!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
retaliation”; in equilibrium/quarrel farce, “the plot focuses upon a narrow, perpetual-motion kind of
movement, in which two opposing forces wrestle each other literally or metaphorically, in a tug-of-war
without resolution”; and in snowball farce, “all the characters are equally caught up as victims in a
whirlwind of escalating sound and fury” (Davis 2003, 7-8).
76
Wells and Davis suggest that “going through the kyōgen plays one by one, it is possible to produce a list
of failings that Japanese audiences of the last six hundred years or so must have found psychologically
convincing in liberating laughter” (2006, 140). These “conditions justifying comic punishment” include
the “moral failings” of trickery, malice, cowardice, trouble-making, dishonesty, gullibility, stupidity,
bullying, cruelty, ineptitude, greed, boasting, theft, pretension, jealousy, shrewishness, infidelity, ignorance,
nagging, and drunkenness; the “physical failings” of blindness, ugliness, physical deformity, and being
Chinese; and the “religious failings” of ritual defilement and being the King of Hell (141). A more
extensive survey would be needed to determine what failings justify comic punishment in Okinawan farce.
77
As Jameson notes, literary critical portrayals of farce tend to “oscillate between the repressive and the
liberatory” (1981, 107). He dismisses such attempts at broad-spectrum genre criticism as idealist attempts
to reconstruct “something like the generalized existential experience behind the individual texts” (107-108).
Approaching the question from a functionalist perspective, James C. Scott observes that what little
empirical data we have on farce “provides little or no support for catharsis through displacement” (1990,
187). He goes on to propose that “far from being a relief-valve taking the place of actual resistance, the
discursive practices offstage sustain resistance in the same way in which the informal peer pressure of
factory workers discourages any individual worker from exceeding work norms and becoming a rate-
buster” (191).
78
Ikemiya, for example, mentions a form of non-comic folk kyōgen in Yaeyama (jīnu-kyongin 例の狂言),
distinct from Yaeyaman comic kyōgen (bara kyongin 笑わせ狂言) (291). Some early commercial
performers may have been familiar with folk traditions such as this.
79
On kuchidate in mainland Japanese shinpa performance around the same time, see M. Cody Poulton
(2010, 22).
80
Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics exemplifies the metaphysical conception of beauty, which has permeated
literary studies in Japan as thoroughly as in the West (as evidenced by Ikemiya’s idealist content-analysis
of Uyanma). In brief, Hegel proposes that art consists of two intertwined aspects: “first, a content, an aim, a
meaning; and secondly, the expression, appearance, and realization of this content. But, thirdly, both
aspects are so penetrated by one another that the external, the particular, appears exclusively as a
presentation of the inner. In the work of art nothing is there except what has an essential relation to the
content and is an expression of it” (1975 [1842], 95). Thus, in the final instance, the “content” of fine art is
nothing less than the self-objectivizing absolute spirit, manifest in the subject’s desire to achieve self-
recognition through “an intuition of something that is his own doing” which he achieves by “altering
external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own
characteristics” (31). Hegel goes on to argue that transcendental pathos (in the Aristotelian sense of the
mode of rhetoric πάθος) as “the proper center, the true domain, of art; the representation of it is what is
chiefly effective in the work of art as well as in the spectator” (232). On the matter of tragic portrayals of
love affairs across status boundaries, Hegel suggests that “if love is the one point of union, and does not
also draw into itself the remaining scope of what a man has to experience in accordance with his spiritual
education and the circumstances of his class, it remains empty and abstract, and touches only the sensuous
side of life” (210). Moreover, because love is “only the personal feeling of the individual subject, and it is
obviously not filled with the eternal interests and objective content of human existence,” Hegel regards it as
inferior to the heroic passions as a topic for tragedy (566-567).
81
Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki, for example, opens with one of the most well-known passages in Japanese
literature:「ゆく河の流れは絶えずして、しかも、もとの水にあらず、淀みに浮ぶうたかたは、か
つ消えかつ結びて、久しくとどまりたる例なし。世中にある人と栖と、またかくの如し。」
82
旧慣制度の改革、名子の廃止、宿引女廃止、御陰米の廃止、耕作仮筆者の廃止 (「一木書記官
取調書」 cited in Shimajiri 1977, 69). Ichiki Kitokuro’s 1894 report to the Home Ministry estimated a
population of around 400 officials, 3,000 indentured servants, and 31,600 peasants (65).