A Voice that Cracks the Darkness: Tetsu Yamazaki and "Tsumpo Sajiki" (Summer 1974)

A Voice that Cracks the Darkness: Tetsu Yamazaki and "Tsumpo Sajiki" (Summer 1974)
In the heat of the underground theater of the 1970s, playwright and director Tetsu Yamazaki led the theater company "Tsunposajiki" and created the stage play "Assassination. This play depicted "the karma of a man possessed by the magic of the sword" and "the cycle of violence" against the backdrop of the turmoil of the Bakumatsu Restoration, and was a wildly poetic play that symbolized the shadow of the Japanese society of the time. His plays were not mere period dramas, but attempts to express the pathology of the times through the human body.
In 1974, Japan was at the end of its rapid economic growth, and the generation that had experienced the setback of the Zenkyoto movement was moving away from "politics" and toward "expression. In the midst of this trend, Yamazaki pursued the possibilities of theater to break through the social blockage. In his plays, anger and despair quietly flare up, and the audience is confronted with the "absurdity of life" and the "inevitability of violence. The sword fights in "Assassination" symbolized the political chaos of his time and the inner impulses of human beings.
Performances took place at the Nanatsuji Kyodo Studio in Nagoya, Shinshu University, and Meiji University, and were deeply connected to the local city and student culture. Tetsu Yamazaki's theater was also a movement to bring back to the stage "the body of the people," grounded in reality, rather than the urban fantasy of Shuji Terayama or Juro Karajuro.
What Yamazaki tried to portray was not violence but the "cry of life" at its root. In 1970s Japan, where defeat and rebirth, chaos and hope mingled, Yamazaki's theater continued to be the voice of the times, echoing from the depths of the darkness.