THEATROCRACIES OF DESIRE: TAKARAZUKA REVUE’S 2019 QUIET PARADIGM SHIFTS

Abstract

This paper examines Takarazuka Revue’s 2019 theatrical season as a lens through which to understand Japan’s negotiation of historical memory, cultural identity, and late-modern selfperception during the transition from Heisei to the Reiwa era. Situating 2019 as a significant historiographical moment – marked by the imperial abdication of Akihito, the first since 1817 – the study traces how Takarazuka Revue’s nine productions at the Takarazuka Grand Theater reflected and refracted a broader national ethos of renewal, uncertainty, and recalibrated optimism. While Takarazuka Revue traditionally reinforces conservative gender politics, socio-cultural hierarchies, and deeply codified aesthetic practices, its productions equally operate as dynamic sites of negotiation where inherited narratives are affirmed, questioned, or strategically reimagined. Drawing on 25 years of phenomenological fieldwork, archival research, and ethnographic engagement with performers, producers, and audiences, the analysis situates Takarazuka Revue within Japan’s massmedia ecology as both a cultural barometer and a performative medium of resistance to uniformity. The study identifies 2019’s nine theatrical works as integrated in four major paradigm shifts and explores their structure and engagement, examining the ways in which Takarazuka Revue articulates tensions between tradition and modernity, spectacle and critique, individuality and collective expectation. Ultimately, the current examination argues that Takarazuka Revue’s sustained popularity and aesthetic longevity illuminate the potential for mass-media performance to convey hard truths, foster existential authenticity, and address the complexities of identity in an era increasingly shaped by posthistorical uncertainty.