This paper aims to demonstrate the relationship between Broadway revues and Japanese entertainment stages in the 1920s by examining one specific production. The revue style gained popularity on Japanese stages around 1930, but the influence of Broadway revues on performances on Japanese stages has not been discussed in Japanese theatre history studies. However, there were some Japanese people engaged in theatre productions who had contemporaneously watched Broadway revues in New York in the 1920s. Among such people, a female magician, Syokyokusai Tenkatsu, and her troupe performed some Broadway revues at Teigeki Theatre, Tokyo, in 1925. They did not advertise the details, but their “Jazz” songs, “Jazz Dances,” and “Sungeki” sketches at the Teigeki stage were programs picked up from some Broadway revues performed in 1924. A year before the Teigeki production, Tenkatsu's troupe performed in a vaudeville show at Hippodrome Theatre, New York, and got the opportunity to experience the popularity of those programs at the local level and judge their potential for Japanese audiences in the future. Understanding the relationship between Broadway revues of 1924 and Tenkatsu's Teigeki production can facilitate a comparison of other Japanese entertainment stages of the 1920s to Broadway revues of the same time. Tenkatsu's “Broadway revue” at Teigeki in 1925 is the key production to observe an untold aspect of Japanese theatre history in the 1920s.

Since the mid-1920s, agitprop troupes were established in Japan under the influence of the Russian Revolution and the international socialist movement. Performances took place not only in theatres but also in public spaces such as factory grounds, where the agitprop troupes performed critical social sketches for workers who hardly went to the theatre.

Among these Japanese agitprop troupes, the “Mezamashi-Tai (Alarm clock troupe)” was especially remarkable. The Japanese actor Koreya Senda, who had studied and worked in an agitprop troupe in Germany from 1927 to 1931, became a troupe member in 1932 and promoted its development according to his experiences in Germany. The performances of the troupe included montages of short dramatic pieces, sprechchor and musical pieces. The troupe also performed in front of regular audiences. Their performances created a new theatrical genre. They were simply constructed and the agitprop effect was preferred to artistic perfection. The Mezamashi-Tai became very popular, but it had to close its operations in 1934 under the pressure of the national security law. Some of its former members worked in governmental theatre organizations until 1945.

The activities of the “Mezamashi-Tai” have hardly been researched yet because of their political message and of their “non-artistic” form. However, the approach of the Mazamashi-Tai contained elements which in the meantime have become characteristic features of many theatrical performances since the 1970s until today.

Kokumin Engeki which means the National Theater was a popular concept with journalism, the academy, and the goverment, in Japan under WWII. We associate Kokumin Engeki with Japanese wartime nationalism and fascism. The government promoted the Kokumin Engeki contest from 1941 to 1944, but it is the strangest thing that the some plays of national policy were rejected or defeated. As a matter of fact, the state powers and academic authorities didn't have the distinct concept of Kokumin Engeki. This thesis is about the confusion of the Kokumin Engeki contest as seen in the participating plays of FURUKAWA ROPPA's company and his diary.

KAWAGUCHI Matsutarô's novel Tsuruhachi and Tsurujirô (1934) gained popularity after it was adapted into a play and then into a film. This paper examined how the novel was received. In addition, it also clarified the fluid nature of Matsutarô's text by examining the problems of its adaptation and relationship to the Japanese performance art genre “geidômono.”

The main characters of Tsuruhachi and Tsurujirô are the performers of the Shinnai musical performance art. Together with The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums that follows Kabuki actors, Tsuruhachi and Tsurujirô has generally been considered the performance art genre's representative work. The performance art genre “geidômono” refers to the group of works that depict a world where performance holds a supreme value beyond any particular person. Undeniably, this work and the theatrical production of its predecessor The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums functioned as the impetus creating this genre. Nevertheless, this investigation has shown that while both of these works were treated as similar stories in their historical contexts, their structures greatly differ. Furthermore, Tsuruhachi and Tsurujirô has been considered an adaptation of the long-time Hollywood film Bolero. Clearly, portions have commonalities with Bolero, for instance, the setting, but Tsuruhachi and Tsurujirô's structure and character models differ distinctly from Bolero.