There is a country where top ballet dancers are treated like rock stars. Hundreds of fans line up at the stage door, waiting patiently to shower them with gifts or ask for an autograph; some even travel the globe to follow their favourites.
No, it isn’t France or Italy, where the art form has roots dating back to the Renaissance. It’s Japan.
True to the country’s culture of fandom, Japanese audiences have embraced western ballet with boundless enthusiasm in recent decades. After the second world war, as the middle class expanded, it gained traction as a popular pursuit for girls — and, as ballet schools sprang up across Japan, a new audience was born.
Yet until recently, that audience lavished attention mostly on the prestigious foreign companies that tour Japan regularly, such as the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Ballet. The country has struggled to build world-class companies and hold on to the top talent it trains.
The National Ballet of Japan wants to change that. Since 2020, it has been under the leadership of Miyako Yoshida, a former star of the Royal Ballet. Later this month, she will return to the Royal Opera House for the National Ballet of Japan’s first UK visit, with her production of the 19th-century classic Giselle.
“It was my dream,” Yoshida says of bringing her ensemble to London, before adding with a laugh: “But it happened so fast, I’m panicking!”
When I visit the New National Theatre, Tokyo, the performing arts complex where the company is based, Yoshida’s 75 dancers look anything but panicked. In morning class, they glide through exercises with quiet, steely focus. That night, they perform Harald Lander’s 1948 Études, an arduous tribute to classical ballet that typically only venerable ensembles tackle. From the corps de ballet to the principals, the National Ballet of Japan doesn’t miss a beat, showing complete command of the bravura steps.
“They’re fantastic,” Johnny Eliasen, the Danish ballet master responsible for staging Études, says after the show. “I don’t see any difference with any other big company, really.”
For a company that has only existed for 28 years, it is no small miracle. By the standards of ballet, where stylistic cohesion is honed over decades, if not centuries, the National Ballet of Japan is still in its infancy. It was born in 1997 as a resident company for the New National Theatre. An austere-looking yet airy new-build wrapped around pools of water, it feels insulated from the furious pace of the surrounding neighbourhood, Shinjuku. And its three state-of-the-art theatres provide superb facilities for ballet.
The idea of a subsidised national company devoted to a western art form was a departure for Japan, where ballet wasn’t introduced until the early 20th century. The first local ensembles, such as the renowned Tokyo Ballet, which was founded in 1964, were private entities with no theatre to call home. When Yoshida retired from the Royal Ballet in 2010, she kept performing as a freelancer in Japan until 2019, and was “shocked”, she says, at the working conditions.
Even top-tier dancers often don’t receive a fixed salary. “They’re paid through appearance fees, per performance,” Yoshida says. “So if they get injured, they lose their income. And companies don’t provide them with health insurance or physiotherapy — what they need to take care of their bodies.” Dancers are also commonly asked to sell tickets to their friends and families in order to provide income for companies.
As a result, the best young Japanese dancers have often sought careers abroad. Every year, the Prix de Lausanne, a prestigious Swiss ballet competition aimed at dancers aged 15 to 18, draws a sizeable Japanese contingent. (Yoshida won it in 1983.) Many have gone on to successful careers in the west: the Royal Ballet currently has 11 Japanese dancers, including principals Fumi Kaneko and Ryoichi Hirano.
After her long career in London, Yoshida — who “never imagined” herself as a director — felt a sense of duty when the National Ballet of Japan approached her. In 1997, she had performed as a guest in the company’s inaugural production, The Sleeping Beauty. “I wanted to make a contribution now to my country, for the Japanese ballet environment to be like what I experienced in the UK,” she says.
She immediately went to work. Fixed salaries — previously limited to soloists and principals — were expanded to the whole company, and adjusted upward. Yoshida also pushed for more performances each season, so appearance fees would rise, and brought in medical support in partnership with a local hospital.
“For us, it was like a ray of hope,” says Ayako Ono, a veteran principal of the National Ballet of Japan who will dance the title role of Giselle in London. Ono knew what was at stake from a young age: her elder sister danced for a private ballet company and struggled financially. “I saw her having to have another job and save up to perform. During the day she would rehearse, and in the evening she would be waitressing,” Ono says.
Whether Japanese ballet will establish an artistic identity of its own, like British or American ballet in the 20th century, remains an open question. According to Shizuka Yasuda, a Tokyo-based dance scholar, Japanese companies tend to “imitate” the style of specific western companies, with the National Ballet of Japan leaning towards the Royal Ballet as a model. (In addition to Yoshida, the company had a British director, David Bintley, from 2010 to 2014.)
The company’s repertoire has remained focused on western narrative ballets, from the 19th-century classics to Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon and Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Yet Yoshida hopes to nurture Japanese choreographers: next season, a former company member, Naoya Homan, will create a new work.
The National Ballet of Japan already has unique strengths: its corps de ballet demonstrates rare, quasi-military precision. The country’s culture favours this, dancers say, because it stresses unity and group work from a young age.
Yet, as a result, Japanese ballet dancers are often stereotyped in western countries as lacking in personality, something National Ballet of Japan corps member Yuki Kaminaka experienced first-hand. At the Slovak National Ballet, where he started his career in 2013, he was initially told he “wasn’t expressive enough”, he says. “On the whole, Japanese people don’t use a lot of gestures or facial expressions — it’s not the norm.”
While he became a first soloist in Slovakia, Kaminaka felt a sense of isolation because of the language barrier, and ultimately decided to return home. “The average technical level is very high here, and people are hungry to get better,” he says. “I’ve seen dancers abroad who are very proud of their country’s companies, and I always thought: ‘We have a good ballet company in Japan, too.’”
Yoshida hopes to demonstrate this in London with her production of Giselle, inspired by the British tradition. Yet this romantic ballet about a peasant girl betrayed by a nobleman has its own resonance in Japan. Ono sees common traits between its ghostly second act, in which Giselle returns from beyond the grave, and nihon-buyo, a form of classical Japanese dance present in kabuki theatre, which she studied as a child. “There is this quietness, this concentrated tension that pervades the atmosphere, and you have to float,” she says.
Ono says she feels a responsibility to help establish Japanese ballet on the international stage. “For most Japanese companies, it’s very rare and special to tour abroad,” she says. “There is a lot of pressure — but even more joy.”
July 24-27, rbo.org.uk
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