and Putting on a Performance of The Mikado
The word "nigger" appears in two places in the libretto, in Act I, during Ko-Ko's "As someday it may happen" aria, and in Act II, during the Mikado's "A more humane Mikado" aria. This word has been known to be unacceptably offensive for some time, especially in the United States, but the solution historically has been only to replace the word and not to address the racism that suggested its use. The pages that contain the original text for these arias also contain some discussion of how this problem has generally been handled in the past.
As discussed here and on the pages that discuss the text containing it, the word "nigger" has historically been a problem for Americans viewing the operetta, and that word began to be replaced beginning in about the 1930s. British people, apparently, had less of a problem with that word than Americans.
Cultural and Racial Stereotypes
The Mikado premiered in 1885, the year before Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was published, and many of the objections and defenses of Huck Finn pertain to The Mikado as well. In my search of late 19th-century periodicals, I found many, many offensive portrayals of people of color and people of non-white, non-Protestant ethnic heritage. In that search, I came to an understanding of both Gilbert's and Twain's place along a spectrum of ethnic and racial bigotry that rather surprised me: they were rather less offensive than much else that was written and published in their time, though they are clearly of their time and place. In the periodicals I read - like The Century, Harper's Monthly, Cosmopolitan and other more-or-less literary periodicals of the day - it seems to have been common to represent African-Americans, for example, by simulating an accent and using ethnic signals to identify characters and speech. To continue with the same example, like their white counterparts, African-American writers like Paul Lawrence Dunbar used these same conventions for what looks to me to be for the same purposes.
We left the characters' names as Gilbert wrote them. They remind me of baby talk, but they are so closely tied to the entirety of the operetta and people's memory of it that we felt they could not be changed without doing irreparable harm. Besides, what's wrong with sanitizing all this offensiveness out is that we walk away with an unrealistic expectation of what the Victorians were like.
Also offensive is Gilbert's confusion of Japanese and Chinese. Nanki-Poo's name is probably a reference to China rather than Japan (see my discussion of the characters' names). For another example, in describing his (fictional) execution of Nanki-Poo, Ko-Ko says he took hold of him by his pigtail, which Japanese men were not wearing at this point in history, though some Chinese men were.
People have objected to the racism and ethnic bigotry The Mikado in the past for the same reasons we're offended now. I think the first objection was in about 1907, when the British ambassador to Japan asked that some performances be cancelled because of the stereotypical way Japanese people were presented. I don't know how much of his objection was based on the actual libretto and score and how much were based on the way the performers presented their characters as Japanese. Obviously, the fact that Japanese companies have performed The Mikado does not prove that it is not offensive to Japanese people or others who respect their culture, but it is true that the operetta has been translated into a number of langauges, including Japanese.
I have included among these pages and in my bibliography what examples of late-19th-century writing about Japan and Japanese culture that I could find. While the writers seem never to be able to shake their profound sense of difference between themselves and the Japanese they write about, not all of what they write is to my mind hopelessly racist, though it seems clearly old-fashioned and paternalistic.
Not Much That Is Japanese Is in The Mikado Anyway
There is not much that is Japanese in The Mikado. The name of the supreme ruler, of course, "Mikado," is authentic. The song "Mi-ya Sa-ma" uses the music of an actual Japanese song. Some Japanese words appear in the Finale of Act I, "With Aspect Stern and Gloomy Stride." The costumes are usually Japanese, reflecting the extreme popularity of Japanese design and fabric during the late 19th century in England and America. That's basically it.
Because they sounded like stereotyping to our ears, for our performances we cut some of the references to Japan or Japanese culture that were part of the reminders to the audience that the characters were supposed to be Japanese. Victorians are far enough away from us now that setting a play a century ago makes it seem sufficiently exotic for a fairy tale and helps make the idealism plausible.
The Craze for Japanese Art and Crafts and Fabrics and Fashions
Perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan would argue that their stereotypical signals reflect not a sense of the inferiority of Japanese or Asian culture but in fact a love and even a preference for it. Certainly the craze for Japanese art and objects was in full force in the mid-1880s, when the operetta was written and originally produced. Familiarity with Japanese aesthetic, at least as it was imported into western Europe, had been growing from about the middle of the century. British painters had begun to discuss Japanese art and understand its integrity, at least to some degree. Even the contemporary edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica shows this influence, with quite a long and sometimes ecstatic description of Japanese art and crafts ("Japan" 588-592).
That love for Japanese fabrics and fashions, which shows up in the tradition of costuming the characters in Japanese clothing, was part of the craze for all things Japanese. John Leighton lectured (and later published his lecture) at the Royal Institution in 1863 about an 1862 exhibition of Japanese objects (in Paris?); Whistler was responsible for trying to get people to think about Japanese art in a more sophisticated way. An exhibition in 1885 in Knightsbridge, a suburb of London, in which a more-or-less life-sized Japanese village was set up, with people performing crafts, serving tea, and so on.
The "Willow Pattern," although technically Chinese, shares some characteristics with The Mikado in its fusion of east and west images and stories. Willow Pattern china (table service) has a distinctive Asian blue and white idealization of bridges and birds and flowers and so on. Originally based on a western-European folktale set in China, this extrememly popular tableware was designed and originally made in England. The Chinese began to manufacture and export the china, so by the end of the 19th century, the dishes did probably in fact come from China, though the representation of the images and the perspective is essentially western.
critical analysis
attempts against universalizing
resistance to reductiveness, even to the latest intellectual fad
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This URL: http://web.stcloudstate.edu/scogdill/mikado/racism.html.
Last update: 2 May 1998.