¹ Cited in Slonimsky, Nicolas, Lexikon of Musical Invective, 2nd edn (Seattle and London, 1969), 5.Google Scholar

² Shades of the Past or Indiscreet Tales of Japan (Tokyo and Rutland, Vt, 1959), 307.Google Scholar

³ This twofold movement is only partly analogous to the Japanese influence on nineteenth-century French art, and that of French art on modern Japanese art, each of which seems more self-contained. See Takashina, Shûji and Rimer, J. Thomas, Paris in Japan: The Japanese Encounter with European Painting (Tokyo / St Louis, 1987).Google Scholar

⁴ See Becker, Heinz, ed., Die ‘couleur locale’ in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1976)Google Scholar; Maehder, Jürgen, ed., Esotismo e colore locale nell'opera di Puccini (Pisa, 1985).Google Scholar

⁵ ‘Japanese’ operettas include Jonas's, EmilDie Japaneserin (1874)Google Scholar, and Jones's, SidneyThe Geisha (1896).Google Scholar On the following, see Jürgen Maehder, ‘Exotismus in der italienischen Oper des fin-de-siècle’, to appear in the proceedings of a 1985 Thurnau conference, ‘Exotismus und Naturalismus in der Oper des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts’.

⁶ It now appears that Gilbert and Sullivan had the advice of Algernon Bertram Mitford in writing the Mikado; see Yokoyama, Toshio, Japan in the Victorian Mind: A Study of Stereotyped Images of a Nation, 1850–80 (London, 1987), 87, 173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ See the orchestral score of Iris (Milan, 1898), 377.Google Scholar

⁸ Compare, for example, the presentations of Baty, Thomas, ‘The Literary Introduction of Japan to Europe’, Monumenta Nipponica, 7 (1951), 24–39; 8 (1952), 15–46; 9 (1953), 62–82; 10 (1954), 65–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Siary, Gérard, ‘The Image of Japan in European Travelogues from 1853 to 1905’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 4th series, 2 (1987), 155–70Google Scholar, with those of Elwert, Theodore, ‘Die Entdeckung Japans für die europäische Literatur’, in his Italienische Dichtung und europäische Literatur (Wiesbaden, 1975), II, 1–38.Google Scholar

⁹ I will discuss the historical basis of the opera in a Cambridge Opera Guide to Madama Butterfly, currently in progress.

¹⁰ See Powils-Okano, Kimiyo, Puccinis ‘Madama Butterfly’, Orpheus-Schriftenreihe zu Grundfragen der Musik, 44 (Bonn, 1986), 47–9.Google Scholar On early recording in Japan, see Komiya, Toyotaka, ed., Japanese Music and Drama in the Meiji Era, trans. and adapted by Seidensticker, Edward G. and Keene, Donald, Japanese Culture in the Meiji Era, 3 (Tokyo, 1956), 441–5.Google Scholar

¹¹ The records would not have been sent from Tokyo, but from London, where they were published by the Gramophone and Typewriter Company. Scott Miller informs me that the available recordings are enumerated on the stock list for April 1902, pp. 29–30. The Sound Archives of the British Library in London has a microfilm of the list, and the recordings. At least two of the songs used by Puccini, ‘Kimigayo’ and ‘Echigo-jishi’, were available between 1901 and 1904.

¹² New York Times, 20 January 1907.

¹³ Adami, Giuseppe, Giacomo Puccini: Epistolario (1928; rpt. Milan, 1982), 92.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Belasco's and Long's drama will be cited from Belasco, David, Six Plays (Boston, 1929)Google Scholar; Illica's and Giacosa's libretto in its most commonly received form, the revised edition published after the Paris premiere in 1906 (Milan, 1907).

¹⁵ See Marker, Lise-Lone, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre (Princeton, 1975), 77.Google Scholar

¹⁶ See Cortazzi, Hugh, Victorians in Japan: In and around the Treaty Ports (London, 1987), 337–47Google Scholar, and Chamberlain, Basil Hall, ‘English as She is Japped’, Things Japanese, 5th rev. edn (London, 1905), 137–46.Google Scholar Chamberlain's examples are primarily written; for literary use of spoken language, see the famous interview in Duncan, Sara Jeannette, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (London, 1890), 56ff.Google Scholar

¹⁷ See my ‘Lieutenant F. B. Pinkerton: Problems in the Genesis of an Operatic Hero’, Italica, 64 (1987), 654–75Google Scholar; a revised and expanded version will appear in The Puccini Companion, edited by Simonetta Puccini and William Weaver.

¹⁸ For selections from the draft and a commentary, see ‘Pinkerton’, 657–62.

¹⁹ See Smith, Julian, ‘“Madame Butterfly”: The Paris Première of 1906’, in Werk und Widergabe, ed. Wiesmann, Sigrid (Bayreuth, 1980), 229–38Google Scholar; and ‘A Metamorphic Tragedy’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 106 (1979–1980), 105–13.Google Scholar

²⁰ The description runs through the novel like a refrain; see chapters 14, 27, 44 and 56.

Madame Prune is presented as a member of the Shinto religion (chapter 14), Chrysanthème as a Buddhist (chapter 44, which also describes worship of her ottokes).

²¹ The prayer includes the primal couple Izanagi and Izanami (the former deprived of a syllable), Sarutahiko, a generic kami (god) suffix, and the sun-goddess Amaterasu-ô-mikami or Tenshô-daijin, the latter even in its ‘Chinese’ reading.

²² This alien treatment is very different from the ecclesiastical ambience at the beginning of Tosca, particularly the sacristan's absent-minded harmonic wandering towards the end of the ‘Angelus’

²³ The translation by Keizô Horiuchi (1930; first published 1938), while keeping the reference to Suzuki's headache, corrects the mistakes of the first two lines of her prayer: ‘Izanagi Izanami yaoyorozu no kami garni’ (Izanagi and Izanami and the myriad gods). Chô-chô fujin, Sekai kageki zenshû, 19 (Tokyo, n.d.), 133.

²⁴ Seidensticker, Edward, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (New York, 1983), 268f.Google Scholar; for a description of performances, see Fujimoto, T., The Nightside of Japan (London, n.d. [1915]), 13–16Google Scholar; and esp. Miyazawa, Jûichi, ‘Honpô kageki undôshi oboegaki-sho (2): Teikoku Gekijô kagekibu shiroku’ [Historical Documents of Opera Activities in Japan 2: A Short History of the Imperial Theatre Opera Department], Musashino Ongaku Daigaku [Bulletin of the Musashino Academia Musicae], 5 (1971), 89–115.Google Scholar

²⁵ On the following, see Miyazawa, , 106, and his chapter on Madama Butterfly in Meisaku Opera Kyôshitsu [Guide to Famous Operas] (Tokyo, 1956), 234–6.Google Scholar The performance history given in the latter is imprecise and sometimes inaccurate; references have been corroborated and corrected where possible by newspaper advertisements and reviews.

²⁶ Hakubutsukan, Waseda Daigaku Engeki, ed., Engeki Hyakka Daijiten [Encyclopaedia of the Theatre] (Heibonsha, 1968), IV, 8.Google Scholar

²⁷ See Carner, Mosco, Puccini: A Critical Biography, 2nd edn (London, 1974), 385f.Google Scholar, and the more extended discussion, with corrections, by Powils-Okano (see n. 10), 49–62.

²⁸ Matters cannot have been helped by Rossi's tendency to strike his singers, a habit that earned him the nickname rôshi (old teacher), after the head master in a Zen temple or monastery, more specifically the assistant in charge of whacking with a stick those who slump or doze during meditation.

²⁹ According to Kôsuke, Komatsu, Ongaku no Hana Hiraku Koro [When Flowers of Music Bloom] (Tokyo, 1952), 93Google Scholar, the first production staged by Rossi in June 1913 was not enthusiastically applauded because of the absence of Tamaki Miura, then the most famous Japanese singer of opera.

³⁰ Asahi Shinbun, 5 January 1914.

³¹ It may have originated in Nagasaki, where it could have been centuries old by the time it was rediscovered by Westerners in the nineteenth century. See Blum, Paul C., Yokohama in 1872 (Tokyo, 1963), 44Google Scholar, and Harold S. Williams, Shades (see n. 2), 232–3 and 296.

³² Chonkina was danced to the accompaniment of samisens; losers took off their clothes one by one. Owners of houses featuring the game (chonkina-ya) decided to stop the practice around 1891. Nihon kokugo dai jiten [Dictionary of the Japanese Language], 2nd edn (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1976), XIII, 573.Google Scholar There is a description of the ‘Jong-kee-noo’ in Poyntz, William H., Per mare per terram: Reminiscences of Thirty-two Years' Military, Naval and Constabularly Service (London, 1892), 236f.Google Scholar; of the ‘Johnnie Nookee’ in Barnes, Elinor and Barnes, James A., eds., Naval Surgeon: Revolt in Japan 1868–69. The Diary of Dr Samuel Pellman Boyer (Bloomington, 1963), 102f.Google Scholar The dance even influenced Western operas about the orient. Musical number 14 in Sidney Jones's The Geisha (1896) is entitled ‘Chon Kina’ and features a suggestive song for geisha and chorus:

I can dance to any measure that is gay,

To and fro in dreamy fashion I can sway,

And if still my art entices

Then – at extra special prices –

I can dance for you in quite another way.

Chon kina, chon kina,

Chon chon, kina kina,

Nagasaki, Yokohama,

Hakodate hoi!

Cited from Songs of ‘The Geisha’ (New York, 1896), 15.Google Scholar

³³ Most of these companies were short-lived; real success accrued to a more popular form of musical ranging from operetta to revue called Asakusa opera, a form that even developed its own vociferous claques, peragoro or ‘opera-thugs’. Seidensticker (see n. 24), 269–71.

³⁴ Western reviewers might approach a guest performance with a double bias based on heightened memories of Europe and low expectations of Japan: ‘putting aside the great things one has seen and heard, and remembering that this is Tokyo, [the Russian company presents] real opera sung in a most creditable way’ ( The Japan Times, 22 09 1921).Google Scholar

³⁵ In addition to the data given by Miyazawa (see n. 25), see the article in the Japan Handbuch, ed. Hammitzsch, Horst (Wiesbaden, 1981), cols. 1271f.Google Scholar On radio broadcasts, see Takashi, Ogawa, Nippon no Kôkyôgakudan [Japanese Symphony Orchestras] (Tokyo, 1972).Google Scholar For performances of selections of Madama Butterfly as part of orchestral concerts, see Takashi, Ogawa, Shinhen Nihon no Kôkyôgakudan: Teiki Ensôkai Kiroku 1927–1981 [Supplement to Japanese Symphony Orchestras: Record of Performances 1927–1981] (Tokyo, 1983), 529.Google Scholar

³⁶ Not ‘September’ as stated in Miyazawa (see n. 25), 235 The performances on 21–29 September at the Imperial were sold out, and the troupe returned for encore appearances at the Yûrakuza Theatre on 8–17 October. Ella Wiswell, a Russian woman whose family was living in Yokohama at that time and attended the performances in the intervening week at Yokohama, recalls that they were all in Russian, and that most of the troupe disbanded at the end of the tour. The soprano is reputed to have ended up in a mental hospital.

³⁷ Toyotaka Komiya, Japanese Music (see n. 10), 433.

³⁸ In the programme of Shukusatsu ‘Chô-chô-san’, the adaptor, Shikô Tsubouchi, notes that he had seen the opera twenty years before while studying abroad, and had expanded his vague memories, using his own imagination and Nagasaki dialect to fill in the story: ‘I hope I have not profaned Puccini and his work […] I tried to write something that might be similar to the original; but I fear that I might have written a story about a caterpillar, not about a butterfly.’ I am grateful to Jennifer Robertson for providing me with information about the Takarazuka Revue.

³⁹ Hase, Kaoru, The Japan Times, 3 08 1931Google Scholar, ‘Chô-chô-san was as fatuously unintelligent about human affairs as she was alleged to be beautiful and innocent. If Long misrepresented the true character of western manhood through his hero, he at least truthfully portrayed a Japanese musume of several decades ago, for nothing was more natural for the girls of the Meiji era than to kill themselves on the slightest provocation. But that age seems to have gone forever.’

⁴⁰ Both recorded selections from Madama Butterfly. See Discografia pucciniana by Végeto, Raffaele in the Carteggi pucciniani, ed. Gara, Eugenio (Milan, 1958), 629 and 649–51.Google Scholar Hara's voice is reported to have been bell-like but small; the only easily accessible recording by Miura, ‘Un bel dì’ (c. 1917), does not reveal a very large or well-controlled instrument. See Scott, Michael, The Record of Singing, II: 1914–1925 (London, 1977), 146f.Google Scholar

⁴¹ See Harding, Mabel, ‘Madame Butterfly at Home: Western Opera in the Far East’, Sunset Magazine, 35 (08 1915), 352–5Google Scholar, who describes the event as a consulate concert; and the entry for Hara in Gendai Nihon Jinbutsu Jiten [Modern Japanese Who's Who] (Tokyo, 1986)Google Scholar, which mentions a performance of the opera at the Victoria Theatre.

⁴² While Japanese sources mention a La Scala contract, she does not appear in the chronology of principal performers in Tintori, Giampiero, Duecento anni di Teatro alla Scala: Cronologia (Bergamo, 1979).Google Scholar

⁴³ See the comparison of Tamaki Miura and Geraldine Farrar from Stanley F. Kaye's review of the latter's appearance in Chicago on 10 December 1915: ‘Miss Farrar is undoubtedly the supreme impersonation of this role […] It was not long ago that this city heard Butterfly sung by a Japanese prima donna, and at that time a Japanese effect was made that no occidental could hope to equal. But the thrill of a dramatic voice was absent then, and the welcome visit of Mme. Tamaki Miura serves as a standard of comparison by which Miss Farrar's enacting of the geisha may be more fully appreciated than ever before.’ The clipping in Miss Farrar's scrapbook (Library of Congress) does not indicate the newspaper.

⁴⁴ A singer in the first Japanese opera production, then a teacher of Nobuko Hara, she became the lead of the Imperial Theatre's opera team, and published the first Japanese book on opera under the name of her first husband: Tamaki, Shibata, Sekai no Opera (Tokyo, 1912).Google Scholar She is the only Japanese singer of her generation listed in Kutsch, K. J. and Riemens, Leo, Großes Sängerlexikon (Bern and Stuttgart, 1987), II, 2001f.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ This and the following discussion are based on the Asahi Shinbun, 22 and 28 June 1936.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Ochô fujin (Tokyo, 1937).

⁴⁷ She divorced him in 1937, with an outburst of ‘Japanese’ sentiment that may also have facilitated her remaining in Japan. An interview (‘A Plaintive Melody of Nobuko Hara – Farewell to Her International Love’) in the Asahi shinbun of 12 June 1937 devotes considerable space to the singer's ‘Japanese feelings’, revealing a striking change from the Hara of twenty years before, who had been a leading feminist: ‘I was really a bad wife. […] we got married in spite of my mother's opposition. But just three years after our marriage, I left for America on a performing tour, forgetting about my husband and home. My husband put up with all this without saying a word. A wife like myself who does nothing but sing every day is never a good wife. But now I often think about my mother's grave.’

⁴⁸ Nearly eight times the number of performances by Geraldine Farrar, this is a clear indication of a limited repertory. It is difficult to repress some scepticism at the claim that Miura's Japanese debut coincided with her 2001st appearance as Chô-chô-san; a ‘2013th’, scheduled for 22 June 1937, received much publicity ( ‘Pure-hearted Youth from the Korean Peninsula Chosen as the 2013th Pinkerton’, Asahi Shinbun, 20 06 1937).Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Ochö fujin, ed. Akimitsu, Yoshimoto (Tokyo, 1947)Google Scholar; Ochö fujin: Miura Tamaki Jiden, ed. Akimitsu, Yoshimoto (Tokyo, 1961)Google Scholar; Harumi, Setouchi, Ochö fujin (Tokyo, 1969).Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Asahi Shinbun, 21 03 1953.Google Scholar

⁵¹ While the opera appears to have been proscribed during the war, the occupation forces in China amalgamated the small independent film makers in Shanghai and vicinity into the China United Producers Company, whose first production was a Madama Butterfly in Chinese (Hu Tieh Fu-jen). See Anderson, Joseph L. and Richie, Donald, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, rev. edn (Princeton, 1982), 154.Google Scholar

⁵² On the following see Yoshie, Fujiwara, Opera no Ura Omote: Fujiwara Opera no 25 nen [On Opera – 25 Years of Fujiwara Opera] (Tokyo, 1962), 75.Google Scholar Fujiwara chose to perform La traviata instead. By November 1946 the Nagato Opera Company was performing Madama Butterfly in Tokyo's Gekijô Theatre.

⁵³ The company returned in 1953 and again in 1956. See Opera no Ura Omote, 126–7.

⁵⁴ Japanese audiences seem to have been mystified by the Italian representation of their culture, and surprised by assumptions of behaviour (tittering, for example, at Pinkerton's failure to remove his shoes before carrying Chô-chô-san into the bedroom at the end of Act I) and the unexpected ability of the lead, Kaoru Yachigusa, to speak and sing perfect Italian. See Anderson and Richie, Japanese Film, 247, and Harold S. Williams, Shades (see n. 2), 306–11.

⁵⁵ August, not July, as stated by Miyazawa (n. 25), 231. The play had been translated by Kitamura, Kihachi (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1938).Google Scholar

⁵⁶ The Nippon Times, 8 06 1954.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ See Bowers, Faubion, ‘An American at Meiji-za’, The Nippon Times (12 07 1954)Google Scholar, reprinted in Tsubouchi, Shôyo and Yamamoto, Jirô, History and Characteristics of Kabuki, trans. and ed. Matsumoto, Ryôzô (Yokohama, 1960), 283–92.Google Scholar The sub-text of this story as a Japanese version of the Long–Belasco play is underscored by the illustrations, which identify the actress Mizutani as Madame Butterfly.

⁵⁸ It was followed by a Hamlet in July and a Traviata the following March; a less positive view of the relationship between Townsend Harris and O-Kichi, Shimoda Shigure (Shimoda Showers), appeared in 1958, the centennial of the US–Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce. See Jones, Stanleigh H. Jr, ‘Puccini Among the Puppets: Madame Butterfly on the Japanese Puppet Stage’, Monumenta Nipponica, 38 (1983), 163–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Experiment and Tradition: New Plays in the Bunraku Theater’, Monumenta Nipponica, 36 (1981), 113–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I am grateful to Professor Jones for providing me with a copy of his research files on Ochô fujin.

⁵⁹ The Mainichi Daily News (5 March), and the Asahi Evening News (2 March).

⁶⁰ Translations from the play are by Kyôko Selden.

⁶¹ The Complete Works of Chuang Tsu, trans. Watson, Burton (New York, 1968), 49.Google Scholar The allusion is familiar in plays such as Komachi at Sekidera or Yôkihi. See Keene, Donald, ed., Twenty Plays of the Nô Theatre (New York and London, 1970), 76 and 215.Google Scholar

⁶² This became the subject of a Bunraku play in 1959. See Jones, ‘Experiment’ (n. 58), 23–7.

⁶³ Compare, for example, the lover's vow in Yôkihi (Keene, 216). Kyôko Seiden suggests that the libretto may even make a particular allusion to Ono no Komachi when O-Chô makes three peep-holes in the shôji for Suzuki, her son and herself, exclaiming, ‘hole, hole, hole, oh I cannot wait’ (ana ana ana ana machidôshiya), an exclamation resembling the sighing sounds ‘ana me, ane me’ that legend attributes to the sound of the wind through the skull of the poet in the grass. The allusion is highly appropriate: Komachi was famous for jilting her lovers.

⁶⁴ Written by Shigeru Mizuta to music composed by Heikichi Takeuchi and Hisao Yamane, the programme's synopsis suggets that Chô-chô-san is a maiko (apprentice geisha), who is married to Pinkerton in a ceremony performed by Gorô, a male geisha (hôkan), on a hill filled with roses. The ensuing plot differs from the opera primarily in the changing of names: Duke Kawajima for Yamadori, Osuzu for Suzuki.

⁶⁵ Chô-chô-san Sandaiki was written by Shiro Takagi, with music composed and adapted by Hisao Yamane, Atsuji Kawamura and Mitsuharu Nakai.

⁶⁶ A popular Russian variation has the protagonists married and living into their eighties: Pikul's, ValentinTri Vozrasta Okini-san; Sentimentalnyi roman (Moscow, 1985).Google Scholar

⁶⁷ I am particularly grateful to Robert J. Smith for his unfailing encouragement and advice throughout the writing of this study. In addition to instances acknowledged in footnotes, I am also indebted to Karen Brazell, Brett De Bary, Nelly Furman, Dorinne Kondo, Marilyn Martin and Etsuko Terasaki for helpful conversations, and to Yôko Mathews, Keiko Yokota-Carter and Sara Pradt for their help with research. After the manuscript had gone to press, Aaron M. Cohen, who is working on a detailed study of the opera's performance history in Japan, sent me a review of the performance discussed on page 181 in the Hôchi Shinbun of 26 May 1930. It suggests that the opera was made more palatable by resisting the appropriation of Japanese culture and ‘de-orientalising’ it: ‘Many pans of the original opera – words, music and acting – are cut, but thanks to these cuts we Japanese can enjoy the opera without getting too angry. For example, such famous melodies as “Kimigayo” and “Miya-san, Miya-san” were deleted, and other lines and gestures considered a national disgrace were taken away. Some names were changed: “Suzuki” to “Osuzu” and “Count Yamadori” to “Mr Yamadori” We can now watch Madam Butterfly with peace of mind.’ The review goes on to criticise the decision to have Pinkerton sing in English and all Japanese characters sing in English when addressing the Americans: ‘Isn't a mixture of Japanese and English a little odd, like some sort of comedy routine? It is as if to insist that Aida be performed in Egyptian and Ethiopic.’