Scope. As defined on this site, the performing arts embrace theater, dance, and music and include both traditional and popular forms. In addition, radio broadcasting, or theater of the mind, opened a new but limited creative outlet for women in the 1920s. In some cases, what began as popular performing arts in the 16th and 17th centuries was transformed in the 20th century into classical arts or canonized as the essence of the Japanese spirit. Kabuki is the prime example.

Theater. In Edo Japan, as of the late 1620s, women were not allowed to perform on the Kabuki stage, although history and legend credit a woman with founding Kabuki, an intricate mixture of recitation, dance, and dialogue, in the 1590s. For reasons of morality, officials also banned boys from performing in public. Subsequently, adult male actors who specialized in women’s roles were called onnagata. They developed huge followings and were also frequently depicted in woodblock prints. They and their fans also believed that they were able to project the essence of womanliness or onnarashisa on the stage far better than a female actor could. Women were either said to lack the right voices, stances, or charisma, or, a later argument, they were too real for true theatrical art and artifice. Nevertheless, women players performed onna-Kabuki (women’s Kabuki) privately or secretly. Otherwise, they were active behind the scenes as dance and music teachers or in helping with costumes. In addition, the older forms of Noh classical drama and Kyōgen comic plays and the newer theater of puppetry or bunraku were exclusively male. Women who wished to sing or recite in Japanese narrative styles, such as jōrūri, took lessons and performed for family and friends in their teacher’s annual recitals. Occasionally, they were also teachers.

This changed in the late 19th century as women began to appear on the Japanese stage in modern popular forms of drama called shimpa (new theater), or in popularized classical styles, such as shinkokugeki (new national drama). These two forms remained popular with audiences down to 1945 and even after. Though women’s Kabuki was popular for a time, 1890s to the 1920s, the actors were relegated to the margin of the Kabuki world and to secondary theaters. In 1954, the newly organized Ichikawa All-Girls Kabuki Troupe was a big hit at the Meiji Theater with a production of Kanjincho or the Subscription List, a top Kabuku play. One of the lead actors drew attention for playing her part as though she were a puppet in Bunraku drama. Was it “acting like men,” as a scholar of theater history recently suggested.

In more modern forms, the first Japanese women to gain acceptance on the public stage was Kawakami Sadayakko (1871-1946), a former geisha, who performed with her actor husband in quasi-Kabuki plays which he produced and directed in the 1890s. In overseas tours of the United States and Europe in the early 20th century, she became a sensation with Western audiences for her beauty and acting abilities. At home in Tokyo, 1911, a younger woman, Matsui Sumako (1886-1919), stirred up controversy in playing the role of Nora in Ibsen’s play, The Doll’s House. This happened to coincide with a new stage in Japanese feminist consciousness, but Japanese critics, including women, were upset by Nora’s decision to leave her husband and children and “be a person.” Western style modern drama was called shingeki. At first, Japanese translated and performed French, Russian, German, or English plays. Chekov and Shakespeare were popular choices, and Shakespeare was widely performed in the 1920s by professional and amateur groups, both in Japanese and English. Students at all-male Waseda University performed “The Merchant of Venice” in a new open air theater in 1923. Students in women’s schools got their opportunities in collegiate productions with all-women casts. Experimental Western style-theater was performed in Little Tsukiji Theatre productions in 1920s Tokyo but halted when officials and the police condemned the works as leftist inspired. By the 1930s, a few Japanese playwrights, such as Kishida Kunio (1890-1954), who had studied in Paris, were also writing original modern plays in Japanese. In the 1960s, his daughter, Kishida Kyoko, would become an outstanding film actor.

Supreme among women on the stage, before and during the war years and continuing into the Occupation period, was Mizutani Yaeko (1905-1979), who was versatile in shimpa and shingeki. She had appeared on the stage in the 1920s in Little Tsukuji productions and acted both in silent shimpa films and in the new talkies. In 1937, she tackled the role of Hamlet. As was the case with almost all actors, she too appeared in patriotic productions approved by Japan’s media censors. When the Occupation began, Mizutani was already forty and going strong. She was apparently the stage actress who received the first stage kiss in 1946. It was from her co-star and long-time stage colleague, the versatile Kabuki actor, Ennosuke. This was in a play approved by the theatrical officers in the Civil Information and Education Section, although they did not order the kiss. CI&E wanted to downplay the appeal of Kabuki, which was thought to be feudalistic, and democratize Japanese theater by promoting modern drama, especially the staging of American plays, such as Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine.

Another fine stage actress from the prewar period was Sugimura Haruko (1905-1997), who was also in great demand before and during the Occupation to play character and cameo roles in movies. In 1948, Sugimura was awarded one of six Fine Arts prizes by the Ministry of Education for her performance in the play, A Woman’s Life, at the Bungakuza, the leading theater for Western style drama. She continued her career in television drama after TV’s arrival in Japan in 1953. In the Occupation period, women performers were also recruited to Zenshinza, a leftist troupe of actors which brought plays to a wide range of people in factories, schools, and rural areas and which also specialized in Shakespearean drama. In future years, the Suzuki Tadashi drama method, first demonstrated in Japan in 1966, would be brilliantly executed by actor Shiraishi Kiyoko in Japanese versions of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and modern plays. She also played King Lear. Audiences in the United States, including the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., area, were been treated to her powerful performances in the early 1990s. In a turnabout, Bando Tamasaburō, a young onnagata who brought young Japanese back to Kabuki drama in the 1980s with his beauty and exciting performances, tackled female roles in modern drama and in films and gained fans overseas.

Classical Dance. Dance played an important part in Kabuki drama. Denied a public role, women took Japanese dance lessons from private teachers for enjoyment and to perfect grace and refinement, qualities much admired in cultivating femininity. In the 20th century, a few Japanese women found their way into classical dance, ballet, and modern dance. In classical performing arts, a special group emerged at the end of the Occupation period. It was called the Azuma Kabuki Dancers and Musicians and Headed by a woman, Azuma Tokuho (born Yamada Kikue), a hereditary teacher or iemoto of Azuma style Japanese Buyo dance. The troupe made a highly successful tour in Europe and the United States in 1954 under the sponsorship of Prince Takamatsu and the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Their purpose was to help prepare foreign audiences for the first performances of Kabuki, the real thing, as well as to provide enjoyment in their own right. A theater critic for The Nation commented on the New York performance:

The group also gave performances for US security forces in Japan and charity benefits. Madame Azuma was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 1991, several years before her death in 1998. Among the instruments played by the Azuma musicians was the thirteen-string kōtō. Women had long been proficient in kōtō music and singing (and also played the three-stringed biwa) but rarely performed in public. Since the Occupation, they have emerged as distinguished professional performers and as teachers.

Ballet and Modern Dance. Japanese fell in love with Western classical and modern dance forms in addition to appreciating their own dance legacy. Elena Pavlova (1897-1941), a Russian dancer who took up exile in Japan after the Bolshevik Revolution, founded the Elena Pavlova Company in Kamakura in 1925 and was famous for her rendition of The Dying Swan. She is given credit for helping to show the Japanese that ballet was an art form and not mere acrobatics. One of her students, Tachibana Akiko, opened her own studio in 1933, the Tachibana Ballet Institute. In Occupied Japan, ballet was reinvigorated with the founding of the Tokyo Ballet in 1946 by Komaki Masahide, a former solo male dancer with the Shanghai Ballets Russe, and with the successful staging of a month-long run of Swan Lake that year. The problem Japanese dancers faced, both male and female, was body type—the requisite slim bodies, long legs, and feet molded by dance shoes and not by geta (wooden clogs) or tabi (split-toe socks). Could they really perform in the Western fashion? The answer was a resounding yes. Tachibana, whose story during the Occupation remains obscure, opened her ballet school again in 1952. Her daughter, Asami Maki (born 1934) had the opportunity to meet famed ballerina Alexandra Danilova during a tour of Japan by the Slavenska Ballaet in 1953 and, at Danilova’s advice and backing, trained with the New York City Ballet in 1954-1955. In future years, Asami would found the Asami Maki Ballet Company and become director of the New National Theatre Ballet. Today, several Western classical ballet schools and companies operate in Japan. Asami Abroad, Japanese ballerinas have gained recognition, dancing leading roles in Western ballet companies in North America and Europe.

The modern dance world was molded in prewar days by such leading male dancers as Baku Ishii and Ito Michio. During the war, perhaps the best known interpretive dancer in Japan and in the Japanese empire was of Korean descent. She became popular using a Japanese name, Sai Shoki (in Korean, it was Ch’oe Sung-hui). Her mastery was such that American impresario Sol Hurok had organized a world tour for her in 1939. She chose to return to North Korea after the war but ran into difficulties over wartime complicity. Outside of Japan, Itō Michio first gained fame in Europe in 1916 with a performance of Hawk’s Well. Subsequently, he perfected his own style of dance in the United States and became a movie choreographer in 1930s Hollywood. One of his several brothers was leftist actor and director Koreya Senda, an important force in modern Japanese theater during and after the Occupation. Repatriated to Japan on an exchange ship in 1942, Itō was recruited by Occupation officials in 1945 to help stage shows for GIs at the Ernie Pyle Theater in Tokyo. One of his first productions was Gilbert and Sullivan’s, The Mikado, in mid-1946, with all GI and WAC cast. Within two years, it was also being performed in Japanese with all Japanese casts, including women. In addition, Ito recruited and trained Japanese dancers and singers for his many shows.

Today, Japanese women are active in Japan and overseas as modern dancers, choreographers, and stage designers. Some were trained overseas, and others in Japan. Japanese women perform in Butoh, a revolutionary contribution of post-Occupation Japan to modern dance. In this form, women, like the men, dance in skin-tight costumes and wear white body makeup. Eiko and Koma, a married couple, reside in New York City and perform experimental modern dance. Eiko, the woman, was born at the end of the Occupation in 1952 and began dancing at age nineteen. Koma, born in 1949, left Japan at the age of twenty-two and headed for New York where he and Koma would develop their own modern dance styles. The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, is among the many venues for their performances and master classes. The most recent appearance of Eiko and Koma at Maryland was in March 2006 as choreographers, mentors, and dancers in the much-acclaimed Cambodian Stories.

Takarazuka Review. For the enjoyment of women of all classes and backgrounds, especially young working women and high school students, there was and is, above all, Takarazuka--the all-women’s review dating back to 1914. Performers were carefully recruited and given highly disciplined training. Men’s parts were played exclusively by women. Careers generally were short but satisfying. Over the years, Takarazuka and another all-female troupe, promoted by the Shōchiku Company, acquired huge female followings. Young fans continued to love and support Takarazuka in their mature years. Takarazuka, too, performed patriotic plays in Japan and in Japan’s empire during the war. In the Occupation years, it maintained its fan base but struggled with the costs of costumes and staging. As before, Takarazuka was centered near the Osaka area, with branches elsewhere, and made frequent appearances in Tokyo. However, it lost its prime stage in Tokyo when its venue was remodeled for the entertainment of GIs as the Ernie Pyle Theater. Americans caught the act on occasion but did not fully fathom its huge appeal to Japanese women.

In 1952 and after, Takarazuka became better known to Americans through James Michener’s novel Sayonara and the subsequent film in 1957, starring Marlon Brando as an American Korean War airman. While on leave in Japan, he falls in love with a Japanese actress. She specializes in male roles as one of the stars of an all-female troupe, one which is obviously modeled upon Takarazuka. The part was played by a Japanese actress, as were the lead female roles in the film, Teahouse of the August Moon. However, Hollywood continued to have trouble casting Asians in Asian or Japanese parts, especially males. In Teahouse, Brando got the role of the leading Okinawan, a charming trickster named Sakini. On its visits in later years to the United States, Takarazuka, which performed at Rockefeller Center, met a cool reception from American audiences and critics. It remains a fascinating subject for scholarly work in anthropology, sociology, and comparative theater and, together with Kabuki, has inspired much discussion about gender and sexuality on the Japanese stage.

Comic Story Telling. In the modern period, ordinary Japanese flocked to halls to enjoy comic story telling and other acts. Comic dialogue or manzai was especially popular. Generally, the banter was between two males, but a husband and wife team, Miyako Chōchō and Nato Yūji, gained popularity on Occupied radio and continued to amuse the Japanese in the television era. They became associated with advice to troubled marriage partners and continued to perform as a popular team, even after their divorce in 1957. Another highly popular form of comic performance was rakugo, performed by a single story teller. This too was an art virtually closed to women, though recent research has, not surprisingly, uncovered women participants. In the Occupation years, the most successful rakugo artist was a male performer, Tokugawa Musei, whose jokes and satiric asides occasionally got him into trouble with Allied censors. Today, several successful rakugo performers are women.

Reviews. At a much different level were the all-girl reviews which attracted primarily male audiences. Here women, to use the feminist language of a later time, were objectified and commodified. During the Occupation, the Nichigeki Theater in Tokyo’s Ginza area was a prime stage for such reviews, some of them featuring nudity and others the high kicking style of the famed American Rockettes. Such shows, including burlesque, were not entirely new to Japan with the Occupation. The end of Japanese militarism had permitted a comeback of trends from the late 1920s in Japanese popular culture. Added to this was the cabaret and bar culture which catered to GIs and civilian occupiers and employed many Japanese women. A film which portrays this part of the entertainment world very well is Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, 1949. One of the characters, as played by a sixteen year old dancer who was especially recruited for the role, is a member of an ensemble which is pushed to dance almost to the point of exhaustion in order to please male customers. Another Kuroswa film, Ikiru (To Live), 1952, at one point takes its viewers on a lengthy journey of decadent night life in the bars, cafes, and burlesque halls of Tokyo.

Radio. Japanese radio broadcasting began in the mid-1920s, almost as early as in the United States. A popular form of inexpensive entertainment and news, it was heavily monitored by the Japanese government and military during the war years. This was still another forum dominated by men as writers, directors, and performers. Occasionally, women appeared, such as singers and musicians but never as announcers. During the Pacific War, Japanese were forbidden to listen to shortwave broadcasts, and their home radios, basically crystal sets, were in considerable disrepair by 1945. Nevertheless, radio, in particular the recording of a speech by the Emperor, was the prime form used in August 1945 to communicate the news to homefront Japan and to Japanese civilians and soldiers overseas that the Asia-Pacific War was over. As the Occupation began, new American mass media controls were imposed to replace Japanese censorship and propaganda. The purpose was to help instill democratic values and reeducate the Japanese to peacetime pursuits. Radio and film were of prime importance in this process. Until mid-1947, all radio programs were pre-recorded and monitored by Occupation censors. Though radio censorship was somewhat relaxed at that point, nevertheless, post-review of programs continued until late 1949. In addition, American radio experts were recruited by CI&E to work with the Japanese broadcasting industry in developing new kinds of programs and techniques, including the introduction of music to heighten drama.

For the enlightenment of Japanese women, new radio programs were developed, often with Japanese consultants, for listeners in urban and rural areas. One of the best examples was the “The Women’s Hour,” which dealt primarily with domestic issues. Also, prominent women were frequently invited to discuss contemporary issues and politics on special radio forums. Radio was widely used in 1946 and after to encourage women to vote. Another new program was “People on the Street” (usually translated misleadingly into English “Man on the Street,” the title of an American radio program). Sometimes women, such as housewives out for shopping, took the opportunity to vent their frustrations. Women writers helped to develop new Japanese style radio soap operas. Women participants were tapped for such new entertainment programs as “Twenty Questions,” a spinoff of an American show. In 1949, the Japan Broadcasting Company (NHK), the only national network in Japan at the time, inaugurated a hugely popular music series on New Year’s Eve, the Red and White Song Contest (a male red team versus a white female team). One of the most popular radio programs for several years was “The English Hour,” and it made Joe Hirakawa (Japanese) a star with many female fans. Though set up originally to divert and entertain Occupation troops, the Far East Division of the Armed Forces Radio Network served as a complementary source of news, popular music, and shows for Japanese listeners, not to mention help in acquiring mastery of English. Its main drawback was that it aired at a different frequency and required the purchase of a second radio. Commercial radio stations also became part of the entertainment picture at the end of the Occupation. Radio shows provided an added outlet for women as performers, especially in day-time dramas, but, as in the United States, it would take many long years before women would be accepted as announcers, newscasters, interviewers, or directors. Television was not introduced commercially in Japan until 1953, following the end of the Occupation.

Popular Music. Songs helped to lift the spirits and brighten life in Occupied Japan. They were sung on the radio, in films, and on the stage. The first popular tune to sweep early postwar Japan was the “Apple Song” in the fall of 1945. The singer, a young and relatively unknown woman, went on to a modestly successful movie career. Familiar folk songs and plaintive enka melodies as well as newly composed tunes were performed on non-commercial NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), the only radio network allowed to operate during most of the Occupation period. New Japanese film scores featured both Western classical music and American popular songs. American-style jazz bands popped up in Japanese clubs and coffee houses. Japanese jazz musicians also formed bands and played to GI audiences. This helped to create a demand for Japanese girl singers. Peggy Hayama, against her father’s wishes, first sang for Americans in Yokohama and evolved into a jazz vocalist. In 1948, singer Kasaoki Shizuko made “Tokyo Boogie Woogie” famous in person and on records. On Japanese radio, a variety of music was programmed by NHK. Under pressure from CI&E guidance, there was great variety of Western music intermixed with Japanese. Japanese war songs, however, were banned in public performance and in the recording industry. Out of this popular culture milieu would emerge an extraordinary child singer and actor in 1948-1949, a girl who would become Japan’s most famous enka performer, the legendary Misora Hibari (see separate site under persons). In the Occupation years, she sang in almost every conceivable style: Japanese of course, boogie, blues, Latin, American popular, sometime even venturing into English language lyrics.

Jazz. Although the term, “jazz,” was often just another word at this time for popular songs, the Japanese were increasingly aware of its association with African American musicians. Louis Armstrong, for example, made a triumphal visit to Japan in 1952. African American musicians played in U.S. military bands and sang in chorales. Japanese jazz musicians, primarily male, formed or reformed bands, too, during the Occupation and played at GI clubs and Japanese venues. Toward the end of the Occupation, a young woman musician appeared on scene, pianist Akiyoshi Toshiko (born 1930). Repatriated from Manchuria in 1946, where she had taken piano lessons as a girl, she heard American jazz music on the radio and displeased her family by playing piano in U.S. clubs. She had picked up on jazz tunes by the early 1950s but was discriminated against in Japan’s male-dominated jazz world. Visiting U.S. musicians, including African American pianist Oscar Peterson, realized that she had great talent and gave her encouragement. Akiyoshi left Japan to study on full scholarship at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, graduating from the piano department in 1957. She decided to pursue a career in the U.S. Divorced from her first husband, Charlie Mingus, she later formed an important jazz band, the Big Band, with her second husband, saxophonist Lew Tabackin, and took up residence in New York City. As she reveals in a film documentary about her career, Akiyoshi continued to think very much like a well-brought up woman back in Japan, struggling to balance the demands of good wife and wife mother to her husband and her daughter while actively pursuing her musical career. She would receive an award from the mayor of New York for contributing to the city’s cultural life and a Japan Culture Prize from the Japan Foundation. Her most recent appearance in Washington, D.C., was at the Kennedy Center, March 2006, as part of the Cherry Blossom Festival.

Opera and Classical Music. There was a large base of Japanese fans for Western opera in the prewar period. Famous Metropolitan Opera singers who toured Japan, such as Lauritz Melchoir and Helen Traubel, met with enthusiastic audience reception. In addition, Japan produced a least one international female opera star, Madame Miura Tamiki (1884-1946). After graduating from the Tokyo School of Music, she had studied in Germany and is credited with performing Madame Butterfly over 200 times. Her male counterpart was tenor Fujiwara Yoshie, who was partly American and the founder of the Fujiwara Opera Company in 1934. Miura died soon after the war and seems not to have been immediately replaced by a name star, but Fujiwara continued to promote Western opera in Occupied Japan. It was one way in which aspiring Japanese opera singers could gain experience and hone their talents. One of the greatest singers to tour in Japan shortly after the Occupation ended was African American contralto Marian Anderson in 1953. In America, however, she had not yet been invited to appear on the Metropolitan Opera stage in New York City.

Classical symphonic music too--Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, and many, many more--had also made great gains among music lovers in Japan, going back to the late 19th century. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was especially popular and was regularly performed with large Japanese chorales; it still is. Women sang in the mixed choruses, but men dominated the orchestra. Before Japan’s militarists began dictating musical forms and taste, distinguished foreign violinists and pianists frequently performed in Japan. Viennese pianist Leo Sirota began teaching in the Piano Department of the Academy of Music, Tokyo, in the early 1930s. Young women of good breeding took piano lessons as well as practiced the tea ceremony or flower arrangement to cultivate refinement. A story which has almost been lost features the violin. In 1899, Ando (born Koda) Ko, sister of famous writer Koda Rohan, was sent to Vienna by the Japanese government to study the violin. She had entered the Ueno Music Conservatory (later the University of Arts) at age eleven in 1889, and after graduation first went to Vienna and then to Berlin four four years to continue her studies. Back in Japan, she became a violin teacher at her alma mater but did not give recitals and only played once with the Japan Symphony Orchestra. Her sister, too, had been a violinist. When interviewed at age seventy-seven by the women’s editor for the Nippon Times in June 1954, she expressed pride in having been a happy wife and mother of four sons and one daughter as well as a successful career woman. At the time of the interview, Jascha Heifitz had recently given concerts in Japan. In Ando’s opinion: “Unless one is a very special musician it is impossible to expect concentrated attention from the audience for two hours. It is, of course, different with Jascha Heifetz and a few others who have such great power and artistic appeal that their performances can entrance the audience.” She was “very happy” to have heard Heifitz again, one of the world’s greatest artists. She stressed the importance of early training if children in fact desired music lessons and warned against pushing them into public performance too soon.

The Piano. One of the fascinating musical phenomena of 1930s Japan was the emergence of piano prodigies, among them several girls, including Japanese American Miwa Kai (using the American name order), who pursued her early studies in Japan. Shortly Pearl Harbor, Kai, who had earned kudos in the Japanese press and once toured Manchuria, returned to the United States and managed to gain early release from the relocation camps. Leaving the piano behind, she joined the East Asian library staff at Columbia University. Over the years, Kai would become indispensable to generations of undergraduate and graduate students, and in time take over the Japanese Collection. Today, many decades later, pianist Uchida Mitsuko (b.1948), a Japanese national, is among the world’s finest interpreters of Chopin and Mozart. Violinist Midori, a prodigy born in Osaka, 1971, was trained from age eleven at the Julliard School of Music and has become one of the world’s most famous and busiest musicians. Japanese (and Korean) sopranos today often get to sing leading opera roles besides Madame Butterfly. Japanese and other Asian women also play in the string and reed sections of leading orchestras throughout the world.

Conductors and Composers. As in Europe and America, little to no encouragement has been given to women composers and conductors. It was also difficult for men in these fields. The most famous Japanese composer of classical music, including piano works, is the late Takemitsu Toru. Takemitsu, who greatly benefited from listening to music recordings at one of the U.S. Information Centers in Occupied Tokyo, also created numerous Japanese musical scores. A Japanese conductor of considerable skill emerged in the early 20th century, Yamada Kosaku (1886-1965). He was the first, in Japan or the West, to conduct a recording of Mahler’s 4th Symphony. He also composed patriotic music for Japan during the Asia-Pacific War. Another talented composer-conductor was Konoe Hidemarō, 1893-1973). He held the title of Viscount and was called the Red Count for his Marxist affinities. German Jewish émigré, Klaus Pringsheim, Sr., decided to pursue a career in 1930s Japan as performer, conductor, and teacher. After the war, one of his sons, Hans Pringsheim would become a music critic for the English language newspaper, Nippon Times (Japan Times after 1955), following a stint as a book censor in the Occupation’s Civil Censorship Detachment. His younger brother, Klaus Pringsheim, Jr., eighteen years old at the beginning of the Occupation, also served briefly in civil censorship and later became a graduate student of Japanese history at Columbia University. Joseph Rosenstock (1895-1985), born in Cracow, Poland, escaped from the Nazis to pursue a career in Japan, where he elevated the playing standard of the NHK Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s. He also headed the Nippon Philharmonic Orchestra, 1936-1941. Rosenstock made a welcome return to Japan during the Occupation, followed by a new career in New York City as one of the leading conductors at the City Center Opera House. In recent years, the most famous Japanese conductor in the West has been Ozawa Seiji (b. 1935), who was trained by Leonard Bernstein and until recently presided for many years over the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Japanese women, too, were not in demand as musicians in Japanese orchestras. Today, they play, if not in Japan itself, all over the world in the string and reed sections of major foreign orchestras. Moreover, in making comparisons, it should be noted that it was over great opposition that an American woman, Marin Alsop, became the first woman to head a major orchestra as music director, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2005. Before her, the late Sarah Caldwell (1924-2006) founded and led the Opera Company of Boston for thirty-three years and was the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Some of the performers mentioned above can be seemed briefly in documentary films about the Occupation. There is a separate documentary film on Akiyoshi. Recordings by Misora can be purchased in Japanese book and record stores in the United States or on line.