Caroline Norma “‘It’s ok for women to kill men!’: A radical feminist Japanese theatre musical”

Japan isn’t a society into which any girl would want to be born. It’s a fate of poverty compounded by daily pressures of extreme deference to husbands and male bosses, high expectations of thinness and decorum, and incidents of childhood sexual harassment and assault. Girls with even less luck are found on the inner-city Tokyo streets of Ikebukuro pimped by ‘boyfriend’ hosts and trafficked all over the country in their platform shoes dragging wheelie suitcases.

Japan’s patchy history of bourgeois revolutions produces this society of today which operates under barely a veneer of liberalism. Liberal feminism hardly gets a look-in. On the one hand, this leads to brutal and unapologetic forms of sexism in conditions of extreme capitalism. A prostituted young woman was recently imprisoned for fully 9 years, for example, for swindling middle-aged men to give cash to her ‘host’ boyfriend/pimp. At the same time, middle-aged men who rape their daughters go unchecked, and even if convicted receive sentences of only a few years. On the other hand, weak forces of liberalism let Japanese feminists take clear positions against surrogacy and shared child custody.

This uncompromising political environment produces the most radically feminist musical theatre production the world has perhaps ever seen. A company called Tremendous Circus since 2021 has been staging a production called ‘Femiking’ that retells a history of Cleopatra and the Roman defeat of Egypt. Cleopatra is joined by radical feminists who have travelled back in time to overturn the history of patriarchy through loyal struggle together with Octavia, Arsinoe, Fulvia, and a band of devoted women. They achieve an historic defeat of Octavius Ceasar, which leads to Antony’s suicide but not Cleopatra’s, to free women from ‘intercourse’–defined in the political terms of Andrea Dworkin’s book. At the outset of the play, intercourse is explained as the name of the regime from which women must liberate their bodies and sexuality from male rule.

The production’s retelling of ancient history through acting, dance, and song delivers the audience an outstanding education in radical feminism. In one scene Cleopatra and Octavia are placed in a mock boxing ring thrashing out radical rebuttals of liberal and third-wave ideas of equality, empowerment, beauty, and female sexual agency. In another scene beauty practices discussed in Sheila Jeffreys’s Beauty and Misogyny (translated into Japanese in 2022) are sung by Ceasar in drag who extorts everyone to come together in the name of ‘beauty’. Cleopatra then responds that his fake nipples and make-up are as bad as black minstrel blackface, and tells Arsinoe she will no longer be forced to get up in the morning earlier than men for the sake of beauty or participate in a contest against other women not of her own making.

Significantly, the production was staged in a venue in Ikebukuro, on the way from the train station to which theatergoers must walk past brothels, scouts, and prostituted young women lining the street holding signs advertising their shops. A number of members of the theatre troop are survivors of prostitution, and their voice in the production is strong—its anti-prostitution theme is perhaps the strongest message of all. In one scene, four female characters enact an imaginary scene of ‘the game of life’ in which a roulette wheel is spun to decide different directions of their lives. The character born into a patriarchal poor rural family finds herself at the age of 18 escaping home for the city, and working for minimum wage at a restaurant while dreaming of becoming a nail artist. Then, she is sacked from the restaurant during the Covid-19 pandemic and has to earn money in the underground economy. Her rough boyfriend introduces her to a sex venue where a pimp love-bombs her. As a result, she ends up prostituted and used in pornography, and a victim of plastic surgery. Later in the show pro-prostitution ‘sex work’ arguments are rebutted by the character Livia.

Its narrative is not driven by female victimhood but by women coming together with memories of the rapes and other forms of male violence against them to exact revenge, free themselves from intercourse, and reverse the patriarchal direction of world history. Upon her final sword felling of Ceasar, the audience is exhorted to follow Cleopatra in repeating over and over that ‘it’s ok for women to kill men!’, and characters deliver lines promising to show no fear and to defend other women to the death in their conquer of Rome.

Another strong theme is criticism of transgenderism, and the battle between Egypt and Rome is retold as one between the ‘Rose Crown’ LGBT alliance army and the Isis Church radical feminist ‘haters’ and ‘transphobes’. In one scene Cleopatra calls herself an ‘old-style feminist Godzilla’ for standing up to sexism, explaining that UK Labour Minister David Lammy in 2021 described gender-critical feminists as ‘dinosaurs’.

But this kind of criticism of transgenderism by Tremendous Circus troupe members caused the theatre company to lose the majority of its fanbase built through previous productions taking a less radically feminist stance. The financial impact of this backlash has been enormous, and the company no longer draws crowds big enough to stage shows in its previous theatre venue. The final staging of Femiking on 4 May 2024 had the monologue by Cleopatra explaining the troupe’s stance on the trans issue moved to the end of the production, and defiantly urging detractors to watch the online release of the filmed production to hear the message.

Those of us who were able to watch Femiking, either online or at the theatre, likely had our lives changed by the experience. The overwhelming energy, skill, and power of the troupe members was something to behold, as was the high-quality music, lighting, sound, and production. Most astonishing of all, though, was the realisation that radical feminist popular culture is not only possible but hugely entertaining. The creativity of scriptwriter (Tanaka En) and producers (Tanaka En & Chino) made the production one of political ‘agitprop’ propaganda in the truest sense of the term. It was an escapist, fun social event with friends that stimulated the senses, heightened political awareness, and deepened solidarity with women and girls in Japanese society who need it the most.