Part of the Toyota Visiting Professor 30th Anniversary Special Lecture Series.

Dance performance of geisha was one of the leading popular entertainments in the first half of the 20th century. Of them, Miyako Odori, an annual dance performance of geisha of Gion, Kyoto was especially powerful. Themes of every year’s Miyako Odori used to be happy, cheerful, beautiful, gorgeous, and were not serious at all. However sudden change was seen in the year 1933. The theme turned heavily political. They seemed to have competed to express their obedience to the national policy of the time, choosing themes to lift the spirits for the war.

Mariko Okada is Associate Professor at Faculty of Humanities, J. F. Oberlin University, Tokyo, Japan. She received her Ph.D. from Waseda University in Tokyo in 2011. She published her book “The Birth of Kyōmai ("Kyoto Dance"): Inoue-ryu Dance in Nineteenth-Century Kyoto, Japan" (Japanese) in 2013.

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