Staging the climate of postwar Japan: Kubo Sakae's Nihon no kishō
Published and staged in 1953, The climate of Japan (Nihon no kishō) by Kubo Sakae (1900- 1958) is an ambitious and complex work in which Kubo describes the early postwar years in allegori- cal terms and addresses many of the issues of the day through a group of characters working in or associated with a meteorological observatory. However, compared with his previous works Land of volcanic ash (1937-38), which is still considered Kubo’s masterpiece, and The apple orchard diary (1948), this play has received little scholarly attention.