The Evolution of the Image of Genghis Khan in the Takarazuka Revue

This study examines three Genghis Khan-themed productions by the Takarazuka Revue— Jingisukan (1922), Mongōru (1941), and Kono koi wa kumo no hate made (1973)—through Homi Bhabha's postcolonial framework, tracing the transformation of Genghis Khan's image in modern Japan and its shifting political and cultural meanings. In the prewar era, Jingisukan recast the conqueror as a pan-Asian hero aligned with Taishō ideals, employing stage costuming and Ainu bear rituals to suggest cultural affinity. During the wartime period, Mongōru explicitly positioned Japan as the spiritual successor to the Mongol Empire, exemplifying what Bhabha terms the "menace of mimicry" (Bhabha 1994: 88) within the ideological logic of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In the postwar context, Kono koi wa kumo no hate made shifted toward anti-war sentiment and personal emotion, though residual colonial ideologies remained embedded in its narrative. The evolving image of Genghis Khan thus exposes a central contradiction in Japan's modern nation-building: the attempt to assert national subjectivity through the othering of Mongolia, while remaining entangled in the hybridity intrinsic to colonial discourse. Ultimately, the study contends that the G=Y theory, as staged by Takarazuka, operates as a continually rewritten "cultural text," whose shifting trajectory vividly reflects Bhabha's insight into the ambivalence of colonial authority, oscillating between mimicry and menace (Bhabha 1994: 91).