How Stage Beyond Borders is bringing Japanese culture to the world

“Our objective at the Japan Foundation is to deepen mutual understanding between the people of Japan and the people of other countries and regions,” explains Yasuhiro Kobayashi, director of the Japan Foundation’s performing arts section. “Since 1972, we have used various activities and information services to create opportunities for people-to-people interactions.” 

“The pandemic made it impossible for groups to conduct overseas tours as in the past, so we decided to bring Japanese performing arts to people overseas through the medium of video instead,” Kobayashi continues. “Everything will be available for one year, and can be accessed around the world.” 

Stage Beyond Borders, essentially, is an online portfolio of digitally captured theatrical performances, showcasing the extraordinary variety and quality of Japan’s performing arts industry. Available via the Stage Beyond Borders official YouTube channel, it is a compelling collection of work originating from across the country and featuring everything from traditional theatre to contemporary dance. 

“Numerous works are already available online and we plan to have a line-up of about 90 works uploaded by the end of March,” Kobayashi says. “All shows can be viewed for free, anywhere in the world that YouTube is available, and shows with dialogue are all subtitled in at least five different languages.” 

The range of performances available is astonishing. There is Fortress of Smiles, the hyper-realist masterpiece from internationally renowned theatre director Kuro Tanino and his Tokyo-based company Niwa Gekidan Penino. There is Median, a solo dance piece from leading avant-garde artist Hiroaki Umeda, who has earned acclaim in over 40 countries worldwide. There is I Can’t Die Without Being Born, the latest show from exciting experimental ensemble Theater Collective Hanchu-Yuei. 

Alongside these pieces – and more from other luminaries such as Toshiki Okada, Hisashi Watanabe and Satoko Ichihara – are dozens of performances of traditional Japanese performance, from Noh theatre, to Kyogen comedies, Kyomai dance and Taiko drumming. It is, says Kobayashi, “a terrific opportunity for audiences to gain familiarity and connect with Japanese culture, both old and new, ancient and contemporary.”

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Japan’s theatre industry, like theatre industries around the world, was hit hard by the pandemic, and has still not fully recovered. Theatres were completely shut down for some time and, although they have reopened with safeguarding procedures in place, capacities remain limited in some cases and cancellations due to infection among actors and backstage staff are common.  

It is hoped that the Stage Beyond Borders project can play a part in reinvigorating Japanese theatre by helping individual artists and companies both reignite existing international relationships with institutions in major cities and develop new ones with new organisations in new regions. The ultimate aim, says Kobayashi, is that the Japanese performing arts industry will emerge from the pandemic with deeper, stronger cultural ties to its UK equivalent than ever. 

“The Japan Foundation sponsored many overseas performances by Japanese artists prior to the pandemic, but these were limited mainly to big cities,” says Kobayashi. “Stage Beyond Borders will help us go beyond geographic, time and language constraints to reach new audiences that had no access to these works before.” 

“In the UK in particular, we hope that the program will allow audiences, not only in London and Edinburgh but nationwide, to enjoy these works,” Kobayashi concludes. “And we hope that the project will become a catalyst for actual live performances in a wider range of cities in the future.”

To see the Stage Beyond Borders project, visit the Japan Foundation’s official YouTube site here: