Can a foreigner — a French person, say — become a kabuki actor through effort?

On the institutional question first: the path to becoming a kabuki actor is not closed by nationality. Most kabuki actors are born to it, but birth is not the only door. The National Theatre's kabuki actor training programme has run for half a century as a means of raising actors from outside the hereditary world, and its graduates sustain the stage. It has functioned as the public entrance for those not born into a house.

Performers of foreign origin have joined acting houses and stood on the kabuki stage. Nationality, in other words, is not itself a disqualification — a point worth stating plainly.

That said, it is worth being honest about where the real walls stand. One is language. Kabuki dialogue is not modern Japanese but a classical idiom with a seven-five pulse, moving in exchange with gidayū and nagauta. Mastering it takes long training even for a native speaker. The other is the body: kabuki kata is usually instilled from early childhood, before the frame has set. Beginning later, the work of closing that gap is formidable. But — and this is the point — the same conditions apply to actors born in Japan. What "through effort" asks is very heavy; the road itself is not closed.