The year now ending began gloomily with the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris reminding us of hopeless breakdowns in mutual understanding and tolerance worldwide; now it's set to close hot on the heels of an agreement by nearly 200 countries at the COP21 talks in Paris on the need to counter threatened apocalyptic levels of climate change due to global warming.

It is not really surprising that such events were frequently reflected in the last year's contemporary-theater programs in Japan. However, it's a source of great joy that they brought forth several unforgettable plays whose common denominator was their relevance to the world in which we find ourselves — and their commitment to raising their audiences' awareness of what pivotal times these appear to be.

So as the year began, many of Japan's theater lovers were astonished how the renowned Belgian choreographer and dancer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui injected astonishing new life — and timeliness — into his "Pluto," based on a manga of the same name by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki that was itself a spinoff from Osamu Tezuka's epic "Astro Boy."