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A revolution is sweeping through Japan's Takarazuka Music School
Oct 22, 2020
For more than a century the Takarazuka Music School has transformed thousands of young women from unpolished amateurs into accomplished singers, dancers and actors who perform to sell-out audiences with kitsch adaptations of everything from Japanese manga to classic western novels.
But the school, based in the Japanese hot spring resort from which it takes its name, is not just in the business of nurturing talent.
Founded by Ichizo Kobayashi, an industrialist-turned-politician and president of Hankyu Railways – the performers’ employer to this day – the school combines coaching in the performing arts with a demand for absolute discipline and obedience, tethered to its motto: purity, honesty, beauty.
But a revolution of sorts is sweeping though the school’s spotlessly clean corridors. Earlier this month, it said it had scrapped several longstanding and unwritten rules that have governed the behaviour of new recruits for decades.
They include bowing to passing trains on the local railway line in case its passengers include older students; adopting a sombre facial expression that requires them to lower the corners of their mouth, and limiting their vocabulary to a simple “yes,” “no” and a few other sanctioned phrases when in the company of senior trainees.
After graduating, students join one of five groups that together make up the Takarazuka Revue, a fixture of Japanese theatre since its first performance, as a girls’ operetta troupe, in 1914, a year after Kobayashi opened the music school.
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