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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s a really lovely book, that ended up making me cry many times. I hope you enjoy it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For a table of contents with links to all the chapters,\u00a0go here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
What it means to be scolded<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that Takarazuka fans, when they\u2019re walking around the city of Takarazuka, have often seen or passed by Takarazuka Music School students in their grey sailor suit uniforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I\u2019m 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTakarazuka Music School students are always so courteous!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n People say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s really, really true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, if you\u2019ve only just entered Takarazuka, it\u2019s very difficult to tell who is a Director, or who is a senior student in the company, or things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Therefore, they will give \u2018Proper greetings!\u2019 unconditionally to anyone who looks like they might have something to do with the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea is that it\u2019s better to just give \u2018Proper greetings!\u2019 to everybody, rather than not greet someone and risk being scolded. This means that once in a while, they\u2019ll give their \u2018Proper greetings!\u2019 to someone who doesn\u2019t actually have any connection to Takarazuka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I feel like I must have bowed my head to everyone I ran into in town\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018An Upper Student is going to scold me!!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n That pressure is really intense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the city of Takarazuka, there are rules about \u2018Lower Students may go into this store\u2019 \u2018that store is banned for Lower Students\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although, nowadays in the Takarazuka Music School, it seems those rules are gone, and it\u2019s much easier to get by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although of course it\u2019s still strict\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, this is an incident of a mistake I made that has really stayed with me\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next day\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou ignored me yesterday, didn\u2019t you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course I couldn\u2019t protest \u2018But I couldn\u2019t see you from the street!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCrows are white.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYes, crows are white.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is part of the army-style discipline!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The word \u2018But\u2019 is not in a Lower Student\u2019s vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All they can do is apologize!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, it\u2019s rare to just be able to apologize once and be forgiven right away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next time you go to apologize, you have to change your expression of regret\u2014basically, you can\u2019t say the same thing twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I can\u2019t forget that on that last day\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n I said \u201cEven 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\u2026blah blah blah\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I said that, the Upper Student finally laughed, and happily I was forgiven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But actually, thinking back on that now, that sort of thing was very good training. For a stage performer\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n One other example\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n When there are a lot of things to apologize for, or one very big thing, you would have to write a \u2018Reflection Essay\u2019 on composition paper and hand it in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And one Upper Student said,<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAlright. If you can write the whole essay without one single error, then you\u2019ll be forgiven.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the way, Lower Students are forbidden to laugh in front of Upper STudents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Wah\u2026\u2019 this really made me cry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once when I was supposed to be silently writing a \u2018Reflection Essay\u2019, I messed something up in the middle of it and ended up laughing at my own clumsiness\u2026 I remember that I finally \u2018cleared\u2019 that apology after around 9 attempts\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, but!<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you think about it carefully\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou have to use different words every time you apologize!\u201d is training to develop a wide variety of ways to express the same thought, \u2018I\u2019m sorry\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, \u201cYou have to write your \u2018Reflection Essay\u2019 in complete silence with no errors!\u201d is related to the skills needed to memorize scripts\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also, \u201cNo matter what, you must never laugh!\u201d connects with the fact that when you\u2019re 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\u2019t ever laugh!<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018In short, these things actually have a lot of meaning behind them.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides, that time of being a Lower Student, no matter what happens, it only lasts a single year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you become an Upper Student, it\u2019s a total 180-degree flip in your situations, and now you\u2019re the ones dwelling above the clouds\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, even so, once another year passes, then you become a Takarazuka Revue Ken-1. The most junior student. You\u2019re at the bottom of another human pyramid structure again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you become a member of the company, a single year matters so little that you feel just like classmates, so \u2018I scolded you\u2019, \u2018You scolded me\u2019, becomes just a funny story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s interesting, but I often ended up becoming even closer to the people who had scolded me a lot, rather than the people who hadn\u2019t scolded me much at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018After all\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s how I feel about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now to change the topic a bit,<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Lower Students, cleaning is a very important part of their training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was responsible for the cleaning of the Traditional Dance classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every morning I would get up at around 5 and scour the place like it was New Years\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is shown on television programs and such a lot, so I\u2019m sure a lot of you know about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t have disposable handwarmers) as me and my classmates walked across the Takarazuka bridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was quite a year\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a really strengthening experience. Compared to that year as a Lower Student, I can deal with anything!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n So that was a \u2018really good\u2019 thing, in its own way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think a very important thing about people is that, even if they don\u2019t really know what is happening or why, they can bear it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How-e-ver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s as long as it only lasts a year <3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading