In an early post, I commented that when Rashomon appeared in Venice in 1950, the effect was not unlike seeing a movie from not just another country but another world. Scholars and art historians, of course, knew something of Japanese history and the traditional culture that is visible in the jidai-geki, but the general public throughout Europe and the Americas had only one popular source, The Mikado. After thousands of productions, professional and amateur, the D’Oyly Carte Company authorized a film version in 1939.
This is not how Gilbert saw his original production, which Mike Leigh tried to reproduce in part in Topsy-Turvy, nor is it the way D’Oyly Carte was producing it on stage after a re-design of costumes in the twenties. The sets and costumes were designed for the film by Marcel Vertes to take advantage of Technicolor, most of the cast were not D’Oyly Carte regulars, and the director was American.* Nevertheless, D’Oyly Carte, notorious for their protection of copyrights, in no way objected. What is of interest is that this is how the English and Americans, and through their eyes the rest of the world, saw their subject.
I don’t wish to go into the silly nature of the plot and characters — Gilbert never intended the story to be Japanese in any way, and the play’s success is due almost completely to the fact that it is a wonderfully tuneful English musical satire shifted to a colorful setting to soften the jokes, just as Gilbert had done with The Gondoliers.
What is fascinating is how, after 50 years in stage production, practically everything has gone visually wrong. Essentially, it has been converted to a Chinese setting with actors carrying parasols and sporting sort-of Japanese wigs while wearing bathrobes or even full Chinese regalia in some scenes.
Very little of this goes back to Gilbert. The Mikado is the gate to the Emperor’s palace, not the Emperor itself, and he did think up those baby-talk names, but beyond that, most of the visual confusion derives from an unconscious attempt to tame the foreign-ness and slide it over toward a more familiar and comfortable kind of foreign-ness, which for America, Britain, and most of Europe meant, in Asian terms, Chinese. It is also a demonstration of our ability to look at and not see. The art works for research were available, just as they were when Gilbert staged the first production and got much of the hair and dress right. (A number of those original costumes can be seen in photos at Wikipedia.) But as often happens, the producers looked at the art works and selected one or two obvious aspects and filled in the rest from imagination and assumption.
For example, the women all have the Geisha hairpins, even the maids from school, but also try to wear coolie hats over them. The obis are gone — how is it possible to even think of female kimonos without obis? – all converted to wide sashes, looped like bathrobe belts and hanging down on the front side of one hip. The kimonos don’t fully overlap, so the ladies can walk as if wearing a bathrobe but with a long undergown to cover the legs that would have been seen in any regular western musical.
Many of the kimonos, for men and women both, have actual standing collars. The stiff kataginu, a ceremonial over-garment, is here converted to exaggerated shoulder pads built directly into the other clothing or wings projecting from the neck over the shoulders. I can’t even guess at what the men’s hats are supposed to be. It’s all a bit like doing Brigadoon in periwigs, fontages, and panniers — it would be within the correct general historical and geographical vicinity but just not right.
Odder for me is the architecture. Houses and castles of the Japanese nobility look like no other houses in the world, so it should be easy to copy that look. But sliding doors are in short supply and when we see a “paper” wall, there is a curtain behind it. There are all kinds of railings with Chinese decorative framing along every porch or balcony.
The one street scene, though lined with paper lanterns, otherwise looks like a trip to Chinatown in San Francisco. And of course the willow tree in Ko-Ko’s garden is as stereotypically Chinese as you can get.**
The trombones are obviously intended as a visual joke, so they don’t need further comment, but the wandering minstrel has a large number of possible portable Japanese instruments he might pretend to play. 
Instead he carries a triangular slab with funny pegs, so far as I can tell an instrument unknown in the history of mankind.
Even the scrolls are unrolled and read like European scrolls, from the top down, not from side to side as in Japan.
Why they chose to do almost everything in solid colors, mostly pastels, is beyond me. The effect is often very attractive, but surely if they really wanted to show off Technicolor, Japanese fabrics and patterns would have done so even more effectively. Perhaps only India has a traditional dress for women as colorful and no nation that I can think of is more colorful for men. But the European fashion through most of the thirties had been a time of solid colors, so it may have just seemed too gaudy to use the full Japanese palette and patterns.
My point is not to nit-pick or to point out all the things they “got wrong.” As a former stage director and designer, I’m all too well aware that absolute accuracy is pretty far down the list of responsibilities when staging or filming a work, even with a much larger budget than I could ever have dreamed of. Liberties and simplifications are often taken by movies and the theater for effect or to fit the fashions of the times in which they are produced. In its more negative aspects, this propensity leads to things like “slant eyes” and “yellow men,” both of which are fortunately missing from the makeup for this production. Rather, it is to point to this production as an example of how we can look at what is right before our eyes and yet not see it. I’m sure I have done so myself in past posts and will do so again in the future, so I hardly intend to cast stones. But it happens even with the best of intentions.
In many ways it reminds us of just how “other” Japan became during its centuries of isolation. Even in relatively simple things like costume and scenery for a filmed version of one of the most popular musical plays in history, the physical evidence as well as the original staging just did not compute to mid-twentieth century eyes.
* Victor Shertzinger was born in Pennsylvania and was in Hollywood as both a director and a composer from the mid-teens. The movie was filmed in England but released as Universal Studio’s first Technicolor feature.
** Nothing in Gilbert’s lyrics specify a weeping willow; “on a tree by the stream” a bird sits and sings “willow tit-willow tit-willow” in parody of Desdemona’s song, in which the bird sits in a tree by a stream and sings “willow, willow, willow,” both verbalizations of birdsong.
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