This paper discusses the first visit of the New York City Ballet [NYCB] to Japan in 1958. In the 1950s, as the Cold War continued, both Washington and the Kremlin realized the significance of cultural diplomacy. After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Soviet leaders began to spend vast sums of money in a cultural offensive; they began to finance the trips of Soviet artists to many countries and also emphasized the barrenness of American culture.

In order to counteract such Soviet cultural propaganda, Dwight Eisenhower created the President’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs in 1954. The U.S. government began actively sponsoring tours abroad of American performing arts to show American excellence in cultural achievement and promote its message of democracy all over the world. NYCB’s visit to Japan in 1958 was one of the tours under the auspices of this fund.

American ballet, with European traditions and American elements, was regarded as a weapon of the cultural Cold War. In particular, NYCB, which had a “modern” style that was supposed to show the superiority of American culture, enhanced its status as a ballet company unique to the United States that was successful in its overseas tours.

In Asia, where the Soviet cultural offensive intensified in the mid-1950s, American performing arts were in demand. In order to hold performances efficiently on a low budget in Asia, the U.S. government considered the San Francisco Ballet, which was small and had a style similar to that of NYCB, the best choice.

The U.S. government’s plan to send the San Francisco Ballet to Japan, however, was opposed by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and the Japanese government as well as Japanese impresarios. Aware of the U.S. and Soviet competition for sending artists to Japan, the Japanese impresarios requested well-known “first-class” artists and did not accept the San Francisco Ballet. The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, appreciating the aesthetic sense of Japanese intellectuals with deep knowledge of the arts, also insisted that the NYCB should visit Japan to satisfy them. The Japanese government, furthermore, with a sense of crisis about the favorable reaction to the visit of the Bolshoi Ballet in 1957, asked the U.S. government to promote a more active cultural offensive in Japan. In short, NYCB’s visit to Japan, which was a part of the U.S. government’s cultural program, demonstrated the various motivations of a number of “actors” in realizing it.

NYCB received a favorable response from intellectuals and the media in Japan, the target of U.S. cultural diplomacy toward Japan. In this sense, it can be said that the tour was successful. However, the NYCB’s performance was a box office failure; some Japanese had a negative reaction to the characteristics of the NYCB, which the U.S. government considered a weapon in its cultural diplomacy. This paper shows that a deep analysis of some negative opinions of the NYCB and the causes of its box office failure should have been carried out by the U.S. government, with a view to subsequent projects.

This paper examines the content of and some difficulties which arose in Bolshoi ballet cultural exchange programmes offered by the Soviet government. These programs were offered to a number of countries; I have focused on the countries of Japan, France, the United Kingdom and the USA in the first part of my paper. These four countries were where the most ambitious productions of the Bolshoi company were held in the latter half of the 1950’s. In the second half of my paper I focus specifically and in more detail on the cultural exchanges between Japan and the USSR. The Bolshoi ballet played a significant role in exchanges between the former Soviet union and the rest of the world, as it was symbolic of the USSR’s diplomatic relations. I limited the timespan for the investigation from 1953 to 1964, when Nikita Khrushchev strategically increased dispatches of cultural organizations to the world trying to expand Soviet influence during the Cold War period.

In the mid to late 1950’s, the Soviet ballet tours to France (1954), the United Kingdom (1956) and the USA (1959) were lead by the respective governments on the basis of mutual exchanges. However the Japanese government wanted to avoid such exchanges because they were afraid of the ideological impact of communism on the people and more were interested in economic growth than in cultural diplomacy. Despite this, private organizations in Japan hungered for such cultural exchanges in the arts and sciences, and had an active say in who came from the USSR. The 1957 Bolshoi ballet tour to Japan was also organized by a private impresario and it was received with wild enthusiasm by the Japanese people. The Japanese government granted visas to some applicants but not others; it depended on the political sway of the organizations involved. Sadly sending Japanese advocates to the USSR would involve high costs so the numbers sent there were much less than those who came to Japan. In other countries the exchanges were much more balanced but political relationships with the USSR did cause interruption to the programmes. This would suggest that the success of cultural exchanges depends more on politics than content.

In the 1960’s the Japanese-Soviet political relationship deteriorated because of the new Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (1960), the restart of nuclear tests by the USSR, the Northern Territories dispute, the break up of the relationships between the Japanese and Soviet communist parties concerned with the Partial Test Ban Treaty and so on. However Soviet Russia kept sending high caliber representatives to Japan in similar numbers to before. Some of the Japanese organizations involved dropped out of the exchanges, while others joined. This happened due to changing public feeling towards the USSR, shifts in political relations, and changing relations between the organizations and respective governments. It was in this atmosphere that the Soviet government counted on ballet to maintain diplomatic ties with Japan. The Kirov Ballet’s Japan tour (1961), and the joint concerts of the Tchaikovsky Memorial Tokyo Ballet School with Soviet famous dancers (1961 and 1963) helped to set the notion that Russia led the world in ballet. The Soviet government was convinced of the effectiveness of the ballet in demonstrating the strength of Soviet culture without fear of rivalry from other countries, and expanded the exchanges within this field.