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From 1629 to 1877, women were officially forbidden to act in Japan's kabuki theater, which-under the leadership of a former shrine priestess named Okuni-they had founded in 1603. From 1629 on, male actors, the onnagata, played women's roles. The reasons for the banning of actresses have been frequently recounted elsewhere and need not be reexamined here in detail.
At the time, Japanese urban culture was largely under the influence of Confucian ethics and Buddhist religious practice, both being antifemale systems. Whereas, despite endemic misogyny, ancient and medieval Japan had many women of accomplishment, such women were exceedingly rare during the Tokugawa period (also called the Edo period, 1603-1868). Women of the time may have been more socially and commercially active than is commonly supposed,1 but it is clear that Tokugawa women were, by and large, second-class citizens. People were to behave in this world according to their given place in it. When the dictatorial military government, the bakufu, determined that kabuki's women had overstepped their bounds, it banned them from the stage.
In 1652, it did the same to the youths in the homosexual boys' kabuki, which replaced the women, and who were eliminated for much the same reasons. Kabuki would have died had not increasingly believable instead of merely pretty female characters begun to appear in the mature male kabuki that emerged in the 165Os and took its first important artistic steps in the following decade. At this point, kabuki witnessed a transition from gay theater to gei theater, gei being Japanese for art, including acting art. Only actors past their adolescence could perform and they were forced by law to reduce their physical attractiveness, principally by shaving off the beautifully coifed forelocks that boys wore before celebrating their accession to adult status.
The English theater, by introducing actresses, opened the door to an emphasis on the commodification of women. On the other hand, since kabuki's mature males were required to radically tone down their glamour, one might have feared that the presumably desexed kabuki was not long for this world. But kabuki not only managed to turn the new restrictions to its advantage, it also was able to guarantee that sex remained a fundamental component. Moreover, it served to commodify men as sex...