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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
For more than two decades I had the pleasure and the privilege of working with Kyoko Selden on Japanese texts relating to the history of Italian opera in Japan. We started with translations involving the reception of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and then began working on Takarazuka musical adaptations of the opera. Although administrative duties made it difficult to realize a book project Kyoko's translation of the 1953 Takarazuka Chōchō-san sandaiki (Three-Generation Chōchō-san) furnished me with the basis for a conference presentation, and we eventually collaborated on an English edition of its libretto. That edition was the result of an extensive and—for me—instructive series of revisions and discussions with Kyoko about the intricate relationships between source and target languages. We spent stimulating afternoons over coffee interrogating texts in Italian, Japanese, and English, ultimately working through several complete revisions. Lamentably, that kind of collaboration was less fully realized in the following translation, which we discussed only once. I have edited it here with the generous help of Lili Selden, and revised or added footnotes, in one case deliberately juxtaposing two viewpoints. I believe I also speak for Kyoko in hoping that readers will find it an invitation to continue and refine our dialogue on the transpositions of Italian and Japanese music-dramas into widely different cultural contexts.
1 Arthur Groos, “Return of the Native: Japan in Madama Butterfly / Madama Butterfly in Japan,” Cambridge Opera Journal 1 (1989): 167-94.
2 “Madama Butterfly and the Atom Bomb: The Takarazuka Three Generation Chōchō-san,” unpublished conference paper, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2001.
3 The “Three-Generation Chōchō-san” was published in Studi pucciniani 4, ed. Arthur Groos and Virgilio Bernardoni (Florence: Olschki, 2010), 143-78.
4 For more information on the Takarazuka Revue, see Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Maria Grăjdian-Mengel, “Die Takarazuka Revue oder die Überwindung der Tradition,” Studien zur traditionellen Musik Japans 11 (Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 2005); Leonie R. Stickland, Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan's Takarazuka Revue (Melbourne: Trans Pacific, 2008).
5 It was followed by a performance-filling second part, “From Meiji to Shōwa,” consisting of eleven choreographed songs from that period: “Miyasan, Miyasan” (early Meiji), “Suteteko” (1880), “Oppekepe” (1890), “En kai na” (1881), “Michi wa 680 ri”(1894), “Sanosa-bushi” (1899),“ Strike-bushi” (1900), “Rappa-bushi” (1904), “Koko wa okuni o nanbyakuri” (1905), “Kachūsa no uta” (1914), “Doko made mo” (1916).
6 Romanized Japanese text has been provided in the translation for songs in the Nagasaki dialect. In addition, the children speak Nagasaki dialect and Gorō sometimes switches to Nagasaki dialect when addressing them.
7 Groos, “Return of the Native,” 180-82. On the opera production, see the advertisement in the Asahi Shinbun, 25 May 1931, and the review by Mitsuru Ushiyama on May 28 that year.
8 The kite flying competition that takes place in Nagasaki every April is said to be one of the three most famous events in the port city. The other two are the Bon lantern floating held on July 15 in the old lunar calendar (now August) and the Okunchi festival of Suwa Shrine on September 9, 10, and 11 (now October 9, 10, and 11).
9 Nagasaki means “Long Peninsula.”
10 Tengu are goblins with long noses that usually live in mountains. Americans and Europeans were demonized in Japanese cartoons and art as tengu.
11 A Dharma kite is decorated with a picture of the Indian priest Bodhidharma, and, in Nagasaki, it is a humming kite.
12 In kite battles, strings coated with powdered glass and glue were used to slice through the strings of opponents' kites.
13 Kite-flying term in Nagasaki dialect.
14 The Meiji expression used for “foreigner” here is “ijin-san” (literally, Mr. Stranger).
15 Synonymous with geisha here.
16 Hanamichi is an elevated passageway that leads from the rear of the theater through the audience to the stage.
17 An adaptation from rhythmic phrases used for a game similar to “rock, paper, scissors.” Some nineteenth-century illustrations and musical examples are collected online at Kotechai, Dodoitsu, December 3, 2012, available at http://kotechai.blog69.fc2.com/blog-category-15.html (accessed February 5, 2014). Here “chon” puns on Chō and “ochon” on Ochō with the female prefix. “Nanoha” (leaves of rape or similar greens) stands for “nanohana” (small, yellow flowers of rape or similar greens), which is traditionally associated with white cabbage butterflies. Chonkina was also the name of a striptease dance associated with prostitutes in treaty-port pleasure quarters, widely known in the West. For a description, see the chapter “Chonkina” in the John Paris novel, Kimono (London: W. Collins, 1921), 57-65. Westerners in the know may have winked at the allusions in the Harry Greenbank / Sidney Jones operetta, The Geisha: A Story of a Tea House (London: Hopwood, 1896), where in “Chon kina” (Nr. 13, 77-84), Molly sings how for “extra-special prices” she can “dance for you in quite another way.” Some version of Chonkina was apparently performed at the end of the first Japanese performance of Madama Butterfly at the Imperial Theater in Tokyo in January 1914, scandalizing members of the audience who knew of its treaty-port associations. See “Return of the Native,” 179-80. This first Takarazuka adaptation may be attempting to repatriate the song's more ingenuous origins on the wedding-day of a “lovely, innocent girl” (Pinkerton), although the fact that Gorō sings it could have less elevated resonances.
18 A Japanese version of “Lightly Row” / “Alles Mai, macht der Mai.”
19 The operatic Bonzo (Italian for bonze, Buddhist monk) has been replaced by Bōjō, a more convincingly Japanese name without religious connotations. In fact, all the opera's garbled references to Japanese religious practice have been eliminated.
20 The family name Suzuki, one element of the opera that bothered Japanese audiences because of the awkward and distancing usage of a last name, has been replaced by the more personal Osuzu (Suzu from Suzuki, plus the preface O used at the time in familiar versions of names for people who are inferior or younger). Relatedly, Chōchō is called Ochō by the people who are close to her. She is alternatively called Chōchō and the abbreviated Chō.
21 White is a color associated with death and mourning in Japan and China and used in funeral rituals.
22 What has been rendered as “our forefathers” more literally means “our ancestral tablets,” as in tablets with postmortem Buddhist names, in a miniature family shrine.
23 An autumn song in literary Japanese in two lines comprised of 5/7/5/7/5 syllables.
24 Chōchō's dance continues in 7/5 syllables in literary Japanese.
25 In a Japanese-style room, the tokonoma is a built-in recessed space where a scroll is hung and a flower arrangement is placed.
26 Shelf with a small altar for offering prayers and oranges, sake, and other foods to the memory of deceased family members.
27 The robins nesting in spring in the opera have been replaced by swallows—the latter would be more familiar to a Japanese audience and can also be a harbinger of summer as well as spring (as in Scene 1), coinciding with the production of the musical in August and its references to the Bon festival.
28 The source text's “Ō, kamisama” is a reference to the Judeo-Christian God, suggesting that Chōchō has converted to Christianity. This is contrasted to Ōsaki's incantatory exclamation “Away, thunder, away!” (kuwabara kuwabara) in Scene 1.
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