Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea

Abstract

fundraising campaign to establish the company. The launch of the project coincided with a sabbatical year Shimodate spent in England at the University of Cambridge, where he studied how to produce and direct Shakespearean plays. A principal feature of Shimodate’s translations and adaptations (including The new Romeo and Juliet) is his use of the local Tohoku (northeast Japan) dialect – and a feature of his productions is ‘actors who [can] speak both standardized Japanese and the Tohoku dialect’ (31). For Shimodate, using Tohoku speech is necessary ‘to express a deeper and broader interpretation of Shakespeare’s world’ and ‘to create a new slant on Shakespeare’s plays both in Japan and abroad’ (32). The new Romeo and Juliet was staged for the first time beginning in November 2012 at various locations in northeast Japan that had yet to recover from the March 2011 triple disasters. The play was part of Shimodate’s newly conceived ‘Hot Spring Trilogy’, three adaptations of Shakespeare ‘whose main purpose’, as translator Fumiaki Konno writes, ‘was to bolster through entertainment the spirits of people in the areas devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake . . . [T]he three adaptations share three features: they are comedies, depict no death and are located in a hot spring setting’ (223). The two other plays in the trilogy were based on King Lear and The merchant of Venice. The translated adaptations and supporting material that make up Re-imagining Shakespeare in contemporary Japan amply fulfill the book’s aim ‘to introduce, contextualize and also reconsider the history and current practice of translating and adapting Shakespeare in Japan’ (1). As the example of The Shakespeare Company Japan’s The new Romeo and Juliet vividly illustrates, innovative approaches to the presentation of Shakespearean dramas are neither limited to artists working in major urban centers nor to artists working in circumstances that are ideal for cultural production. When asked about the future of his northeastJapan-based theatre company, Shimodate has movingly said: ‘I would like to build a theatre in Tohoku and . . . I would like to give children the chance to learn about the lingua franca that is Shakespeare and about dialects. Theatres in Tokyo have an urban character; I would like [my] theatre in Tohoku to be down-to-earth and filled with human warmth’ (234).