50 Fun Facts About Kabuki

Kabuki star Ichikawa Ebizo performed to jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara at the opening ceremony of which event?

The Tokyo Olympics opened in 2021 with Ebizo as the swaggering hero of the classic Shibaraku, in a segment intended to dispel negative energy.

Which film saga was staged as a one-night kabuki play in Tokyo in 2019, with Ichikawa Ebizo as its villain?

Star Wars Kabuki cast Ebizo as Kylo Ren and replayed scenes from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, staged weeks before The Rise of Skywalker brought the nine-film saga to a close.

Kabuki is dated to 1603, the year which warlord became shogun?

Tokugawa Ieyasu took the title in 1603 and ruled from Edo. His grandson Iemitsu, the third shogun, banned women from the kabuki stage in 1629.

In which city did Okuni's troupe give the first kabuki performances?

Kyoto was then the imperial capital, and the craze spread fast: Okuni was soon invited to dance at court, and rival troupes sprang up to copy her.

What do the three kanji of the word kabuki mean?

Sing, dance and skill are characters chosen later for their sound. The word itself is thought to come from a verb for behaving outlandishly, first applied to the flashy street dandies of the day.

Why were women banned from kabuki in 1629?

Prostitution, and the brawls it sparked among patrons, alarmed the authorities, but the ban backfired: the boy actors who replaced the women drew the same trouble and were banned in turn in 1652.

What is the term for a male actor who specialises in female roles?

Onnagata took over once women were barred from the stage. An early master, Yoshizawa Ayame I, held that an actor must also live as a woman offstage to be called skilful.

When kabuki resumed after the 1652 ban on boy actors, what did every performer have to do?

Shave off his forelock: long forelocks marked a boy, so the shaved crown made every actor look a grown man. The all-adult theatre that followed was known as yaro kabuki.

Four years before it honoured kabuki, UNESCO proclaimed which older Japanese performing art a masterpiece of intangible heritage?

Noh, the masked drama long patronised by shoguns and samurai lords, was proclaimed in 2001 and kabuki in 2005. Kabuki borrowed from it freely: the hit Kanjincho reworks the Noh play Ataka.

In a kabuki theatre, what is the hanamichi?

The hanamichi, or 'flower path', is a walkway extending from the stage into the audience. Stars make their grandest entrances and exits along it, passing right beside the spectators.

What is the name of the elaborate, mask-like makeup worn by some kabuki actors?

Kumadori follows the lines of the face in bold painted stripes. After a show an actor may press a cloth to his face to lift the design off, a one-off print that fans prize as a keepsake.

What do red lines in a kabuki actor's stage makeup signify?

Passion, heroism and righteousness: red marks the hero, while blue warns of a villain or a jealous ghost, so the audience can read a character before he speaks a word.

In kabuki, what is a mie?

A picturesque pose held to establish character, the mie freezes the action at a peak of emotion, like a film close-up. To show fury, the actor may even cross his eyes.

Which actor pioneered aragoto, the exaggerated 'rough style' of Edo kabuki?

Ichikawa Danjuro I unveiled the style at 13, as the folk hero Kintoki in 1673. A fellow actor stabbed him to death at the theatre in 1704, yet the acting line he founded is still the keeper of the style.

What sound signals the opening and closing of the kabuki curtain?

The crack of wooden clappers, called ki, starts slowly and quickens as the striped curtain is drawn. The man who strikes them stays out of the audience's sight.

Kabuki's sewamono, or 'domestic plays', focus mainly on which social group?

Commoners such as townspeople and peasants were kabuki's own audience, and these plays showed them their world of family troubles and doomed love affairs instead of the warrior epics of the history plays.

Which playwright wrote The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the 1703 hit that kabuki borrowed from the puppet stage?

Chikamatsu Monzaemon took the plot from the news: a young clerk and a courtesan had died together in Osaka only weeks before the play opened.

Why did the shogunate ban kabuki plays about lovers dying together in the 1720s?

They inspired copycat suicides, or so it was reported. Art had first imitated life, since the plays dramatised real lovers' deaths; the shogunate stepped in when life seemed to be imitating art.

The kabuki classic Kanadehon Chushingura retells which historical event?

The revenge of the 47 ronin took place in 1703, but censors forbade plays about recent events, so the story was moved back to the 14th century and its heroes renamed.

Which stringed instrument is the principal accompaniment of kabuki music such as nagauta?

The shamisen was a novelty when kabuki began, a three-stringed lute that had reached Japan by way of the Ryukyu Islands only decades earlier. The first women's troupes seized on its bright new sound.

Which theatre device, invented for kabuki in the 18th century, reached Western playhouses only in 1896?

The revolving stage lets a whole set, actors and all, swing out of view in seconds. Kabuki crews turned theirs by hand from beneath the floor for generations before a Munich theatre built the West's first.

In kabuki, what is chunori?

An actor flying over the stage on wires usually plays a ghost or a fox spirit, and the flight often carries him on over the audience's heads to the upper balconies.

In kabuki, what are the kuroko?

Stagehands dressed entirely in black, considered invisible, the kuroko hand over props and whisk costumes away in mid-scene. For a snow scene they switch to white, and for the sea to blue.

In kabuki's kakegoe, what do expert audience members shout at a climactic moment?

The actor's house name, such as 'Otowaya!' for the Onoe Kikugoro line, goes back to the Edo period, when actors were not allowed real surnames. The callers are connoisseurs seated far from the stage.

What is the general term for kabuki's visual stage tricks, often translated as 'playing to the gallery'?

Keren covers everything from lightning costume changes to real water on stage and whole buildings collapsing. Ghost plays lean on it hardest, to startle the audience with sudden apparitions.

To which district were Edo's three great kabuki theatres forced to move in the 1840s?

Asakusa then lay on the edge of the city. The shogunate, which disapproved of the theatre crowd, pushed the playhouses out there, yet the new theatre town went on to thrive for some thirty years.

Which shogunal reform programme of the 1840s cracked down on kabuki as a needless luxury?

The Tenpo Reforms hit the stage hard: the era's biggest star, Ichikawa Ebizo V, was banished from Edo for living too lavishly, though the rules were gradually loosened afterwards.

Which enigmatic printmaker, active for less than a year in 1794–95, is famed for unflattering close-up portraits of kabuki actors?

Sharaku showed the stars warts and all: one handsome player of female roles got a bull neck. The public did not take to it, and he vanished after ten months, his identity still debated.

Which licensed pleasure quarter of Edo is the setting of the kabuki favourite Sukeroku?

Yoshiwara is where the dandy Sukeroku courts a celebrated courtesan and picks fights with everyone he meets. He wants each man to draw his sword, because he is hunting for a lost heirloom blade.

Which puppet theatre developed alongside kabuki, with the two art forms borrowing from each other?

Bunraku's puppets drew the bigger crowds for a time in the mid-1700s. Kabuki won them back by borrowing the puppet theatre's hit plays, which still fill much of its repertoire.

After World War II, occupation censors barred many classic kabuki plays for promoting what?

Feudal values, as the occupation saw them, ran through the great history plays with their fiercely loyal samurai, so many were kept off the stage until the rules eased from 1947.

Faubion Bowers, the censor who championed kabuki, was aide to which general?

Douglas MacArthur's young interpreter used his post to argue banned classics back onto the stage. By the time Bowers left Japan, most of the censorship of kabuki had gone.

Which hit manga was turned into a Super Kabuki play at Tokyo's Shinbashi Enbujo in 2015?

One Piece opened that October with Ichikawa Ennosuke IV as Luffy. Creator Eiichiro Oda called Ennosuke's the most beautiful kabuki he had seen, and the show was later screened in cinemas.

Which Square Enix video game was staged as a kabuki play in Tokyo in 2023?

Final Fantasy X reached the stage because the kabuki actor Onoe Kikunosuke, who loved the game, pushed for the adaptation, directed it himself and played its hero, Tidus.

In which Tokyo district is the Kabuki-za, the city's principal kabuki theatre?

Ginza has housed the Kabuki-za since 1889. Pulled down in 2010 over safety fears, it reopened three years later with its temple-like front rebuilt at the foot of an office tower.

Which disaster destroyed Tokyo's Kabuki-za while it was still being rebuilt after a 1921 fire?

The Kanto earthquake struck in September 1923 with the replacement still unfinished. The theatre was built yet again, only to be destroyed a third time by wartime bombing.

Which company has run the Kabuki-za since 1914?

Shochiku began in 1895 as a kabuki promoter. Six years after taking over the Kabuki-za it moved into films too, and grew into one of Japan's great studios, the home of Yasujiro Ozu.

Kabuki's striped draw curtain joins black and green with which third colour?

Persimmon, a brownish orange, joins black and green at the Kabuki-za. In Edo each licensed theatre had its own set of colours, so the curtain doubled as the house's badge; one used white in place of green.

What is the name of the last remaining kabuki theatre in the city where kabuki was born?

The Minami-za is the last of seven playhouses licensed there in the early 1600s. Each December it hosts a 'face-showing' gala, a relic of the Edo custom of presenting the new season's troupe.

What does a kabuki actor formally inherit at a shumei ceremony?

A stage name is earned in steps. Many actors take at least three over a career, each announced from the stage in a grand ceremony and often bringing bigger roles.

The dark space beneath a kabuki stage is called the naraku, a Buddhist word for what?

Hell seemed the right name when the stage machinery was worked by hand: the crews laboured below in darkness and damp, heaving actors and scenery into place on cue.

The thick white makeup of Edo-era kabuki actors slowly poisoned many of them because it contained what?

Lead, as the pigment lead white, spread smoothly and cost little, so it was the favourite face powder of old Japan. Actors, who wore it thickest and most often, suffered worst before it was finally outlawed.

Okuni's troupe performed early kabuki on a makeshift stage in the dry bed of which river?

The Kamo's dry bed is where tradition places her first shows. Her dancers, some dressed as swaggering men, acted out flirtations in teahouses for a crowd that ran from townsfolk to samurai.

What did kabuki theatres introduce in 1975 to help newcomers follow the plays?

Earphone guides whisper a running commentary in time with the action. They proved hugely popular with first-timers, and an English channel followed in 1982 for visitors from abroad.

In kabuki, what is a hiki dōgu, used to change scenery while the curtain stays open?

A small wagon stage on wheels, the hiki dōgu lets stagehands roll scenery on or off in full view, sometimes with the actors still aboard.

Which director based his film The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail on the kabuki play Kanjincho?

Akira Kurosawa was shooting it as Japan surrendered in 1945, and slipped a clowning porter into the solemn tale. The occupation authorities blocked its release, and it reached cinemas only in 1952.

Which playwright wrote thief dramas for the star Kodanji IV and kept kabuki supplied with hits into the Meiji era?

Kawatake Mokuami made heroes of thieves. In his Benten Kozo, five bandits line up under umbrellas and introduce themselves one by one in rolling seven-and-five-syllable verse.

Which actor created the 'Super Kabuki' genre, launching it with Yamato Takeru in 1986?

Ichikawa En-ō, known then as Ennosuke III, wanted to win kabuki a new and younger audience, so he paired the traditional acting with high-tech sets, costumes and lighting.

In the kabuki classic Shibaraku, the hero halts an execution by shouting the title from offstage, which means what?

'Wait a moment!' rings out from behind the entrance curtain just as the killing is about to begin. The hero faces down the villain until the captives walk free, then beheads the last attackers with one sweep of a giant sword.

Which title did Japan confer in 2012 on Bando Tamasaburo V, kabuki's star player of female roles?

Living National Treasure is the popular name for a certified keeper of one of Japan's intangible cultural properties. This keeper of tradition has strayed far beyond kabuki, even directing the Kodo taiko drummers.