‘The Beginning of the Shin-Fuji at Meguro (Yamabiraki Meguro no Shin-Fuji)’ is a kabuki play written by Takeshiba Kisui and first performed in 1893. This play was based on the adventures of Kondō Jūzō, a retainer of the Tokugawa shogunate who explored Ezo (current Hokkaido) and the Northern Islands five times during the years from 1798 to 1807. Although the latter half of the play is allotted to an episode of a murder case, the first half describes Jūzō's adventure at the Iturup Island.

In the beginning of the play, Kondo redraws the border between Japan and Russia by pulling out a Russian territorial monument, and he is also described fighting against a brown bear, and the Ainu people. In the following scene, “iomante,” an Ainu ceremony in which a brown bear is sacrificed was represented on the stage.

These eccentric settings and the gaps from the historical facts regarding Jūzō's life reflected the situation of the Meiji era in which the Empire of Japan expanded its territory and the interest in the “alien” people, including the Ainu, was increased among the people. In this paper, I argue that this play can be regard as an example how prejudices for “alien” people and nationalism unconsciously amplified by the popular theatre in the late 19^th and the early 20^th centuries in Japan.