Sign-In
Cart
Enter a Samurai: Kawakami Otojiro and Japanese Theatre in the West, Volume 1
Paperback
Publisher Price: $75.95
ISBN13: 9781604943672
Publisher: Wheatmark Inc
Published: Mar 15 2011
Pages: 596
Weight: 2.57
Height: 1.21 Width: 8.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
Looking back to the last years of the nineteenth century, veteran producer-director Joseph L. Anderson draws upon a monumental body of research gleaned from libraries and archives in seven countries to introduce the Japanese theatrical impresario Kawakami Otojiro. In 1899, Kawakami, his wife -- the inspired dancer and actress Sadayakko -- and his troupe went on epochal performance tours of the U.S. and Europe, introducing audiences to new forms of dramatic art and dance previously unseen in the West.
Possessed of boundless energy and limitless imagination, Kawakami was a pioneer who quite literally viewed the world as his stage. In the closing decade of an all-too-brief life, Kawakami introduced major reforms of Japanese performance and the theatre business.
Scholarly, witty, and filled with fascinating insights into the culture and conventions of fin de siecle America, Europe, and Japan, Enter a Samurai opens a door into a little-known, yet vitally important era of modern theatrical history.
About the Author
Joseph L. Anderson has been enjoying Japanese and American plays and films for over seven decades. During the 1950s and 1960s he wrote for and was an editorial board member on many little film magazines. Later, as professor of film in the Ohio University College of Fine Arts and adjunct in its Comparative Arts doctoral program in the early 1960s, he pioneered university-level studies of Japanese cinema. He has a BA in history from Antioch College and an MA from Ohio State University, and he was a language student at ICU, Tokyo. Anderson is the principal coauthor of The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (in print for fifty years).
Anderson was chief advisor for the Tokyo Broadcasting System academic program in Japanese Broadcasting, Media, and Culture and taught at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He has been an assistant director and dialogue coach on American feature films shot in Japan as well as a director of documentary films, a Variety stringer, and a writer of subtitles for Japanese films. In Hollywood and at WGBH Boston, he developed computer-generated subtitles for feature motion pictures (the technique in use today).
During his career, he directed two independent American feature films, was an outside producer for ABC and CBS news specials, director of special projects at the [American] Art Theatre Guild, Mid-West producer for the Candid Camera Company, a puppeteer, a neophyte comedian in burlesque, an actor in lesser touring companies, director of a children's theatre, and an English language benshi (live narrator of Japanese silent films). In his teens he was a professional scenic artist, stage carpenter, and minor actor with several Equity summer stock theatres.
Anderson is now a retired vice president of WGBH Boston, the organization that for several decades has produced more than a fourth of the television programs seen nationwide on PBS. In 1989, he received the Japan Prize (Nihonsho) for WGBH and was a Japan Foundation senior fellow in 1975.
1 different editions
Also available
Enter a Samurai: Kawakami Otojiro and Japanese Theatre in the West, Volume 2
Anderson, Joseph L.
Paperback
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Pete Welding (ED.)
Toby Byron (ED.)
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
Trump, Mary L.
Hardcover
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Cooper, Christian
Hardcover
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Wittman, Robert K.
Kinney, David
Paperback
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover