She’s the Ideal Man in Japan

It’s a sweltering Wednesday morning outside a theater in the posh Ginza district. Hundreds of women line the sidewalk holding flowers, cameras and fan letters.

A shorthaired woman in a baseball cap and sunglasses alights from a cab and cuts through the crowd. Instamatics flash, video cameras roll and fans scurry behind her. Schoolgirls, housewives and grandmothers swoon.

“Oh, she’s so handsome,” sighs one elderly woman, clutching her handkerchief.

The object of all the sensation is Fubuki Takane, the newest star of the visiting Takarazuka Revue. Founded in 1914 in a small town in western Japan, the revue is the country’s oldest--and only surviving--female musical-theater troupe. Its shows are a glitzy blend of Liberace, Radio City, Vegas and Broadway, with women playing both male and female roles.

The suave otoko-yaku, or women playing men, with their shiny pompadours, huge painted eyes and perfectly painted lips, are the Takarazuka trademark--a romantic female ideal of the perfect man. In the troupe’s sentimental musicals, otoko-yaku treat their women as real men rarely do in Japan: They woo them, tango with them and cradle them in their arms as they sing in manly baritones of their undying love.

Even more spectacular, perhaps, than the 370 women of the revue are the fans--an audience averaging 2.5 million a year, 95% female. The Takarasienne, as the performers are known, have charmed generations.

The obsessed fans often travel from distant provinces to the two revue theaters--in Tokyo and in Takarazuka, about 10 miles north of Osaka--to see shows dozens of times. They wait for hours before and after a performance so they can fawn over the stars.

Some love the androgynous exoticism of the otoko-yaku; others long for real men who are just as romantic. “We think this is the most beautiful thing in the world,” gushes Tomomi Ohashi, a 25-year-old office worker, outside the theater in Takarazuka. She awoke at 6 a.m. and traveled two hours by train from Nagoya to greet her favorite star before morning rehearsal--the ninth time in one month.

The troupe, whose name means “treasure mound,” was the brainchild of Hankyu Corp. railroad entrepreneur Ichizo Kobayashi. He thought of an all-female opera chorus as an answer to his financial woes; it would compete with his main business rival’s all-male chorus and, he hoped, be a commercially viable alternative to Japan’s ancient, all-male Kabuki theater.

According to his memoirs, “Takarazuka jottings,” Kobayashi conceived of the otoko-yaku as actresses who would be “more suave, more affectionate, more courageous, more charming, more handsome and more fascinating than a real male.”

In those days, the theater world was considered risque and slightly immoral, and there was no place to train female thespians, so Kobayashi founded the Takarazuka Music School in western Japan. The town that grew around it and is named for the troupe includes a theater complex, an amusement park, hotels, shops and cafes.

Schooled in Graces

Kobayashi’s short-term goal was entertainment; the long-term goal of the school was, in keeping with Japan’s turn-of-the-century Meiji Civil Code, to create “good wives and wise mothers.” That was 82 years ago, but little has changed.

In the immaculate entrance hall of the ivy-covered school hangs a plaque with the school motto: “Modesty, purity and grace.”

Upstairs in his spartan office, Principal Yoshiki Terai, a former hotel manager, articulates the school’s philosophy.

“Japan is changing. But the fact remains that the most important thing for a woman is to be a good wife and a wise mother,” he says. “That is the purpose of a girls’ school, and that is the purpose of Takarazuka.”

The administration, staffed almost completely by men, notes with pride that Takarazuka women are considered prize catches, otoko-yaku the best catches of all. (Women must quit if they marry.)

Entrance to the Takarazuka school is highly competitive--only 40 women out of about 1,600 applicants are accepted each spring.

The students take lessons in tap-dancing, ballet, voice and traditional Japanese dancing, as well as in the tea ceremony. They are subjected to a grueling schedule that, for the first year, begins at 6 a.m. daily with two hours of cleaning. Part of the drill is using tape to pick up dust from every square inch of the school’s three floors.

The system resembles the military--and the staff is flattered at the comparison, noting that local members of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces train the girls and women in discipline, marching and military carriage during their first spring.

Although hierarchy plays some role in most Japanese schools, the differentiation between upperclassmen and newcomers is carried to an extreme at Takarazuka. First-year enrollees endure the kind of bullying imposed on plebes at U.S. military academies. This stratification is considered appropriate training for Japan’s group-oriented society.

Stage Training

Girls and women enter the program when they are between 16 and 20 years old. In the first year, they decide whether they want to be musume-yaku, playing female parts, or otoko-yaku. Not everyone can play the coveted otoko-yaku roles; one must be tall. And only a handful of the otoko-yaku will go on to become top stars.

After the first year, separate training begins. The otoko-yakus’ hair is shorn, and they begin learning to walk and talk like men. Those who will play women learn other skills, such as singing in exaggerated sopranos.

After two years, the women graduate to the theater, beginning their climb through the ranks. The ages of the stars are kept secret. Most Takarasienne retire after about 10 years--in their middle to late 20s. Otoko-yaku reach the top after 11 to 14 years and then dazzle their fans for three to five more years, depending on their popularity. They retire by their early 30s.

Shinji Ueda, Takarazuka Revue Co. president and director, was unwilling to disclose his actresses’ salaries but says even top stars make less than the average Japanese white-collar worker. “Takarazuka does everything for them. They don’t need much money,” he says.

The payoff comes later for those who decide to stay in show business. Former Takarazuka stars are everywhere here--in ads, on television, even in parliament.

Takarazuka is in the business of selling dreams, says Ueda, who also was scriptwriter for its two biggest hits, “The Rose of Versailles” and “Gone With the Wind.”

“For the fans, Takarazuka is like a drug,” he says. “It helps them escape from reality. Men don’t treat women like that. . . . This is how women want to be loved.”

Improving on Men

He attributes Takarazuka’s popularity to the inequality of the sexes, women’s dissatisfaction with Japanese men and the restrictions placed on women in Japanese society. “Japanese men just go to work, and come home late drunk. They never say, ‘Let’s have dinner, just the two of us.’ . . . Japanese men are the worst,” he says.

Ueda, who has been with Takarazuka for 40 years, says that before World War II the troupe’s gaudy musicals were as popular among men as among women. But after the war, as Japan threw itself into frenzied economic growth and men disappeared into the nation’s factories and corporations, the audience became predominantly female.

Ueda explains that many women love the shows because when they see other women on stage portraying men, they say to themselves: “I could do that!” And they extrapolate: “I could ride a horse, run a company--and it would feel so good to have that power.”

Men today see Takarazuka as strange but nothing to get worked up about. Most have never seen a show and aren’t even curious. They say they see the dreamy otoko-yaku as too distant from reality to pose any competition for the hearts of their women.

“No matter how handsome my wife says an otoko-yaku is, I wouldn’t be worried,” says Keiji Hirano, 32. “There are no men like that. In the end, they are women.”

Otoko-yaku speak earnestly of their study of male mannerisms, and their desire to please their fans is palpable. Jun Shibuki, an otoko-yaku, sitting with her lithe dancer’s legs apart, explains in the cadence of male Japanese speech her struggle to behave like a man.

She says lowering her voice was the biggest challenge: “At first, no sound would come out. Now I sound like an old man.”

Ueda says that in the 1940s and 1950s, the women watched big Hollywood stars such as Tyrone Power and Clark Gable to learn to walk, talk, sit and even smoke.

Shibuki is playing a gangster in an upcoming show and says she has been watching the 1987 movie “The Untouchables,” starring Kevin Costner and Sean Connery.

She’s been with Takarazuka for 11 years and says behaving like a man comes naturally. Many of the women act the same way offstage.

Mire Hana is the No. 2 otoko-yaku in the Flower Troupe, one of the revue’s four divisions (the others are Moon, Snow and Star). She is starring in the adaptation of the Broadway musical “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

She says she studies men on trains and buses: “When I see a man, somehow that leaves an impression--I walk with a wide stride, sit like a man, even my thinking is like a man. But we aren’t men. We are women being men. We have a sexiness that men don’t have.”

Hana hopes to marry one day and says she will make the perfect wife.

“If I marry a man, since I have been one I know what [he wants] from a woman. So I will always be one step ahead of him, knowing exactly what he needs before he can even ask for it,” she says.

Hana says the life of an otoko-yaku is full of privileges usually granted only to men. Fans cater to the stars’ every whim, cooking meals, doing their cleaning and sending gifts that range from box lunches to jewelry.

In the cloistered world of Takarazuka, there is prejudice against the hard-working stars of female roles, whose labors go unnoticed. “Takarazuka is a male-actor-centered society,” says Hana, humorously echoing real Japanese men who often explain inequality between the sexes by noting that Japan is a male-centered society.

Every day, thousands of fans make a pilgrimage to the town of Takarazuka to pay tribute to their favorite otoko-yaku. No one knows for sure how many fans there are, but a Takarazuka spokesman says there are more than 300 fan clubs. Tomonokai, the official fan club, lists 70,000 members.

Revue of Revenues

According to a recent book by the Takarazuka Research Club, an assemblage of journalists and fans, the average fan club member spends $2,000 to $3,000 a year to attend 20 performances and buy Takarazuka-related videos, magazines, calendars and other products. In 1994, revenues for videos alone totaled $150 million.

Tickets sell for $35 to $75. The theater’s revenues are not announced separately from those of Hankyu Corp., but a Takarazuka spokesman says audiences have grown by 60% in the past 15 years. Still, he says, the troupe is in the red, because each performance employs close to 300 people.

On one Saturday, fans stood in the rain in Takarazuka, outside the troupe’s home theater, waiting to greet the stars before a rehearsal of “How to Succeed.” A deep respect for the stars governs the crowd’s behavior. There are no paparazzi; no fan reaches out to touch her favorite actress.

Escape From Reality

During the intermission of the afternoon show, Tsuji Yoko, 40, says she plans to see the show 50 times during its six-week run. The wealthy homemaker says she comes to escape reality.

Office worker Ishihara Shizuo, 34, will see the show and attend a tea party, where she will pay $50 for cake, tea and 30 seconds to speak with her favorite star. “I wanted to be born a boy,” she says.

Tomomi Ohashi, the office worker who took the train, says when she watches love scenes between men and women in movies, she doesn’t feel anything much. But Takarazuka drives her wild. “Seeing the love scenes, I get embarrassed,” says Ohashi. “But it’s so romantic, I get goose pimples. Real men are never like that.”

Until things in Japan really change, says Ueda, Takarazuka has a corner on the dream market: “If the number of fans drop, we will know women are happier, their home lives are getting better.”