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This chapter explores the particular history of performing Japanese by African Americans in hopes of understanding the complex layering of racial representation buried not just in The Mikado but in a much larger history. The very first productions of The Mikado in the United States inspired a multitude of blackface minstrel parodies and adaptations. These productions complicate how we understand yellowface performance as the field of white performers whose racial privilege as white was enhanced by their playing of Japanese and other oriental identities. Blackface minstrelsy is present even at the very beginning of encounters between modern Japan and the West. The chapter also argues that The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado reveal the close ties of blackface and yellowface, as well as how the racial dynamics of the opera depend on an imagined locale.

One day in his study at Harrington Gardens, William Gilbert happened to glance at a Japanese executioner's sword hanging on the wall. It started a train of thought that he began to turn into a plot. On May 20, he sent Arthur Sullivan his sketch plot of The Mikado. Sullivan thought the subject excellent—funny. By the end of the month, Gilbert was able to sail away for the summer in good heart. The Japanese exhibition had opened at Albert Gate, Knightsbridge, an event that could not have provided a better advertisement for The Mikado. The exhibition was laid out as a Japanese village comprising shops and houses, teahouses, and even a temple. It also included an entertainment provided by Japanese wrestlers and fencers, and a dance.

In a letter to Alfred Watson, William Gilbert suggested that the ghost music was “out of place in a comic opera. It is as though one inserted fifty lines of Paradise Lost into a farcical comedy.” Reacting to criticism, Gilbert changed the spelling of the title to Ruddigore. The impression of failure with Ruddigore dogged Gilbert, even though in his heart he did not believe it. Its comparison with The Mikado, the onslaught of adverse criticism, his discomfiture with some of Arthur Sullivan's music, and his recognition that the second act as originally performed had serious weaknesses all contributed to the feeling of failure. It was nothing of the sort, despite the difficulties, but it was hard to lay that particular ghost to rest. In later years, Gilbert made several attempts to have Ruddigore revived, but was unsuccessful. It was left for later generations to enjoy.

When William Gilbert received notification in March of Helen Carte's intention to stage a revival of The Mikado and an invitation to undertake the stage management, he accepted without argument. Apart from Herbert Workman as Ko-Ko, Henry Lytton had been engaged to play the part of the Mikado and Rutland Barrington that of Pooh-Bah. He had a preliminary discussion with Workman at Eaton Square about allowable interpolations, and rehearsals proper began on Monday, April 1. In place of criticism of the cast, Gilbert took issue with Helen Carte over the “interpolations and excrescences” that had crept into the libretti in the touring companies. Helen Carte denied that any interpolations were allowed except those that Gilbert himself authorized from time to time. If Gilbert had any authentic information about interpolations and would let her know, she assured him that she would deal with the matter.

The opera Princess Ida satirizes “feminism” or what we today call “the women’s movement,” and some of the laughter it elicits is rather hollow. This chapter suggests that the reason Princess Ida seems less funny than most Gilbert and Sullivan’s work is that it is not a comedy. The actual theme lies deeper: Princess Ida is the first and best working-out of a theme that was to inform the subsequent Mikado and Ruddigore—the necessity of young people breaking with the past to achieve hope of progress. The opera is the team’s most ambitious work, exceeding even The Yeomen of the Guard in scope and in the seriousness of its subject matter.

The Mikado’s success represents one of the most perfect fusions of composer and librettist ever achieved in music theater. Gilbert and Sullivan step back here from their previous evolution toward seriousness in tone and subject matter. They commit themselves to an almost antithetical course: From beginning to end, the audience is distanced from any real sympathy for the characters and their situations, and are invited to laugh at even their grimmest plights. Part of the brilliance of Gilbert and Sullivan had been their ability to swing from the comic to the dramatic on a moment’s notice. It is a commonplace to say that The Mikado is not about Japan but about England. The ingenuity of the machinery is so remarkable, so flawlessly meshed, that it remains a source of joy on many repeated viewings.

This chapter aims to redirect an opera that is too often dislocated from that scene back within its boundaries. It explores the interpretive practices that have installed this certainty within critical approaches to such a semiotically complex work as Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Early productions proudly exhibited its Japanese qualities: the putatively authentic sword and costumes onstage; the Japanese women recruited to teach the British actors how to dance; the “Miya Sama” theme, incorporated almost without amendment from a Japanese source. It was not until the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, when the Japanese Empire confronted British audiences and critics with a newly threatening aspect, that critics collectively decided, never to recant, that the opera did not contain “a single joke against Japan,” as G. K. Chesterton put it, but was rather wholly designed to satirize and caricature British political culture. As such the affinities between The Mikado and a particular aspect of late-Victorian Orientalism have been obscured, and the semiotic problem Japanese culture posed to Victorians has been oversimplified.

This chapter focuses on the Swing Mikado, the most popular and successful of the Negro Unit productions. It is a syncopated version of the classic Gilbert and Sullivan comedic operetta depicting romantic mishaps and political foils in nineteenth-century Japan. On 31 December 1938, the Chicago Defender proudly reported that the Swing Mikado had captivated Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes; although Ickes had initially planned to attend only half of the performance, the first number was compelling enough to keep him in his seat for the rest of the evening. For Ickes, the Swing Mikado exemplified his own progressive inclinations on racial matters, as he exclaimed: “No people . . . can consistently be suppressed on the basis of race, color or creed, when they persist in making cultural contributions of real importance and benefit.”

This chapter shows how The Mikado is an example of what is often called japonaiserie, a term that signals, unlike the alternative term Japonisme, a certain irreverence, whimsy, and lack of authenticity. Both japonaiserie and Japonisme are part of the larger infusion of orientalism into Western decorative arts. The Mikado both articulated and significantly refocused the rage for Japanese objects d’art, costumes, décor, and crafts, staging a world inhabited by fanciful characters whose “Japanese” nature is identified primarily in terms of familiar decorative objects such as swords, fans, screens, and china. It popularized an easy way of playing Japanese, an accessible and transparent racial impersonation that relied on the display and use of objects, songs, and gestures of the opera.

This chapter shows how The Mikado might be juxtaposed with other accounts of Japan to expose inherent anxieties about commodity culture, labor, and bodies. Exhibitions of Japanese artisans at work and other cues of laboring oriental bodies in these exhibitions made clear the fault lines within commodity racism and revealed exactly what had presumably been erased by the opera’s sparkling success. The Mikado has still maintained its charms to the present day through its consistent ability to present a compelling image of Japan as a place of magical objects and pleasurable, even therapeutic, racial play. The paradox of The Mikado lies not in pure fantasy, but in its artful embellishment of fiction with corroborative detail.

This chapter examines the legacies of the 1885 Mikado in contemporary productions such as Mike Leigh’s acclaimed 1999 film Topsy-Turvy. The allure of playing Japanese through evoking the fantasies of William Schwenck Gibert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan’s opera can be as attractive today as in 1885. Playing The Mikado does not seem to strike either performers or audiences as cross-racial pretense, even though there are both momentary and more sustained instances of protest. Performing The Mikado offers the promise of authentic cultural contact and Titipu becomes a space to play out a restorative fantasy of Japan. In other words, The Mikado offers a way of inhabiting the beautiful world of Japanese things. The film Topsy-Turvy emphasizes characterization and the work of individual performers.

This chapter provides a different perspective on racial masquerade by looking at the intertwined histories of The Mikado, blackface minstrelsy, and African American musical theater. Other performances of The Mikado, as well as other African American performances of Japanese, have been used to articulate hopes for African American advancement and racial uplift. African American actors seem to promise a uniquely ironic take on the artifice of Japaneseness in the opera, destabilizing racial typecasting. The chapter also argues that yellowface seems to provide a liminal space in which African American performers can escape from the stereotypical renderings first established through blackface minstrelsy. Unfortunately, this liminality does not work in only one way.

This chapter considers a vital aspect of the opera’s racial history: how it operates not only as harmless divertissement but also as a touchstone of racial sensitivity. It provides an account of the 1907 censorship of the Savory revival and how this event affected William Schwenck Gilbert’s later reworking of the opera into the children’s book The Story of the Mikado in 1908. Gilbert’s impatience with how the growing diplomatic influence of the real Japan hindered the performances of his opera translates into a kind of hostility that is barely disguised in the fairy-tale tone of this version of the opera’s story. The chapter also examines protests of the opera along with other examples that demonstrate the opera’s power to represent Japanese and other Orientals.

This chapter describes The Mikado’s elusiveness: how, under the guise of nonsense, the opera seems to disavow any international hurt or misrepresentation. The opera’s versions of Japan escape largely unscathed from protests. It explores how The Mikado’s Japanese productions responded to political and popular perceptions of Japan as a nation. It reinforces the opera’s significance as a racial fantasy with a representational power that extends well beyond national and ethnic lines. The chapter also focuses on several instances of The Mikado as directed or performed by Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans. On Western stages dominated by white actors, the practice of yellowface—the playing of oriental characters by non-Asian actors—marks the privilege to represent.

This chapter provides an overview of the Japanese production of The Mikado, which define a much more modest yet important aspect of the opera’s racial history. Having Japanese actors in The Mikado challenges the logic of its racial impersonation. These productions are framed not only by their rarity within a world overwhelmingly populated by yellowface versions of The Mikado, but also by the long history of resistance to the opera on the part of Japan. It argues that the first twentieth-century production of The Mikado in Japan was staged less as musical exchange and more as a military exercise by the U.S. occupation forces. In closing, it is wise to keep in mind that there is no one Japanese response to the opera.

This chapter focuses on the representation of Japan and the Japanese in American popular song and musical theater from 1860 to 1930. The representation of African Americans and of European immigrants in American popular song has received much attention. Comparatively little work has been undertaken on Tin Pan Alley’s engagement with Asians and Asian Americans. Through style and content analysis, the author identifies particular features that served as “Japanese” markers in the music, lyrics, and cover art of these songs. Musical interest in Japanese subjects directly reflected developments in political history and in American conceptions of race. The impact of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, and of the Russo-Japanese War is identified. The chapter is based on a collection of some 375 pieces with Japanese subjects–including parlor songs, show tunes, and piano dances and novelty pieces–that were published between 1890 and 1930 in the U.S.