Keiichiro Akagi, AGAIN - Ghosts of the Screen Revived in Asakusa, 1977

Keiichiro Akagi, AGAIN - Ghosts of the Screen Revived in Asakusa, 1977

In the spring of 1977, a memory of the silver screen itself appeared on stage at the Asakusa Mokumakan. Keiichiro Akagi AGAIN, an avant-garde play directed by Tohei Gyoda, was an attempt to bring back the vision of Keiichiro Akagi (aka Tony), the movie star who died prematurely 16 years earlier, and to question the image of the "young hero" created in postwar Japan from the bottom up.

Keiichiro Akagi died in an accident at Nikkatsu Studios in 1961. He was 22 years old at the time. As one of Nikkatsu's "Three Men," he was, along with Yujiro Ishihara, the object of admiration among young people in the postwar era. His death was glorified as "the pure combustion of youth," and he became the prototype for the "tragic idol" in postwar society. In the late 1970s, however, Japan was losing the afterglow of its rapid economic growth, and the entertainment industry was shifting its focus to television. At such a time, Gyoda Tohei chose "The Rebirth of Akagi" as his subject, sharply satirizing the idolatry of youth.

The setting is an abstracted abandoned movie theater. In the darkness, the audience receives fragments of Akagi's images, tape recordings, and the actors' voices. Electronic music by Tsuyoshi Takago plays, and Rokuro Oyama, Jun Tobe, and others shout to the audience, "Don't forget Tony. At that moment, the boundary between the screen and reality collapses, and the viewer is shaken by a "yearning for the past" and an "addiction to the imaginary.

This was not a mere memorial play, but a critique of the 1970s, an era in which symbols of the past were consumed and nostalgia became a business. The location of the Asakusa Mokubakan is also symbolic. Once a mecca for popular theater and film, Asakusa was in decline amidst a wave of redevelopment that left only faint echoes of old culture. It was an irony of the times that a "play about the rebirth of the dead" was staged there.

Many in the audience were confused, some enthusiastic. The theater magazine "Teatro" called it "an outrage that stroked postwar nostalgia," while "Bijutsu Techo" praised it as "an experiment in staging the critical juncture between death and the media. This work, which oscillated between popular culture and avant-garde art, eventually influenced the small theater movement.

The rebirth of the myth of Keiichiro Akagi was at the same time an act of burying the fantasy of postwar Japan's youth. This work, which questioned the meaning of "standing again" against the image of idols mass-produced by television and commercial films, was a play of memory, a prayer-like experiment to break the boundary between fiction and reality. The echo of "AGAIN" echoing through the Mokubakan in Asakusa was a symbolic moment of the 70's culture, when youth itself was set ablaze on stage.