Nogi Maresuke, who led the Siege of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War, committed ritual suicide with his wife on September 13, 1912, the day of the Imperial Funeral of the Emperor Meiji. Subsequently, as Japan faced 15-years of war in the Asia-Pacific, the figure of Nogi would become the subject of works in a number of media including kodan (traditional oral narratives), rokyoku (narrative songs), and movies, widely becoming the personification of a "military god" in the popular imagination. In theater, the best known of such works is General Nogi (1929‒1937) by Mayama Seika. Nogi, who was portrayed in the flesh by Ichikawa Sadanji II as the embodiment of a military god wrapped in a soldier's finery, is embraced as a "tragic hero" invested with the sadness of a single human being who himself had lost a son. Following the war, primarily by means of depictions in Shiba Ryotaro's Junshi (1967) and Saka no Ue no Kumo (Clouds Above the Hill； 1968-1972), Nogi's image would come to be established as an incompetent and mediocre general； however, I wish to consider the duality of Nogi in theater with reference to the depiction of Nogi as a "buffoon" playing the part of a "warrior" for the Emperor found in Inoue Hisashi's Shimijimi Nippon /General Nogi (1979).
|
