VI
Socialistic tendencies, dissatisfaction with the oppression of the governing class, often found expression in Kabuki plays. A favourite piece of this kind has the champion of the downtrodden, Banzuiin Chobei, for hero.
Chobei is at the head of a business that supplies men to feudal lords, kago bearers, attendants to travel in the long trains that escorted the daimyo in their goings and comings to and from the capital. His men are loyal to him and fearless, and when they encounter the samurai of a hatamoto, or direct retainer of the Shogun, called Mizuno, an evil character, there is a skirmish and Chobei’s side is victorious.
Mizuno and Chobei happen to meet in the theatre, the Murayama-za, one of Yedo’s first shibai. The play is progressing on the old-fashioned stage, when a drunkard bursts in through the audience and causes a disturbance. Chobei springs out of a box in the pit to help straighten things out. At this juncture Mizuno appears in an upper box reserved for the gentry to the left of the stage, and they exchange words. From this time onward Chobei is a marked man.
Banzuiin Chobei, a man of the people, rôle by Matsumoto Koshiro.
Mizuno’s messenger comes to Chobei’s dwelling, and delivers an invitation to dinner. Chobei’s wife does not wish him to accept, but he cannot refuse, as he would be taken for a coward. He says farewell to his wife and little son, gives his men last instructions, and sets forth.
Within Mizuno’s residence, Chobei is received with every sign of hospitality. He is unafraid, and behaves with the courtesy of manner that belongs to a man accustomed to stand up for what is just and right. An attendant purposely spills sake over his clothing, and then recommends that he take a bath. The maid leads him to the bath-room. The steam is issuing forth from the big tub. He is just about to enter when he is attacked. Chobei, with only his fists to defend himself, lays about him, and five men are stretched on the floor, the stage bath-room being considerably larger than that in real life.
The host then attacks, and even he is no match for the alert Chobei. Left alone he might have fought off his enemies, but one of the men strikes him from behind, and so he dies,—a victim to the treachery of that day.
Mizuno was afterwards ordered by the Government to commit harakiri to atone for this and other crimes. So says history, but Chobei’s memory is kept fresh by generations of actors.
Still another play of the people is that of Sakura Sogoro. He was the headman of a village not far from Tokyo. The people were oppressed by the feudal lord, and groaned under the taxes imposed until famine and destitution stared them in the face.
Sogoro decides to go to Yedo to present a petition to the Shogun, knowing that his life will be forfeit for this act of insubordination. When he returns, his wife and four sons are executed at the command of the daimyo.
He bids good-bye to his wife on a snowy evening, and tries to induce her to accept a divorce, and so escape the punishment that is bound to overtake the family. But this she refuses to do, preferring to share his fate. Sogoro trudging through the snow-drifts, with his eldest son clinging to him, and his wife and little ones looking forth from the open shoji, is a typical Kabuki farewell scene.
He knocks at the rude hut, where an old watchman is trying to sleep beside a few embers of charcoal, and guarding the boat that is chained to a stake just below on the marshy lagoon—or blue and white cotton cloth which represents the historical watercourse that bore Sogoro away on his desperate mission. Sogoro is recognised with joy by the watchman, who tries his best to dissuade him from going, but at last agrees to row him on his way, and breaks the chain, thus defying the law of the daimyo.
The direct appeal is made when the Shogun, after a hawking expedition, stops to rest at the shrine sacred to his ancestors in what is now known as Uyeno Park (Tokyo). The retinue is passing over a bridge connecting two red-lacquered buildings. Sogoro throws his petition, which a sympathetic follower of the Shogun secretes in his sleeve, and the procession passes on, leaving Sogoro bound, a martyr to the cause of the suffering country people.
Whenever this play is produced in Tokyo, the actors taking part repair to the district of Sakura where Sogoro lived and pay their respects to his shrine, likewise a little shrine is erected within the theatre where offerings of sake, fruit, and vegetables are made before the spirit of the man who died that the wrongs of the people might be righted.
Nakamura Kichiyemon as Sakura Sogoro, the Village Head who sacrificed his life for the good of the people.