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Some of the 350 Takarazuka girls are daughters of early members. They live in the Takarazuka Operatic School for Girls, which fatherly Impresario Kobayashi runs with a strict, decorous hand (no dating, pupils to leave the school only in pairs, weekday curfew at 7). To teach them their musical trade, the girls are given a solid year of voice, ballet, Japanese Western dancing, English. After a year, they are graduated to the chorus (pay: 10,000 yen a month, or $27.77). The 30 stars make ten times that much. The girls wear blue jeans, sweaters, and horsetail hairdos in school, do their own housekeeping and live by a motto:'"Be pure, be right, be beautiful." Their glamorous aura of unattainableness makes them idols to millions of Japanese fans.
Truckin' Chorus. Impresario Kobayashi originally wrote his own scripts from Japanese fairy tales and familiar Kabuki and Noh plots, got his musicians to adapt traditional music to two-step and waltz rhythms. "I was trying to build a musical bridge between East and West," he says.
Today his scouts roam New York City and Paris to acquire tunes and lyrics. Step-for-step dance routines from Oklahoma! and On the Town have turned up among such confections as Broadway Cinderella.
Kobayashi has also staged a musical version of Hamlet and an adaptation of Carmen. His production of Turandot, Puccini's Italianate tragedy of the Orient, became a vehicle for a truckin' chorus.
Today, 82 and frail. Kobayashi rarely leaves his villa near Takarazuka. except for a monthly visit to his theater. Next day he sends cryptic memos to the directors. He still manages to keep his musical empire humming, brings eminent Western concert stars to the town (e.g., Singers Marian Anderson and Helen Traubel, Violinist Yehudi Menuhin). Early this year, he will repossess Takarazuka's Tokyo branch, which the occupation forces had turned into the famed Ernie Pyle movie theater. Last week the old showman ventured forth to take in a special show with a Christmas finale. Sample lyric:
Jinguru berru Jinguni berru Jinguru aru wei.
Owa fun itsu rai In na won hosu opu swei—Hey!