Performances Despised, Performances Praised: "Kawahara Beggars" and the Age of Television (1950s-1970s)

Performances Despised, Performances Praised: "Kawahara Beggars" and the Age of Television (1950s-1970s)

The status of popular performing arts in postwar Japan, despite its remarkable revival and expansion, has long borne the origins of social scorn. The term "kawahara beggar" is symbolic of this. This term has been used since the Edo period (1603-1867) as a derogatory term for those who made their living as entertainers and performers among the non-humans and the discriminated who were positioned outside the framework of the status system, and at the same time, it was consistent with the pride of the people in the performing arts.

From the 1960s to the 1970s, television penetrated deeply into homes, and entertainers began to appear in people's lives as "friends in the living room. The arts entered the living room and were exposed to the public without the high hurdles of movies and stage performances. Simultaneously with this rapid popularization, the social meaning and position of the performing arts changed. In the process, however, the "discriminatory origins" of the performing arts in the past became less visible, while at the same time, some people began to talk about them consciously.

Shoichi Ozawa, an actor and storyteller of the history of the performing arts, took on himself the sense of humility and pride that lies at the root of the art by saying, "I am a beggar from the riverbanks. This was in the spirit that the performing arts belonged to those who lived on the margins of society, who did not follow the norms of the center, and who were therefore free to speak their minds. Ozawa paradoxically boasted that it was because of this "lowly origin" that entertainers were able to distance themselves from authority and institutions.

Some critics and cultural figures of the time strongly respected this self-awareness. One contributor wrote, "Shoichi Ozawa calls himself a beggar from the riverbanks, so I can't cut him. That's why I can't cut him. This is a composition in which celebrities avoid criticism by placing themselves in the lowest strata, rather than confronting the "cultural figures from above," and this avoidance itself is a form of criticism.

On the other hand, this kind of self-production is deeply related to the nature of the TV medium. Television is a medium that sells "closeness" and "friendliness," and the celebrities who appear on it are redefined as "the interesting aunts and uncles next door," rather than the "special presence" of the traditional entertainers. However, not a few people were aware of the historical discriminatory nature of the entertainment industry that had crept into the "lightness" of the media.

At that time in Japan, prejudice and discrimination against people from the discriminated Buraku still persisted in society. The National Heisei Sha movement began before World War II, and in the 1960s, the Dowa project was in full swing, but the world of performing arts was not only a refuge for such "invisible origins," but also a hotbed of discrimination. In some of the traditional performing arts and the world of "yosegei," such as striptease, manzai, kodan, and nankyoku, the origins of these people were shared as a tacit understanding, but not publicly discussed.

That is why Shoichi Ozawa's words, "I am a beggar from the riverbanks," were an act of bringing the voices of those who had been relegated to the margins of history into the new public space of postwar Japan, television. The social impact of these words was neither a mere self-deprecation nor an art form of backhandedness. It was a quiet but pointed questioning of what art is, where expression comes from, and where it should go.