October 29th, 2005.
This is the day my entire life changed.
I wish there was a way I could say it that didn’t sound so dramatic, but it’s true. Everything in my life could go back to life before and after that date. Or, at least, my adult life. I didn’t realize it was special, or important, until years later. What happened?
I was introduced to the Prince of Tennis musicals.
Dream Live 4th Cast
Yes. It’s a musical. About cartoon boys. Playing tennis. On stage. Hitting balls of light. Could they sing? Not always. Could they dance? Yeah. Could they act? Well enough. But it wasn’t the show itself that was special, it was what it gave me. For the first time in years, I had an interest in something. I was a second year university student, I’d just switched to a history degree instead of a theatre degree, and I was in a steady worry over what would I be doing once I finished school. And then suddenly, I had something else to think about.
I love musicals, and I’d always had an interest in Japanese things. I played pokemon, liked Sailor Moon as a kid, and the country enchanted me during the 1998 Olympics. My friends were into anime, and followed along blindly, despite the fact I didn’t really like it, not the way they did. I knew there was SOMETHING about Japan that I liked, so I latched on to their interests, waiting to find something to catch me.
Then suddenly, one night at a Halloween party for the university anime club, one of the new members asked me, “You like musicals? I have something you need to see.”
Dream Live 3 Cast
It was stupid. I didn’t understand what they were saying, and I could tell they were being idiots half the time. But that was the appeal. It was simply fun. It was theatre that was being shown to make people happy, not to spread a message or make a statement. I’d forgotten theatre could be like that. Suddenly, I had a lot more focus in life. The goal after university? Move to Japan, teach for a year, and watch tenimyu.
Within a year, I had learnt how to read hiragana and katakana. I made some amazing friends online while learning about the series. I started to write again. Everything I did in school went towards the one goal of teaching overseas.
It’s almost seven years later. I’ve taught in Japan. I went to see tenimyu live, many times. My Japanese has improved a lot, though I still have much more to work on. But things happen, times change, and interests fade. Once I moved home to Canada, it was too difficult to watch tenimyu as I did once before, only on DVD on my computer. I stopped really paying attention, to stop myself from feeling homesick for Japan. I moved to Korea, and got into the culture there instead. Tenimyu felt like a distant memory. A happy, distant memory.
Rikkai: Second Service cast
When I decided to visit Japan this summer, I planned for four days in Tokyo, four days in Osaka, and two days in Hiroshima before heading home. It just so happened that tenimyu would be running in Osaka the week I was there. And it also just happened to be the second run of Imperial Match Hyoutei, the very same show that got me into this whole love affair with Asia almost seven years earlier.
I had to go. One last time.
Hilariously enough, my seats for this show were better than almost any other tenimyu show I’d been to. It figures, once I stopped caring so much, the seats would improve.
Every show opens, normally, the same way. Sometimes there’s a bit of dialogue to lead into the opening song. No matter what, there’s the same moment as the curtain goes up, where you can hear the squeak of tennis shoes on the courts and rackets hitting balls over the net, that distinctively means that for the next two hours, we’ll be in a world where tennis is played with balls of light, and there is no logic, reason, or rules of gravity. It’s just a shounen manga, meant for young boys, adored by women, and brought to life on stage for sold out audiences.
Things have improved a lot with the staging of tenimyu since the first time they ran the Imperial Match Hyoutei. The budget has improved, so the cast has grown. Back then, tenimyu wasn’t known for it’s strong vocal presence, and the casting didn’t seem to have quite the same number of potential candidates as it has now. There were a lot of triple threats on that stage on Friday, boys who could sing AND dance AND act – A luxury and huge improvement for those who have been into these shows for the better part of a decade. They were able to expand the cast, include characters that hadn’t been in the previous run, and change some scenes to include more of the story. A lot of the classic songs remained the same, and I amazingly remembered every word to those songs. Songs that I remembered as having only one part suddenly had harmony, and were improved upon so it wasn’t just the new cast playing an old script.
At the same time, there were a lot of new songs, to make the show unique to the new cast. Ridiculous songs were changed to songs that were equally as ridiculous, if not more ridiculous.
I will always have a really fond place in my heart for tenimyu. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had I not been shown it. I suspect that things would have been a lot more boring in my life, and I would have never come across the amazing opportunities that I have without it.
ミュージカル「テニスの王子様」，いつまでもありがとうございます。♥
