After leaving Pavlova's studio after a few years of study, Tachibana in 1933 established the Tachibana Ballet Institute, and later opened the Tachibana Ballet School. She married Mikio Maki Anderson, a fellow dancer with whom she performed several duets in the 1930s. In 1934, their daughter, Asami Maki, was born. “My mother kept it a secret that she had a child in order to continue her stage career,” Maki reports. In the early, formative years of Western classical dance in Japan, dancers who aspired to professional careers were forced to make many sacrifices. This early generation was dedicated to the art of ballet; they frequently danced without salaries but their passion united them like a family.
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Akiko Tachibana teaching children. Location, date, and photographer unidentified.
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Then World War II intervened. Everything was destroyed by the war’s end in 1945. Elena Pavlova, who became a naturalized Japanese citizen in 1931 and renamed herself Eriko Kirishima, died in China on her way to giving a “comfort performance tour” on the front lines in 1941. (note 4) In spite of the impoverished conditions after the war, curiosity about Western art flooded postwar Japan. One of the landmark cultural events that took place in Tokyo shortly after the Axis surrender was the first full-length Japanese staging of Swan Lake, in 1946. Masahide Komaki, who danced as a soloist with the Shanghai Ballets Russes, returned to Japan and was joined by dancers from the Pavlova Ballet, including Hiroshi Shimada, Chieko Hattori, Yusaku Azuma, and Yaoko Kaitani. (note 5) Together, these dancers formed the Tokyo Ballet (different from the present-day Tokyo Ballet). Their Swan Lake performances at Teigeki took place after four months of preparation. The production was directed and choreographed by Masahide Komaki, and based on his experience with the Shanghai Ballets Russes. Swan Lake enjoyed a month-long run of performances—an outstanding achievement at that time.
Tachibana did not take part in the postwar Swan Lake performances, focusing instead on her independent activities. She reopened the Tachibana Ballet School in 1952, and then established the Baby Ballet Company, a troupe that offered performance opportunities for young talents like Noriko Ohara, who went on to pursue a professional career at the Scottish Ballet, and Katsuko Okamoto, the current director of the Inoue Ballet Company in Tokyo. “Tokyo had become just a stretch of burned field after the war,” Maki recalls. “It was surprising to find such vigorous ballet activities starting up so quickly. It was a time of great energy.”
Don Quixote premiered on the September 1952 program of the Baby Ballet Company, with the seventeen-year-old Maki as Kitri. She had been rigorously trained under her mother's tutorship, and made her stage debut at age three. “I learned my discipline from Miss Pavlova's Imperial Russian Ballet [as it was transmitted] through my mother” says Maki. With her prodigious talent, Asami Maki was the first Japanese ballerina to perform the requisite thirty-two fouetté turns as Odile in act three of Swan Lake.
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