Sano Seki

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Sano Seki ( Japanese 佐野 碩 ; born January 14, 1905 , † September 28, 1966 in Mexico City ) was a Japanese actor, theater director and choreographer . In his work he shaped the modern Japanese theater and later in Mexico numerous directors and actors and thus not only the Mexican , but also the Latin American theater in general .

biography

Seki Sano, son of a medical doctor in Tokyo , grandson of Gotō Shimpei and thus a member of a privileged minority in Japan, attended high school in Urawa when the great Kantō earthquake struck. After the earthquake, during which he volunteered to rescue the injured in Tokyo, he and others founded an association for theater studies while studying at the faculty of law at Tokyo University, and with this group also regularly attended performances at the Tsukiji theater . Oriented towards his fellow students and, last but not least, his Marxist -minded uncle Sano Manabu , Sano increasingly oriented himself towards left-wing political thinking. In the support of the Kyōdō printing strike was first politically active. The theater group to which he belonged played mainly pieces from independent American and European theater, mostly by left-wing political authors.

After his last position as theater director, he was arrested like many other activists in May 1930. In May 1931 he got the opportunity to go to Moscow as a representative of the Japanese proletarian theater association PROT. He also worked as a theater director in the Soviet Union . He traveled through the United States and Europe, where he made numerous contacts. After the political changes in the Soviet Union, he and his colleague Hijikata Yoshi were classified and expelled as a "dangerous Japanese" in August 1937 .

Seki Sano lived for some time in Europe and was involved in the field of political theater and film in the fight against National Socialism . After a short stay in New York , where he directed himself against National Socialism in the theater as well as supported the Chinese war against Japan , he finally found asylum in Mexico in August 1939 , where he lived voluntarily until his death after the end of the Second World War and worked.

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

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michiko Tanaka: Seki Sano and Popular Political and Social Theater in Latin America. (pdf, 1.8 MB) Retrieved January 1, 2019 (English).
  2. ↑ Tetsuro Kato: Biographical Notes on the Japanese Victims of the Stalinist Terror in the USSR. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism . 1998, archived from the original on December 19, 2012 ; accessed on January 1, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Sano Seki
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 佐野 碩 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese actor, theater director and choreographer
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1905
DATE OF DEATH September 28, 1966
Place of death Mexico city