rumi-san's face, but somehow ended up gazing up at the ceiling.
When I recovered my awareness, I had come sliding in at Rumi-san's feet.
It was a champion slide, better than anything a professional baseball player could have done.
(I would definitely like to recommend wearing grass sandals to all professional baseball players. They're safer than cleats, and you can do some great slides.... But you couldn't play baseball on that stage. I take it back.)
The audience that saw that--let's call it perfect--slide, were in a great state of excitement.
I thought it would be best to try and smooth over the fall, but it was very clear I was horizontal and it was impossible.
That day was near the mid-point of the tour, the pace was relentless, and it was the peak of my exhaustion.
When exhaustion piles up, people become weak against laughter.
(This is something I can say after many long years of cultivated experience in Takarazuka, that your condition is five or six times more likely to laugh.)
If the audience laughs, it makes me laugh as well. I was exhausted, so I didn't have the energy to fight off laughter.
When they saw me laughing on stage, the audience suddenly broke into an uproar again.
Amidst this cycle, I was able to move the play forward a bit, mumbling my lines as I laughed.
The ones I feel sorry for are the princess and her ladies who came out in the middle of all this.
Without knowing why the audience was in stitches, they came along with their serious performances.
I was thinking that we had to regain our footing, but the princess was so serious that it was strange, and the circle connected and I was off once more.
The scene finally ended amid a maelstrom of laughter.
Rumi-san and I exited the scene as if fleeing, without much resemblance to a performance.
After the performance, Rumi-san and I were really put through the ringer by the kumichou4.
(1) ken-8 (kenkyuusha-8) = In her eighth year as a performer in the Revue. The performance was 美しき忍びの季節 (Beautiful, Secret Seasons).
(2) Hina-Matsuri is a holiday in Japan. Check out the Wikipedia article for an image of a traditional display such as she's referring to.
(3) Setouchi Miya was top star of Star Troupe at the time.
(4) kumichou = The longest-serving member of the Revue in that particular show.
[ Dream of Takarazuka table of contents ]
When I was ken-8, I participated in a national tour for the first time.¹
At two months, it was a fairly long performance run, and we traveled around Japan from Aomori in the north to Okinawa in the south.
The performance started in the beginning of May in hot Fukuoka.
But when we went to Aomori at the end of May, I was shocked to find it snowing.
I was able to really comprehend how far Japan stretches as a country, so it was educational. But although I say that, and although we went all around Japan, all I was really able to see were the hotels and theaters in the area, which is a pity.
When you participate in a tour as an underling, you help transport the upperclassmen's luggage, organize the props, distribute hand towels, and have such a mountain of things to do that it is hard work, but luckily I had just squeaked in as an upperclassman, so I had it easy.
But both the top stars and the underlings alike suffered the horrors of early mornings.
Takarasienne have a disproportionate number of people who are terrible at getting up early, but I take the prize.
And for me, who isn't satisfied without ten hours of sleep, there was no greater agony.
Traveling, in a different place every day and in order to be able to perform on the same day as we arrived, we had to get up at seven in the morning.
(For me, ten o'clock is the perfect waking time. So seven felt like the middle of the night.)
We'd leave the hotel at eight, travel by train or bus for three or four hours, and arrive at our theater destination.
By the time two performances were over, it was usually past nine o'clock at night.
Faster than a speeding bullet, faster than the audience, we fly out of the theater (If we couldn't do it, we couldn't participate in the tour. After the last performance we put away our own costumes, closed up our stage makeup things in our luggage, cleaned off our stage makeup in an instant, changed into our normal clothes, set the luggage we would need at the hotel outside of the dressing room: all of this in about five minutes.) and get onto the bus headed for the hotel.
You eat dinner, shower, and sleep.
No matter how quickly you finish your preparations, it's usually past midnight.
This is the usual schedule. At the time, even though I was rarely horizontal or getting much sleep, I sadly wasn't the type of person who could get any sleep while traveling.
This went on for three days, and by the third day I was half asleep on stage; I apologize to the audience on those days.
*
Whenever I think of going on a national tour, I wonder what it seemed like to the people witnessing the sudden appearance of our troupe of blonds appearing in their quiet towns.
(About half of Takarasiennes have dyed hair. In fact, my hair right now is bright gold. We dye it for the performances, never for our own preferences or to make ourselves conspicuous.)
Some day I'd like to ask them.
Anyway, get three Takarasienne together and we're all blahblah, haha, louder than a group of school girls.
When this troupe gets into a train car, there couldn't be anything more unfortunate for everyone else riding in the car, don't you think?
To those of you living in those areas: Beware the blonds!
*
Every day we performed in a different location, every day in a different theater. Some of them are theaters nearly as small as school auditoriums, some are super-modern, gorgeous and luxurious large theaters; there are many kinds.
(There are a lot of super-modern theaters unexpectedly out in the middle of fields. And in a lot of large towns the theaters are old and small. What kind of phenomenon is this?)
And because of these differences in theater size, the incident at the wedding hall occurred in cold Aomori.
My role was that of a young lord who was hated by his father, and there is a scene where he fights with his father in a wedding hall because he is being forced into a political marriage.
Myself and the princess I was to marry, my father and the advisers, and several ladies-in-waiting were arranged on a series of tiered platforms, like those used to display Hina-Matsuri dolls.² Seven of us in all were sitting there.
Every time when we arrived at a theater I would go and look at the stage before the performance to get a sense of it, and this one was quite narrow, and so I took that into consideration, but,well, it was so cold when the performance began that I completely forgot.
Anyway, it was cold.
Although it was snowing outside, it was the end of May so the heaters had all been turned off.
And then we finally arrived at the marriage scene.
I did a quick costume change after the previous scene, searched out my own cushion, and sat.
No problem sitting, but there was a feeling of oppression that wasn't usual.
And when Asazuki Mario-san, who was sitting beside me playing the role of the father, spoke her lines, her voice had a strange quiver to it, as if I were hearing it frightfully close to my ear.
When I was next going to rebut my father, I moved from facing forward to face my father, and wouldn't you know that Buchi-san (Asazuki)'s face was right before my eyes!
I was so surprised that it took me a moment to catch my breath and say the aggressive lines I needed to in a quavering voice.
Please imagine how all the soldiers and ladies looked squashed together side-by-side on the stage.
We sat looking like we were riding together on a packed morning rush-hour train.
In that tight space we had a close relationship, not at all the postures of a fighting father and son, and how must we have looked to those around us, I suddenly wanted to know.
In my spare moments of free time, when I looked around, the actresses below us were reacting to how funny we looked with shaking shoulders, looking resolutely down and smiling.
Seeing everyone else laughing, I forged on, which was pretty close to being on the rack.
But father and son had a mission to speak their lines and finish out the scene.
With quavering voices we worked to absolutely not look into each others' eyes, sometimes feeling as if we wanted to laugh aloud, and I would clasp my knees and zip my lips to prevent it.
Thanks to that, I was able to completely forget the cold, and even if it got me sacked, I'd have to look back on it and want to laugh.
*
The stages of the tour theaters were polished to a perfect shine.
Some of them almost seemed to have been waxed, they were so slippery.
In the case of a Japanese-style play, we wear straw and wooden sandals, which I hardly need to write but will.
These sandals and the slippery stages had a good chemistry, and I would forget they were for walking and have an illusion that they were skates, and suddenly the stage was converted into an ice skating rink.
The onnayaku mince along when they are walking and have little danger, while we otokoyaku would sometimes need to run across the stage like an arrow.
Moreover, the word going around was about how this play was about ninja.
A ninja who walks slowly won't leave much of an impression. And even those who weren't ninja had to run during some of the battle scenes.
There were many hazardous scenes.
Many methods for anti-skid devices were pondered, such as putting duck tape on the bottom of the sandals, dampening them with water, or even building up calluses on the bottoms of feet and toes, but they didn't have much effect.
There really wasn't much you could do but steal yourself for the inevitable tumble.
And then one day it happened.
It was a scene of sword-training in the garden of the keep.
I was the one receiving instruction, and Rumi-san (Setouchi)³ was the instructor.
We were the only two on stage.
The location, though I'm belaboring the point a bit, was unluckily in the garden of the keep, meaning it was an outdoor scene.
I was looking manly in my sandals, with my hakama slightly rolled up and my sleeves tied back, and I shouted "Eeyah!" as I brandished my wooden practice sword at Rumi-san and attacked.
I was running forward, aimed at Rumi-san's face, but somehow ended up gazing up at the ceiling.
When I recovered my awareness, I had come sliding in at Rumi-san's feet.
It was a champion slide, better than anything a professional baseball player could have done.
(I would definitely like to recommend wearing grass sandals to all professional baseball players. They're safer than cleats, and you can do some great slides.... But you couldn't play baseball on that stage. I take it back.)
The audience that saw that--let's call it perfect--slide, were in a great state of excitement.
I thought it would be best to try and smooth over the fall, but it was very clear I was horizontal and it was impossible.
That day was near the mid-point of the tour, the pace was relentless, and it was the peak of my exhaustion.
When exhaustion piles up, people become weak against laughter.
(This is something I can say after many long years of cultivated experience in Takarazuka, that your condition is five or six times more likely to laugh.)
If the audience laughs, it makes me laugh as well. I was exhausted, so I didn't have the energy to fight off laughter.
When they saw me laughing on stage, the audience suddenly broke into an uproar again.
Amidst this cycle, I was able to move the play forward a bit, mumbling my lines as I laughed.
The ones I feel sorry for are the princess and her ladies who came out in the middle of all this.
Without knowing why the audience was in stitches, they came along with their serious performances.
I was thinking that we had to regain our footing, but the princess was so serious that it was strange, and the circle connected and I was off once more.
The scene finally ended amid a maelstrom of laughter.
Rumi-san and I exited the scene as if fleeing, without much resemblance to a performance.
After the performance, Rumi-san and I were really put through the ringer by the kumichou4.
(1) ken-8 (kenkyuusha-8) = In her eighth year as a performer in the Revue. The performance was 美しき忍びの季節 (Beautiful, Secret Seasons).
(2) Hina-Matsuri is a holiday in Japan. Check out the Wikipedia article for an image of a traditional display such as she's referring to.
(3) Setouchi Miya was top star of Star Troupe at the time.
(4) kumichou = The longest-serving member of the Revue in that particular show.
[ Dream of Takarazuka table of contents ]
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