Hijikata Yoshi

Hijikata Yoshi, 1948

Hijikata Yoshi ( Japanese 土方 与 志 ; born April 16, 1898 in Tokyo Prefecture ; † June 4, 1959 ) was a Japanese theater director.

Life

Hijikata met Osanai Kaoru in 1920 , whose pupil and enthusiastic follower he became. In 1922 he embarked on a ten-year trip to Europe. In Berlin he got to know the works of expressionist writers such as Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser . The Great Kanto earthquake caused him to break off his trip in 1923. During a stay on the return trip, he saw a production by Meyerhold in Moscow and was very impressed by the theater in the Soviet Union.

With Osanai he founded the Tsukiji Little Theater in Tokyo in 1924 , which he largely financed himself until Osanai's death. Works by Anton Chekhov , Maxim Gorky , Reinhard Goering , Romain Rolland and other western authors were performed here, in complete break with Japanese theater tradition . After Osanai's death in 1928, Hijikata founded the Shin Tsukiji Gekidan , which was fully committed to the principles of socialist realism .

In 1933 he emigrated to the Soviet Union, from where he fled the Stalinist purges to France. In 1941 he returned to Japan. There he was arrested immediately and remained in prison until 1945. After the war he became a member of the Communist Party. Despite poor health, he continued to work in the theater in Japan in the last decade of his life.

literature

• Brian Powell: "Japan's Modern Theater: A Century of Change and Continuity" , Routledge, 2002, ISBN 9781873410301 , pp. 59 ff
• James R. Brandon, "The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theater" , Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 9780521588225 , p. 162
• John Scott Miller, "Historical Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature and Theater," Scarecrow Press, 2009, ISBN 9780810858107 , p. 33

Web links

• Answers.com - Hijikata Yoshi

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Hijikata is the family name, Yoshi the first name.