a manoeuvre that backfired when the prince complained that he had hoped to see The Mikado during his stay. A Japanese journalist covering the prince's stay attended a proscribed performance and confessed himself "deeply and pleasingly disappointed." Expecting "real insults" to his country, he had found only "bright music and much fun." After World War II, The Mikado was staged in Japan in a number of private performances. The first public production, given at three performances, was in 1946 in the Ernie Pyle Theatre in Tokyo, conducted by the pianist Jorge Bolet for the entertainment of American troops and Japanese audiences. The set and costumes were opulent, and the principal players were American, Canadian, and British, as were the women's chorus, but the male chorus, the female dancing chorus and the orchestra were Japanese. General Douglas MacArthur banned a large-scale professional 1947 Tokyo production by an all-Japanese cast, but other productions have occurred in Japan. For example, the opera was performed at the Ernie Pyle Theatre in Tokyo in 1970, presented by the Eighth Army Special Service. In 2001, the town of Chichibu (秩父), Japan, under the name of "Tokyo Theatre Company", produced an adaptation of The Mikado in Japanese. Locals believe that Chichibu was the town Gilbert had in mind when he named his setting "Titipu", but there is no contemporary evidence for this theory. Although the Hepburn system of transliteration (in which the name of the town appears as "Chichibu") is usually found today, it was very common in the 19th century to use the Nihon-shiki system, in which the name 秩父 appears as "Titibu". Thus, it is easy to surmise that "Titibu", found in the London press of 1884, became "Titipu" in the opera. Japanese researchers speculate that Gilbert may have heard of Chichibu silk, an important export in the 19th century. The town's Japanese-language adaptation of The Mikado has been revived several times throughout Japan and, in 2006, the Chichibu Mikado was performed at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in England. Criticism Since the 1990s, some productions of the opera in the United States have drawn criticism from the Asian-American community as promoting "simplistic orientalist stereotypes". In 2014, after a production in Seattle, Washington, drew national attention to such criticism, the Gilbert biographer Andrew Crowther wrote that The Mikado "does not portray any of the characters as being 'racially inferior' or indeed fundamentally any different