Mori Keaki published this essay book the month before her retirement as Top Star of Snow Troupe. It is mainly a memoir of her personal journey in Takarazuka, as well as her early life. Her writing/formatting style is kind of unique, and I tried to reproduce or reflect it as much as possible.

It’s a really lovely book, that ended up making me cry many times. I hope you enjoy it!

For a table of contents with links to all the chapters, go here.

What it means to be scolded

I think that Takarazuka fans, when they’re walking around the city of Takarazuka, have often seen or passed by Takarazuka Music School students in their grey sailor suit uniforms.

And I’m sure there are people who know a bit more and can tell that those who have their hair pinned all over to make sure it all stays out of their faces, with clean faces and no makeup, are Lower Students, and those with perms or short haircuts with stylishly arranged bangs, wearing light makeup, are Upper Students. Right?

“Takarazuka Music School students are always so courteous!”

People say.

That’s really, really true.

About that, Lower Students have it drummed into them that they must always make sure to greet not only, as is obvious, their seniors in the Takarazuka Revue, but also all the staff members, previously graduated Takarazuka students, and anyone with any connection to the company.

But, if you’ve only just entered Takarazuka, it’s very difficult to tell who is a Director, or who is a senior student in the company, or things like that.

Therefore, they will give ‘Proper greetings!’ unconditionally to anyone who looks like they might have something to do with the company.

The idea is that it’s better to just give ‘Proper greetings!’ to everybody, rather than not greet someone and risk being scolded. This means that once in a while, they’ll give their ‘Proper greetings!’ to someone who doesn’t actually have any connection to Takarazuka.

I feel like I must have bowed my head to everyone I ran into in town…

‘An Upper Student is going to scold me!!’

That pressure is really intense.

In the city of Takarazuka, there are rules about ‘Lower Students may go into this store’ ‘that store is banned for Lower Students’.

Although, nowadays in the Takarazuka Music School, it seems those rules are gone, and it’s much easier to get by.

Although of course it’s still strict…

So, this is an incident of a mistake I made that has really stayed with me…

Once, there was an Upper Student inside a particular store. I, a Lower Student, had no idea about this at all, and just passed by the store.

The next day…

“You ignored me yesterday, didn’t you.”

Of course I couldn’t protest ‘But I couldn’t see you from the street!’

“Crows are white.”

“Yes, crows are white.”

This is part of the army-style discipline!

The word ‘But’ is not in a Lower Student’s vocabulary.

All they can do is apologize!!

But, it’s rare to just be able to apologize once and be forgiven right away.

The next time you go to apologize, you have to change your expression of regret—basically, you can’t say the same thing twice.

It took me nearly three months to apologize for this, and I was thinking as hard as I could to think of different ways to say it.

And I can’t forget that on that last day…

I said “Even though in every country all over the world, people are greeting each other, I failed to greet you even in this small city of Takarazuka…blah blah blah…”

When I said that, the Upper Student finally laughed, and happily I was forgiven.

But actually, thinking back on that now, that sort of thing was very good training. For a stage performer…

One other example…

When there are a lot of things to apologize for, or one very big thing, you would have to write a ‘Reflection Essay’ on composition paper and hand it in.

And one Upper Student said,

“Alright. If you can write the whole essay without one single error, then you’ll be forgiven.”

By the way, Lower Students are forbidden to laugh in front of Upper STudents.

‘Wah…’ this really made me cry.

Once when I was supposed to be silently writing a ‘Reflection Essay’, I messed something up in the middle of it and ended up laughing at my own clumsiness… I remember that I finally ‘cleared’ that apology after around 9 attempts…

But, but!

If you think about it carefully…

“You have to use different words every time you apologize!” is training to develop a wide variety of ways to express the same thought, ‘I’m sorry’.

And, “You have to write your ‘Reflection Essay’ in complete silence with no errors!” is related to the skills needed to memorize scripts…

Also, “No matter what, you must never laugh!” connects with the fact that when you’re performing on stage, you never know what might happen, but even if somebody totally messes up their lines, or some old man in the audience sneezes really loudly right at the best part, you can’t ever laugh!

‘In short, these things actually have a lot of meaning behind them.’

I still feel strongly that these were good experiences. Although they were sometimes nonsensical, looking back on it now I still think there was a lot of worth in the fact that I earnestly dedicated myself to doing it all properly.

Besides, that time of being a Lower Student, no matter what happens, it only lasts a single year.

Once you become an Upper Student, it’s a total 180-degree flip in your situations, and now you’re the ones dwelling above the clouds…

But, even so, once another year passes, then you become a Takarazuka Revue Ken-1. The most junior student. You’re at the bottom of another human pyramid structure again.

Once you become a member of the company, a single year matters so little that you feel just like classmates, so ‘I scolded you’, ‘You scolded me’, becomes just a funny story.

It’s interesting, but I often ended up becoming even closer to the people who had scolded me a lot, rather than the people who hadn’t scolded me much at all.

‘After all…’

I think it might be because at those times, we clashed with each other really genuinely and earnestly. And then without either of us fleeing the scene, we spent all that time working to reach a settlement…

That’s how I feel about it.

And now to change the topic a bit,

For Lower Students, cleaning is a very important part of their training.

I was responsible for the cleaning of the Traditional Dance classroom.

Every morning I would get up at around 5 and scour the place like it was New Years’.

This is shown on television programs and such a lot, so I’m sure a lot of you know about it.

Now, I have fond memories of when, in winter, it was so cold and dark that I would hold a hot can of coffee in each hand (in those days, they didn’t have disposable handwarmers) as me and my classmates walked across the Takarazuka bridge.

That was quite a year…

It was a really strengthening experience. Compared to that year as a Lower Student, I can deal with anything!!

So that was a ‘really good’ thing, in its own way.

I think a very important thing about people is that, even if they don’t really know what is happening or why, they can bear it!

Yeah.

How-e-ver.

That’s as long as it only lasts a year <3