Living with Japanese Ballet History

An interview with Asami Maki, artistic director of Asami Maki Ballet Company and the New National Theatre Ballet, Tokyo

by Akiko Tachiki

Asami Maki, director of Asami Maki Ballet Company, and the New National Theatre Ballet

It has been ninety years since ballet, the classical movement art that was developed by Western culture and nurtured by its esthetics, was introduced to Japan. Today, Japan’s top ballet ensembles are competitive with international companies, both in terms of classical technique standards and production quality. Yet Maki’s comments allude to the story behind this flourishing, a history of overcoming cultural barriers.

There are certain figures in any historical chronicle whose footprints establish the continuity of the art. The story of the lifework of Asami Maki and her mother, Akiko Tachibana, reveals a journey that parallels Japanese ballet’s development, from its uncertain beginnings to its present vibrant place in Japan’s cultural landscape.

Japanese ballet history begins with the visit to Tokyo in 1912 of Italian dance master and choreographer Giovanni Vittorio Rosi. (note 1) Rosi, who trained at the ballet school of La Scala, Milan, was working in London when the Teikoku Theater (Teigeki), which had just opened as an innovative contemporary theater in Tokyo, invited him to Japan. In addition to serving as Teigeki’s director and choreographer for opera and ballet, Rosi became Japan’s first ballet teacher. Though his presence established a cultural landmark, it took another ten years or so before the seeds of ballet took firm root in Japan because there was no precedent in Japanese culture for this art form and its physical values. While the institutional history of Japanese ballet is about as old as that of England or the United States, the realities behind it reveal great differences. For one, Japanese traditional culture and its social environment—the context in which the transplanted art had to grow—are profoundly different from the traditions and culture of the West. There are also different cultural values surrounding the human body. While Japanese dancers grew technically from one generation to the next, especially in the postwar period, they always had to contend with the esthetic conventions that stress a particular Eurocentric body type as the ballet ?ideal.?

In spite of his efforts, ballet did not flourish under Rosi at Teigeki because many of Rosi's pupils found his strict training difficult. Those dancers and choreographers who trained under Rosi included Baku Ishii, Michio Itoh, Toshi Komori, Masao Takada, and Seiko Takada. Though they first studied ballet technique, by the 1920s many of these students chose to pursue modern dance with artists such as Baku Ishii, who had become a pioneer of this Western contemporary dance form in Japan.