Czech kimono challenge

Photo courtesy of Tokio Ohska

Czech kimono challenge

Tokio Ohska had an opera to direct.

As always, there were lighting, scenery, and music issues to contend with. But finding costumes to fit a cast of Europeans? That was a new challenge.

Ohska is a physicist. As the head of research services at KEK, the Japanese particle physics lab in Tsukuba, he tends to the needs of foreign scientists and has a knack for making cultures click. But he's also a former professional singer with a background in Japanese opera.

So when a Czech theater company needed a stage director for the first Japanese opera to be sung in Japanese by a European cast, Ohska seemed a natural choice.

Jan Snitil, conductor of the Silesian Theater in Opava, had decided to celebrate the theater's 200th anniversary with a performance from his wife's home country.

“The problem was that the body sizes of Czech singers are much larger than those of the Japanese,” Ohska said.

He enlisted a friend to help scour Japanese antique stores for the largest kimonos they could find to match the 200-year-old setting of Yuzuru, roughly translated as “the crane at dusk.”

“Fortunately, the singers and the conductor are extremely talented, nice people,” Ohska says. “They worked with me with a lot of patience and gave me helpful suggestions.”

On opening night in October 2007, Ohska sat in the front row, almost holding his breath. As the performance ended he made his way to the stage, expecting polite applause. “But every time I would go to walk off, the curtain would rise again,” he says, for a total of 10 thundering ovations: “I was so relieved.”

The opera sparked an encore in the form of an ongoing cultural exchange. Opava has since hosted a Japanese culture week; and in 2009, the Czech opera Dalibor is scheduled for its first performance in Japan.

Tona Kunz