YBT has performed in tents, temples and the New York Church of St. John the Divine, the largest cathedral in the world. But its best work has been seen in the 50-ton barge where the audience clambers down rickety steps to sit in tiers facing the performers. International theatrical luminaries (like the Polish director, Andrzej Wajda) drop in there; more importantly, by YBT's standards, so do hordes of neighborhood kids. And not just any new boat will do for YBT's 68-year old director Takuo Endo--it must be wooden, hand-crafted and seat 100.

One of the reasons Japanese theater lacks innovation, Endo believes, is because it relies on Western traditions and the perspective of the Western stage, an imperfect system which the Japanese have been diligently copying for the last 100 years "with dismal ." "The problem with modern theaters is that they separate the performers from the audience," he says. "Our boat is easy to heat, the acoustics are wonderful, and it feels like an enclosed, wobbly world."

Nobody in Japan is making wooden boats any more, so Endo went on a reconnaissance mission to Indonesia, where he found what he was looking for. For about ¥2 million, he could sail a large wooden boat from Sulawesi to Japan, and moor her on the Nakamura River in Motomachi, a short walk from Ishikawacho Station. And that's when the bureaucrats in Yokohama's City Hall came in.

"We can have as many flashy speed boats or steel ships as we like," reports Endo. "But the import authorities are giving us one excuse after another why we can't bring a wooden boat to Japan. Our company was born on a wooden boat; all our plays are made there. We know what we need to make theater--and they don't."

"It's not that you cannot import a wooden boat," a Yokohama Port Authority official told us. "But it must have a manufacturer's number and a license." Hand-crafted boats have neither. And even the mooring is no longer secure--Yokohama Port has passed a bill requiring all vessels to be moored at marinas, with the requisite fees. Otherwise, the authority will "treat as abandoned" (i.e. remove and scuttle) all boats, starting this month.

Last year Endo set up the hundred-strong Yokohama Association for Constructing a Theater Boat, which includes professors, students, artists, and die-hard fans, and goes public with its campaign this month. But amid all this preparation, disaster struck. In early October, a typhoon swept through Yokohama and felled the ¥400,000 barge. "We dragged her up in December, bailed her out and patched up the hull. But now she's impossible to insure," laments Endo. The Boat Theater can no longer perform on a boat.

YBT tried to work out some kind of compromise, and appealed to the City's sense of reason, but to no avail. "We public officials are required to do our job and protect the public from fire hazards in non-defined theater spaces," intones a robotic City Hall official. Obviously, she's never blocked cinema fire exits with the rest of Tokyo to catch a movie.

Yokohama Boat Theater is different from the companies which perform only occasionally in alternative venues. It fine-tunes its productions for as long as 10 years. The mythical fable Oguri-Hangan Terute-Hime, for instance, used 40 handmade instruments; Endo wrote the poetic narrative and created the masks; the composer Makoto Yabuki scored the music, made the costumes, and fused words and gestures into a phantasmagorical spectacle of ritual and masquerade. YBT wins prizes, it tours the international festivals, but it always returns to its watery home to mount other productions.

Apart from its rebuilding campaign, the company will hold three months of workshops in Indonesia this summer, part of what Endo calls its "cultural ODA." But the group knows where home is: YBT without the "B" has little charm for Endo, who decries the conveyor-belt assembly lines at most conventional spaces in the city.

Is this crusade just the stubborn dream of a white-haired old man? "They're closing down everybody's space," Endo says. "They've shut down the Harajuku dance scene, they've thrown the homeless workers out of Shinjuku. Now they want to keep us off the rivers. Who makes these decisions on our behalf and why? That's what we mean to find out. Then we'll bring our boat home."