Hanayagi Shōtarō (花柳"章太郎) (actor 05/24/1894 – 01/06/1965)

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Biography:

Hanayagi Shōtarō was an actor who flourished in Tokyo in the 1920s through 1950s. He led the revival of the Shinpa (New Faction) school of theater, which combined elements of traditional kabuki with modern and Western drama. A handsome man, he won popular acclaim as an actor in female roles on stage, but later in life he played male lead roles as well. He appeared in Mizoguchi Ken's famous 1939 film, "Zangiku Monogatari" in 1939, and is the subject of Yakusha shosetsu Hanayagi Shōtarō, written by his friend, the author Kawaguci [sic] Shotaro. In 1952 he became the head of a Shinpa troupe, and appeared many times with the group's female lead, Mizutani Yaeko. He was recognized by the Japanese government as a "Living National Treasure" for his artistic skills, and won numerous prizes.

This is quoted directly from the Portland Art Museum (Oregon) curatorial notes.

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Hanayagi Shōtarō was a versatile actor born at a time of great change in the acting field. He not only acted on stage but in films, too. He played the parts of both women and men. That was not unusual in the history of kabuki theater for an especially talented performer. However, the 20th century brought on even greater changes. Women were no longer blocked from performing on stage and Shōtarō's daughter Ono Michiko, aka Hanayagi Toshiko, was one of these trailblazers.

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James Cahill, one of the greatest Sinologists of the last half of the 20th century wrote:

"When I got to Tokyo in 1946 (and began collecting Japanese prints, then bad Chinese paintings, beginning of career) I talked about this with an old print dealer in the Marunouchi Bldg., near where we lived, asking whether I could see the film again there. He said no, all copies were lost (fortunately he was wrong). But, he said, he knew the actor Hanayagi Shotaro and would introduce me to him. He was playing in shimpa plays (his real specialty—he wasn’t, as you know, a kabuki actor) at the Tokyo theater where these plays were performed; the plays went on from around ten in the morning until late in the afternoon. I practiced what I would say to him, trying to express my admiration for this film and his acting in it. The print dealer took me backstage before the first play, and I talked to Hanayagi as he was making himself up. (The scene was not unlike the beginning of [Zangiku Monogatari], as I remember it.) My memory isn’t at all clear, but I recall that he seemed pleased that a foreigner admired the film and could talk about it in some kind of Japanese. Then I spent the rest of the day seeing him act. In the first play he was a young kabuki actor who loses his leg and gets a wooden one from the U.S. and carries on. An intermission, and he comes back in a shorter play, a comedy, playing the part of an old woman, with totally different movements, voice, face, everything. Then a third play in which he didn’t have a part; and then, the longest of the day, a play in which he was a beautiful geisha. This was another revelation—the print-dealer was filling me in all the time, and I learned the phrase mizu ga tareru yo ni (like water flowing) to describe the rhythms and lines of his movements. Totally convincing, voice and appearance and manner. This was apparently one of his specialties. And he did this triple performance every day, as a normal thing—what would likely be a once-only tour-de-force for a Western actor."

Many years later, when I spent a month as a visiting scholar at Waseda University, I found in their library a special room set up as a kind of shrine to him."

Shinpa or shimpa (新派) plays were popular melodramas from the early part of the 20th century.