Kabuki Trivia
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50 free Kabuki trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This kabuki trivia quiz covers the four-hundred-year-old Japanese theatre of painted faces, stylised poses and all-male casts. The easy questions cover the country, the shrine maiden who founded it in Kyoto in 1603, the meaning of its three characters, the men who play women's roles and the year UNESCO recognised it. From there the quiz moves through the history: the ban on women in 1629, the rowdy wakashu years, the Genroku flowering, Chikamatsu's love suicides and the government's 1723 ban on them, the fires that pushed the theatres out to Asakusa and the brief post-war ban by the American occupation. The hard end covers the craft: red versus blue kumadori, the mie pose credited to Ichikawa Danjuro I, the aragoto rough style, jidaimono and sewamono, the shamisen and nagauta, the flower path, revolving stages and trap doors, actors flying by chunori, the invisible black-clad kuroko, the audience shouts of house names, the 47 ronin play, the Kabuki-za's fires and rebuilds, and the Super Kabuki adaptations of Naruto, One Piece and Final Fantasy X. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for kabuki, aragoto and the Kabuki-za before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Japan, Japanese culture and world theatre quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Kabuki star Ichikawa Ebizo performed to jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara at the opening ceremony of which event?
The Tokyo Olympics
The Tokyo Olympics opened in 2021 with Ebizo as the swaggering hero of the classic Shibaraku, in a segment intended to dispel negative energy.
Q 02Which film saga was staged as a one-night kabuki play in Tokyo in 2019, with Ichikawa Ebizo as its villain?
Star Wars
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.
Q 03Kabuki is dated to 1603, the year which warlord became shogun?
Tokugawa Ieyasu
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.
Q 04In which city did Okuni's troupe give the first kabuki performances?
Kyoto
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.
Q 05What do the three kanji of the word kabuki mean?
Sing, dance and skill
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.
Q 06Why were women banned from kabuki in 1629?
Prostitution
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.
Q 07What is the term for a male actor who specialises in female roles?
Onnagata
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.
Q 08When kabuki resumed after the 1652 ban on boy actors, what did every performer have to do?
Shave off his forelock
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.
Q 09Four years before it honoured kabuki, UNESCO proclaimed which older Japanese performing art a masterpiece of intangible heritage?
Noh
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.
Q 10In a kabuki theatre, what is the hanamichi?
A walkway extending from the stage into the audience
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.
Q 11What is the name of the elaborate, mask-like makeup worn by some kabuki actors?
Kumadori
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.
Q 12What do red lines in a kabuki actor's stage makeup signify?
Passion, heroism and righteousness
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.
Q 13In kabuki, what is a mie?
A picturesque pose held to establish character
Q 21Which theatre device, invented for kabuki in the 18th century, reached Western playhouses only in 1896?
The revolving stage
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.
Q 22In kabuki, what is chunori?
An actor flying over the stage on wires
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.
Q 23In kabuki, what are the kuroko?
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.
Q 14Which actor pioneered aragoto, the exaggerated 'rough style' of Edo kabuki?
Ichikawa Danjuro I
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.
Q 15What sound signals the opening and closing of the kabuki curtain?
The crack of wooden clappers
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.
Q 16Kabuki's sewamono, or 'domestic plays', focus mainly on which social group?
Commoners such as townspeople and peasants
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.
Q 17Which playwright wrote The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the 1703 hit that kabuki borrowed from the puppet stage?
Chikamatsu Monzaemon
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.
Q 18Why did the shogunate ban kabuki plays about lovers dying together in the 1720s?
They inspired copycat suicides
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.
Q 19The kabuki classic Kanadehon Chushingura retells which historical event?
The revenge of the 47 ronin
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.
Q 20Which stringed instrument is the principal accompaniment of kabuki music such as nagauta?
The shamisen
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.
Stagehands dressed entirely in black, considered invisible
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.
Q 24In kabuki's kakegoe, what do expert audience members shout at a climactic moment?
The actor's house name
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.
Q 25What is the general term for kabuki's visual stage tricks, often translated as 'playing to the gallery'?
Keren
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.
Q 26To which district were Edo's three great kabuki theatres forced to move in the 1840s?
Asakusa
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.
Q 27Which shogunal reform programme of the 1840s cracked down on kabuki as a needless luxury?
The Tenpo Reforms
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.
Q 28Which enigmatic printmaker, active for less than a year in 1794–95, is famed for unflattering close-up portraits of kabuki actors?
Sharaku
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.
Q 29Which licensed pleasure quarter of Edo is the setting of the kabuki favourite Sukeroku?
Yoshiwara
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.
Q 30Which puppet theatre developed alongside kabuki, with the two art forms borrowing from each other?
Bunraku
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.