For the codirector of a show with such a provocative title, James Long seems surprisingly skittish about it. "I just want to make it clear that it was conceived and written by people of Japanese descent who have lived in Japan," says Long, codirector of Sexual Practices of the Japanese. "And I'm only one half of the producing team. I don't like it if it looks..."
Creepy? Exploitative?
"Yes," he says. "It will be a legitimate exploration of Japanese stereotypes."
Long and his longtime creative partner Maiko Bae Yamamoto are Theatre Replacement, a company based in Vancouver, BC, where the performance scene seems to be catching fire. (One: This year, Vancouver's third annual PuSh festival exceeded its own hopes with over 14,000 attendees. Two: Long says he and his peers, who struggled throughout the '90s, have started finding funding, rehearsing full time, and producing more rigorous, quality work. Three: There are seven companies performing in this year's Northwest Artist Series at On the Boards; four are from Vancouver.)
Yamamoto wanted to make a piece about Japan, so she and two other writers each began writing about Japanese stereotypes. All three wound up writing about sex: Yamamoto about being groped on a Tokyo train, Manami Hara about an office affair in a love hotel, and Hiro Kanagawa about Japan's national fetish for Ichiro Suzuki. According to the company's YouTube preview, Sexual Practices is not as titillating as it is melancholy, with a sad keyboard score in the mournful style of enka music and a stage design based on another Japanese icon: identical, empty suits hanging in ghostly rows.
"The roots of the show are self-exploitative," Long says, "but it comes back to a very human place. It's not an appropriation that brought these people together." Still, Sexual Practices of the Japanese is about sex in Japan (among other things) and its title can't help but attract Japan fetishists. "Some people come looking for live sex onstage," Long said. "People afterwards talking about what they wish they had seen, whatever they happen to be into. And there is some simulated sex."
To sexualize is always, at some level, to exploit. Even Ichiro, the quiet, private center fielder, feels the discomfort of being desired. A Japanese magazine once offered him $2 million to pose naked. He declined. Later, an ESPN reporter asked how much Ichiro would have to be paid to do a naked photo shoot. He answered like a man harassed: "I would do it if the people who take the photo, if the people who yank my leg and invade my privacy, if they would disappear."
"You mean," the reporter pressed, "you would do it if they would stop writing about you and following you?"
"No," Ichiro answered. "If they would disappear from the planet."
Sexual Practices of the Japanese at On the Boards, Feb 22–24. Call 217-9888 for tickets and information.
