Bunraku Katsura and Views on the Performing Arts: The 1960s and 1970s: Sensitivity Living on the Borderline of Geijutsu and Eros

Bunraku Katsura and Views on the Performing Arts: The 1960s and 1970s: Sensitivity Living on the Borderline of Geijutsu and Eros
In the 1960s and 1970s, Japan was in the midst of a wave of postwar reconstruction and rapid economic growth, and sexual expression and the performing arts were at odds with each other. With the spread of television and magazines, sex and laughter began to appear before the masses, but how they were perceived differed greatly from generation to generation and from individual to individual. Akiyuki Nosaka said that the reason he was not attracted to pornographic literature was that Katsura Bunraku was there. Bunraku Katsura, a master of Edo rakugo (traditional Japanese comic storytelling), did not use explicit descriptions, but his stories had a sex appeal and a sense of human comedy in the pauses between words and in the hints he used. For Nosaka, such refined storytelling was true eroticism and the dignity of language. Even in an age when striptease and harumoto were prominent, Nosaka's sensibility was more toward the depths of the performing arts. The reality that Bunraku s
torytelling was allowed and Harumoto was outed meant that the social value of sexual expression changed dramatically depending on whether it was recognized as "art" or not. Nosaka's view of the performing arts was a perspective that viewed eros as part of human understanding, and was an expression of a cultural position that sought to find its own place between the media environment of the time and the restrictions on expression.