ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to demonstrate that Afro-diasporic cultures indeed played a significant role in its early history. The full recognition of early butoh's at times problematic but surprisingly intimate relationship to a racialized form of "blackness" should compel to revise its heritage as having been fundamentally transcultural and indeed "global" from the very beginning. The direct influence of Afro-diasporic cultures on the birth of butoh has been largely ignored or forgotten partly due to the "whiteface" that Hijikata began in the early 1960s. Most accounts of butoh suggest that Hijikata's white butoh, especially after Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese People, embodied a performative rejection of the West and modernization, or more specifically, the decolonization of the Japanese in the face of rapid Americanization. In the 1970s, Hijikata is said to have symbolically returned to the mythic "Tohoku" – and by extension to a pre-modern Japan.
