ABSTRACT
In the first decades of the century, after Sadanji Ichikawa II's 1909 production of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, Japanese theatre practitioners like H getsu Shimamura and Sh y Tsubouchi celebrate the importation of the Italian proscenium stage and of English, French, and Scandinavian naturalist drama (in the Shingeki movement) as a revolutionary liberation from the stifling Japanese traditional theatre.
