This Day in Musical History (Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ Opens)

Jan. 11, 1976—After a Boston preview and a one-month run at the Kennedy Center, Pacific Overtures premiered at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. It was another success d’estime, but hardly a blockbuster, by Stephen Sondheim, closing after 193 performances.

Starting in the 1960s, twentysomething John Weidman worked on the story, about how the "black ship" of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's East India Squadron ended more than two centuries of isolation from non-Dutch Westerners imposed by Japan's shogunate.

But after toiling on this straight drama for years, producer Harold Prince told Weidman he saw wider possibilities for opening it up, particularly as a musical in collaboration with Sondheim.

Though the show’s title came from a letter sent by Commodore Perry, it appealed to Sondheim’s interest in wordplay and ambiguity. The U.S. naval leader meant the phrase to signal peaceful gestures toward diplomacy (absurd on its face, considering that Perry trained guns on the populace during “negotiations”). But for Sondheim, it also meant an opening through music (“overtures”) of two nations separated by an ocean (the Pacific).

If not quite a 21^st-century “clash of civilizations,” the encounter certainly changed both races. And it startled both the creators of the show and its American viewers in that bicentennial year—who, if they heard of Commodore Perry at all, would have associated him with the kind of triumphalism displayed by Samuel Eliot Morison in his 1967 biography, Ol’ Bruin.

(For a more modern and objective perspective on these events, you might want to turn to Peter Booth Wiley’s 1990 history, Yankees in the Land of the Gods.)

In the Seventies, each show that Sondheim and Prince, had already mounted (Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs) stretched the boundaries of the American musical. But this topped it all.

The all-male cast (an issue that Sondheim and Prince eventually revisited) was the least of it. The plot would be seen entirely through non-Western eyes: two Japanese friends caught (and made the scapegoats for) the ensuring epic national transition, through the conventions of Kabuki (a form of Japanese theater).

And Sondheim had set himself the task of writing the score within quasi-Japanese style of parallel 4ths, without any leading-tone or pentatonic scale. The whole thing proved unexpectedly, devilishly difficult.

(Nearly 30 years later, at the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2004 revival at Studio 54, Prince and Sondheim would live to witness the logical conclusion of their wish that the action be viewed through foreign eyes, as the musical was directed this time by Amon Miyamoto.)

As with most of those pre-workshop days of musical theater, changes were made on the fly, with deadlines bearing down on everyone. In getting ready the Kennedy Center production, Sondheim told one actor that his big number would be replaced with “Chrysanthemum Tea,” a song with four verses that needed to be memorized in three days!

In addition, “Welcome to Kanagawa,” Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981), was “the most annoyingly problematic song I’ve ever written. With each revival of Pacific Overtures I rewrite it and with each revival it fails to be funny.”

The wonder is that everything turned out as well as it did. Sondheim himself claimed to the end of his life that “Someone in a Tree” was the favorite of all his songs: “I like the swing and relentlessness of the music and the poetic Orientalism of the lyrics, but what I love is its ambition, its attempt to collapse past, present and future into one packaged song form.”

For more than 40 years, this was the Sondheim musical with which I was least familiar. I never heard the whole thing with lyrics, and had to make do with an orchestral suite arranging its seven “dances” or songs through a 1985 Book-of-the-Month Club collection of his work.

Then this week, in preparing this post, I came across this YouTube clip of the 1976 production, which ended up being shown then on Japanese television.

The Kennedy Center staged Pacific Overtures again as part of its 2001-2002 Sondheim Festival. But I think that producing it at this time would be the last thing that current management would consider.

A show about—let’s face it—imperialism, would not sit well with a chauvinistic, saber-rattling administration that effectively dictates policy and governance to a cultural institution once largely insulated from it.

Quote of the Day (Matthew Engel, on Why ‘A Successful Public Transport System is a National Benefit’)

“A successful public transport system is a national benefit. Japan, China and most of western Europe accept it explicitly. For much of the world, the past 40 years have indeed been the second age of the train. British politicians get the point implicitly but execute policy furtively and cack-handedly; only American Republicans are visceral and obstructive deniers.”— British journalist Matthew Engel, “Slow Train Coming,” The Financial Times, Dec. 5-6, 2015

It escaped my attention a few weeks ago until I noticed Leo Lewis’ excellent recent retrospective in The Financial Times: late last month, Japan celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the first bullet train. Since that event, the nation has steadily improved its high-speed railroad system, the shinkansen, with the fastest train, the Hayabusa, now reaching 320 km/h.

In contrast, the fastest train in the US, Amtrak’s Acela—currently running at 150 miles per hour—will, even with a new model announced for 2024 but still with no set date at this point in the year, only reach 160 mph/h, or 258 km/h.

For several reasons, within the lifetimes of older baby boomers, the U.S. railroad system has declined in importance even as the automobile and the airplane become more entrenched. has declined. For the sake of a diversified transportation system and healthy economy, more needs to be done to revive the industry. It should be beyond partisan politics.

Continued decline or even stagnation of the industry is not inevitable. A high-functioning rail system can be not just a signal of industrial innovation but even a point of national pride, as Lewis points out in noticing that the Tokyo-to-Osaka line opened just ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, making the two events “symbols of Japan’s great postwar resurrection.”

But upgrading a rail system will not only require a can-do spirit but eternal vigilance. As Lewis observes:

“Despite the appearance of effortless service, punctuality and performance, Japan knows full well that everything is, in fact, attributable to unstinting effort. It is no coincidence that, in the same year it opened the shinkansen, Japan Railways invented an alarm clock which could not, under any circumstances, be slept through (thanks to an inflatable balloon under the mattress).”

(The image accompanying this post, the Shinkansen N700A Series Set G13 high speed train travelling at approximately 300 km/h through Himeji Station—an image captured with a line-scan camera using strip photography—was taken Aug. 19, 2017, by Dllu.)

Photo of the Day: Pagoda Tree Near FDR Memorial, DC

Franklin D. Roosevelt died 70 years ago today in Warm Springs, Ga.—though you would not know it from a glance through newspapers or the cybersphere this weekend. That is in marked contrast to the anniversaries of the deaths of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, which are regularly featured all the time in the media whenever their respective dates (April 14 and November 22) roll around.

It’s a far from the intense feeling across the land in April 1945, when hundreds of thousands paid their final respects to FDR on the long funeral train journey from Warm Springs to his Hyde Park, N.Y. home.

The difference between these reactions might be described this way: the deaths of Lincoln and JFK, because they involved assassination, left America confused and traumatized; the demise of FDR left the nation bereft, the way a family would feel at the loss of a strong father.

Roosevelt’s third term (and first few months of his fourth) constituted only four years, but he aged more visibly during this point than at any other in his life. The reason, I think, was not merely the heart disease that would increasingly plague him, but the heavy weight of conducting an unprecedented two-ocean war in which thousands of young men would lose their lives. Death clung to him, as surely as we know it did for Lincoln, in the final photo of his care-lined face by Alexander Gardner.

Feeling that he could not lay down the burden of power, any more than a serviceman could neglect his duty, FDR ran for a fourth term, at a point when (as made abundantly clear in the final episode of Ken Burns’ documentary, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History), many of those who loved him dreaded the signs of his physical deterioration.

But FDR felt responsible not just for the lives of the young men (including all his sons) in harm’s way throughout the war, but the lives of those for generations to come. He had seen how, despite Woodrow Wilson’s most strenuous efforts after WWI, the attempt to prevent another global conflict had collapsed within 20 years, with even more catastrophic results. He was determined to create international structures of security that would prove better this time.

How well he succeeded may be glimpsed in this 3,800-lb, 17^th-century Japanese pagoda tree that I photographed while in Washington, D.C., a year and a half ago. The tree, a gift to the United States from the mayor of Yokahama, Japan, came to Washington in 1957, long before the opening of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial.

I have written before on the memorial concerning its statue of FDR as well as its “Forgotten Men” representation of the nation’s unemployed. But the pagoda’s placement just outside America’s tribute to its greatest 20^th-century President, next to the Tidal Basin he loved so much, seems powerfully appropriate as well, and certainly worthwhile examining.

In April 1958, the tree was dedicated in order to recognize the centennial of the peaceful relations between Japan and the United States after Commodore Matthew Perry helped open up the long closed-off Asian nation to the West in 1854. But that tree was symbolic not only of the longstanding prewar amity between the two countries, but also of what it takes to reconstitute a seemingly familiar form in an unfamiliar environment.

The pagoda embodies the Japanese ideal of balance. But when its shipment arrived in the U.S., researchers at the Library of Congress discovered that, to facilitate its transport, the tree had been shipped in five carts. Now the researchers needed not just to reassemble the whole (with no instructions enclosed, no less), but also to ensure that it could flourish in far different soil. It was not unlike the task facing FDR and the bureaucrats in his War and State Departments faced as the war drew to a close.

FDR himself would not be around for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let alone the surrender ceremonies aboard the USS Missouri. But the lawyers retained by Douglas MacArthur to write the constitution for postwar Japan had been part of FDR’s New Deal. The Asian nation they envisioned would take root not in an imperial nation, but a Western-style democracy. 

They learned what the Americans dealing with the pagoda tree would grasp in the following decade: that an organic thing, whether a landscape fixture or a nation, could be reconstituted in foreign soil, but only if reassembled with the utmost care.

Japan, like Germany, could not be allowed to re-militarize and threaten its neighbors again, FDR felt. At the same time, the country needed to be reintegrated, economically and diplomatically, back into the community of nations.

By and large, the postwar world envisioned by FDR, then carried through by Harry Truman, succeeded in its objectives—though not without tensions or ironies. Germany and Japan, with the burden of maintaining arms removed, have instead, to varying degrees, constituted economic rather than military rivals to the U.S. for long periods in the postwar era. To neutralize a GOP concern that had derailed U.S. membership in the League of Nations, the President ensured that America, as a charter member of the U.N. Security Council, would have veto power over measures—a right that the former U.S.S.R., unfortunately, had as well as a member of the council.

Most of all, in order to eradicate the virus of nationalistic, race-based militarism, FDR was forced to create the modern American national-security state—an apparatus based on secrecy (in this case, the Manhattan Project that would climax in the dropping of the atomic bomb).

None of this negates, however, the value of the collective security system that FDR created. In foreign as in domestic policy, he believed in “bold, persistent experimentation”: “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” 

Nor did he believe, despite his enjoyment of power, that his example alone would be enough to maintain international order. As he told Congress upon his return from Yalta, in a quote that appears on one of the walls of his memorial today: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one Nation….It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.”

Flashback, April 1954: ‘7 Samurai,’ Kurosawa Film Classic, Premieres

Akira Kurosawa added to his growing reputation as an international master of cinema with a movie that opened in his homeland: Seven Samurai, a three-hour epic of seven down-on-their-luck Japanese warriors who hire themselves out to villagers requiring a defense against ruthless bandits. The samurai’s do-or-die commitment mirrored the creation and shooting of this masterpiece, in which Kurosawa battled sickness, actors who didn’t meet his expectations, delays and balky investors to complete his film.

It has been said that Kurosawa is responsible for the modern action movie. That is probably an exaggeration, but there is far more credence in the notion that he influenced another genre in the West: the Desperate Men on a Mission movie. Over the next few decades, the form was adaptable enough to accommodate thrillers (The Wages of Sin), Westerns (The Wild Bunch) and war movies (The Dirty Dozen).

In a sense, it was only natural that when Hollywood used Seven Samurai as the raw material for an American film, it would be for a Western, John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960). For years, the Western occupied the same pride of place in the American cinema that the samurai feature did in Japan. (Samurai flicks comprised nearly one-half of all films released in the Land of the Rising Sun through the end of the 1960s.) Kurosawa’s movie was set in 16^th-century Japan, the Ashikaga Shogunate, a period of lawlessness, without a central authority—not unlike the Wild West in the United States.

The Irish-American director John Ford had elevated the formulaic Western genre to works of art through bravura cinema techniques, a constant company of players, and an appreciation of how it might address larger concerns about community and history. Kurosawa, who said of the crusty American master, “When I'm old, that's the kind of director I want to be,” sought to accomplish the same goals with his samurai film. It ranks with Ford's The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence as an elegy for men of violence who, by wringing civilization from chaos, assure, ironically, that there will be no place for themselves in the new order.

Moreover, like the American, Kurosawa was a master of his set who brooked no interference, and sometimes picked on one actor unmercifully. During the filming of Seven Samurai, he constantly derided Yoshio Inaba, who played Gorobei. The experience was stressful enough that the actor took only limited roles thereafter.

The film ran more than the average two-hour running time, but it needed the extra minutes to accommodate Kurosawa’s dense characterizations. He catalogued each character’s clothes, favorite foods, history, speaking habits and other relevant details. The preparation was enormous: a registry of all 101 village residents. It was virtually unheard of in Japanese cinema.

Among the most fully crafted characters were the eponymous heroes. Kurosawa’s own ancestors included members of this hereditary warrior class of pre-industrial Japan. He and his two co-screenwriters drew heavily on actual historical figures for these characters—until, that is, they realized they needed someone with whom audiences could identify.

That opened the way to Toshiro Mifune’s strutting, fake samurai, Kikuchiyo. The actor's improvisations turned the character into a paradoxical figure—hilarious one minute as he bounces along on a road with his sword (almost double the length of anyone else’s), tragic the next, as he confesses to a great social taboo—acting as a samurai to move up and out of his social caste.

Perhaps as important as the care that Kurosawa took with the screenplays were his visuals.  For the first time, he used multiple cameras, which allowed him multiple angles and greater flexibility in editing. He also used slow motion for dramatic emphasis, a technique that soon became commonplace. (Even the wind blowing on bushes was not circumstance: the director had a fan blowing on them, believing, correctly, that it gave the early scenes a feeling of instability.)

Possessing such exacting visions for his story and visuals meant considerable difficulties for the director and his crew. When the simultaneous production of Seven Samurai and Godzilla nearly pushed financial backer Toho Kabushiki Kaisha into bankruptcy, Kurosawa had to overcome several delays in production. His driving perfectionism sent his budgets soaring and the blood pressure of studio “suits” soaring. (He had to overcome the reluctance of his Japanese studio to make his prior masterpiece, Rashomon, and for two decades he would have difficulty finding backing for his films in Japan.)

The final extraordinary sequences, covering the three-day battle between the samurai and the bandits, were particularly onerous. It wasn’t only that lack of finances meant that initially there weren’t enough horses for shooting, but filming was done at the end of a particularly bad winter. (Mifune, as crucial an acting partner to Kurosawa as Robert DeNiro would later be for Martin Scorsese, noted that these were the wettest, coldest days he had ever filmed.)

Just as Kurosawa borrowed from Western forebears, a new class of American film-school students in the 1960s were influenced by him, notably Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, with such films as Star Wars and For a Few Dollars More doing little to hide their indebtedness to him. But none of them, really, equal the propulsive power of Seven Samurai—which, for good reason, continually turns up on the list of the world’s greatest films.

This Day in Japanese History (Tsunami Leaves More Than 20K Dead)

June 16, 1896—Less than 40 minutes after experiencing slow shaking from an earthquake, the Japanese port of Sanriku was hit with a tsunami that destroyed 170 miles of coastline and 9,000 homes, claimed the lives of up to 28,000 people, and injured still thousands more.

In the long history of mankind, a kind of numbness, as much by sheer repetition as by mass suffering, can ensue when reading about the impact of natural disasters. For anyone hoping to understand other nations, this is unfortunate not just because, as John Donne writes, “Every man’s death diminishes me,” but because the impact of natural events is magnified countless times in the human environment.

In a way, it was almost inevitable that I would write about this particular destructive event, especially after the tsunami that occurred this March in Japan. How did the earlier disaster match up against that one, along with the even more ghastly 2004 Indian Ocean catastrophe?

For the Meiji-Sanriku disaster, its initial 7.6-magnitude earthquake didn’t match the one that occurred three months ago (8.9-9.0 magnitude), nor the one that devastated 11 coast countries along the Indian Ocean seven years ago (its undersea earthquake was magnitude 9.1-9.3). But it was bad enough to rank on a list of the world’s 10 worst tsunamis compiled by the Oregon Emergency Management Preparedness and Disaster Blog.

Here are other ways to imagine the distress created by the 1896 disaster:

· The wave unleashed after the mass mocement along the underwater fault reached a height of 25 meters (80 ft.) high;
· The crisis first broke slowly, then swiftly, carrying virtually everything before it; and
· The impact could be felt as far away as San Francisco, where a 9.5-ft. wave was observed.

At first, fishermen from Honshu, off the coast of Sanriku, were unaware of the event. More than 20 miles out to sea, they had no reason to suspect the worst, because the waves beneath their boats--only about 15 inches--were nothing like the waves bearing down on the coast.

You can imagine their horror, then, when, approaching land, they beheld more debris than they could imagine--and corpses floating in the sea.

The tsunami ravaged Japan’s maritime culture. The nation’s numerous mountain areas have long compelled residents to seek shelter and jobs along the coast, frequently as fishermen and in aqua cultural industries and canneries. That meant that they suffered disproportionately because of the tsunami.

In an article written before the last disaster, reporter Winston Ross noted that, because of the frequency of tsunamis in Japan over the years, the nation has become "the best-prepared country for tsunamis and earthquakes in the world, with a vigilance that combines the reflections of the past with the technology of today - at a cost of billions of dollars.”

Even getting its early-warning system down to three minutes, however, Japan still survives horribly from these events. In a way, the scale of the damage has become even more frightening, because of the interconnectedness involved in a highly industrialized society (the people of 1896 did not have to worry about a nuclear event.

Quote of the Day (Toshio Tamogami, On Denying History)

“A country that denies its own history is destined to fall.”—Toshio Tamogami, former head of Japan’s air force, concluding an essay that won a contest denying Japan’s role in sponsoring wartime atrocities, as quoted in “The Ghost of Wartimes Past,” The Economist, November 8, 2008

(Allow me to correct that last quote: A general who denies his country’s past is destined to fall. Not to mention make a fool of himself, and cause his country’s neighbors to shake their hands and ask why it was taking Japan so long to accept that it had a problem in its history.

For a long time, I’ve felt that actors should not be allowed anywhere near keyboards lest they type something beyond their understanding, such as screenplays in which people are expected to speak intelligibly. Now, I’m ready to broaden that blanket prohibition to the military—or, at very least, Japan’s.

I mean, what can you say when Gen. Tamogami was just one of 78 members of Japan’s air force who entered this writing contest? I guess they’ve been reading so many flight plans that they never bothered to read how pissed off other nations were—like the Philippines, North and South Korea, and China—upon reading denials by Japanese leaders and institutions that they ever mistreated anyone in what Tamogami called a “defensive” war.

Maybe if you’re Newt Gingrich—who, when he’s not bloviating for Fox News, has taken to writing what-if scenarios about, among other events, the Battle of Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor and 9/11—you like the idea of alternative histories. But you have to keep that straight from real history.

Fortunately, an anniversary today provides an opportunity for a history lesson that Gen. Tamogami never received all these years. You see, on this date in 1948, Gen. Hideki Tojo—part of the militarist cabal that beat the drums for an unprovoked war against the Chinese in the 1930s, then the virtual dictator of Japan from 1941 to 1944—was found guilty, along with 24 other defendants, of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). Tojo and six of his co-defendants were sentenced to death for their roles.

(The charges referred to crimes against other nations, but as far as I’m concerned, Tojo and his associates could just as easily have been charged with crimes against his own country. The recklessness of Tojo’s actions led to a furious reaction by the Allies, who proceeded to launch devastating air raids—and, of course, two nuclear bombs—on the country.)

The 2 ½-year Tokyo trial of Tojo and his compadres has been called the “other Nuremberg trials,” and like that judgment in Germany there were problems with the proceedings. (The Allies decided not to press charges against Emperor Hirohito—and even stopped the trial to persuade Tojo to reconsider his testimony that the monarch knew of and approved his decisions.)

Nonetheless, a mountain of documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony demonstrated conclusively that Tamogami missed the mark in absolving his government and mitigating its culpability for the war:

* The Rape of Nanking, in which an estimated 20,000 women became victims of sexual violence at the hands of Japanese soldiers.

* Narcotics trafficking, perpetrated on a wide scale in China to weaken resistance to Japanese aggression.

* Waging aggressive war against the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands and France.

To this day, Japanese textbooks downplay their nation’s role in wartime atrocities. As the Tamogami case proves, perhaps it’s time that these textbooks’ authors should start from scratch and get it right this time. Otherwise, God help the world on the day when Japan’s pacifist constitution is shredded and the military returns to power. )