Butterfly's Choice - "Dr. Pianist" Makiko Hirata DMA

Pinkerton: My Butterfly! How aptly you were named, fragile butterfly!

Butterfly: They say that overseas if it should fall into the hands of man a butterfly is stuck through with a pin and fixed to a board!
From Madama Butterfly Act I https://www.murashev.com/opera/Madama_Butterfly_libretto_English_Italian

Madama Butterfly (1904) is one of the most popular operas by Puccini, still to this day. It tells the story of a fifteen-year-old geisha from a fallen noble family in Nagasaki at the turn of the century. A marriage broker marries her off to a US Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton for a sum of money. She faithfully waits for his return with his child for three years, until he comes back as he promised, but with Mrs. Pinkerton, and only to claim his child. She chooses to end her life than to live without honor, and to set her son free to a better future, without attachments.

Behind the popularity of this opera must be the universal acknowledgement of age-old inequality between the colonialists and their local wives, and the countless tragedies they bore. In addition, there is the colonialist association of masculinity to the West and femininity to the East that suited perfectly to Madam Butterfly’s story. Puccini’s opera is in fact based on a popular short story, Madame Butterfly (1898) by John Luther Long, which was then turned into an internationally acclaimed play, Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan by David Belasco (1900). Puccini saw Belasco’s play in London, which is how the opera came to be.

As a lone young Japanese pianist navigating the fiercely competitive music industry in the U.S., I was also vulnerable, like Madam Butterfly. I once cried openly at a production of the opera I was taken to by a predatory impresario. The cultural appropriation in its production, as well my helplessness in the situation both infuriated me. I decided to consider my tears as the only form of protest I could muster.

I thought I would never want to see another production of this opera at one point in my life. However, this weekend, I went to the Aratani Theater in Los Angele’s Little Tokyo, and saw a remarkable Japanese-English bilingual production of Madama Butterfly that made me feel a lot better. Not only were the costumes, hair and makeup and staging done by Japanese and Japanese-American designers, but also all the Japanese roles were played by Japanese and Japanese-American cast. The conductor, Eiki Isomura, who also translated the Japanese portions of the libretto, writes:

[While] a realistic portraial of Japanese people and culture [is not] possible in BUTTERFLY, given that its source material was conceived entirely through through a western lens, [the discussions among the Japanese and Japanese-American cast members] shaped and enlivened the libretto, and affected, in our small way a “flipping of the lens.” The goal of this production has never been to reclaim the Japanese-ness of BUTTERFLY…[but] if this bilingual production can generate in our audiences some new degree of empathy for these characters’ experiences, it will have fulfilled its aim.
https://www.eikiisomura.com/blog/2020/11/17/flipping-the-lens-on-madama-butterfly#comments-outer-wrapper=

I went to the opera, wearing a T-shirt that said “Not Yo’ Butterfly,” bearing the title of Miyako Nobumoto‘s memoir of empowering herself with the power of performing arts and social activism after surviving her childhood in the internment camp. The t-shirt allowed me to have a lot of encouraging exchange with the fellow audience members at the theater.

Presented by Pacific Opera Project; Costume was by Kimono SK; Makeup and Hair was by Yumi Hashimoto.

There is a reckoning of cultural appropriation, not just in operas but in the performing arts industry as a whole. Ballet Dancer Phil Chan started a non-profit organization called “Final Bow for Yellowface” raising their voices against the stereotypical portrayals of Asians in the audience’s favorite classical ballet, like the Nutcracker. Phil Chan produced Madama Butterfly last year with Boston Lyric Opera, where the story takes place in 1940’s San Francisco, and the Madama Butterfly is a Japanese-American singer who ends up in the internment camp!