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History
Kamishibai (Japanese Picture Book
Story telling) Started in Japan in Japan over 80 yrs ago. Sweet
sellers would Pedal their wares on the back of Bicycles from which they would
also perform Kamishibai. They would do, depending on business, one or two shows
usually stopping in the middle of the second show and saying "come back next week"
if you want to see the next episode". In the fifties it was reported that there
were 3000 such story tellers around Japan. Now Just a handful. I attempt to
explain the possible rise of Kamishibai in my story Two Brothers. Kamishibai
comes from a much older tradition of story telling and a deeper look into the
roots of Kamishibai is provided by our resident Historian, Helen McCarthy. www.helenmccarthy.org
HISTORY OF KAMISHIBAI
Kamishibai grew out of three other popular art forms. Pictures had been used to
educate and entertain for centuries, starting in Buddhist temples and developing
into a full-scale print industry. Etoki,
or picture storytellers, would use prints or original art to illustrate their
narratives. The whole nation, rich and poor, had been listening to storytellers
for centuries. Rakugo, a traditional
form of storytelling, is still practiced today. When film first came to
Japan
in 1886, it gave birth to a new form of storyteller: the benshi narrator was the person who introduced and narrated silent
film for the audience.
When silent film died, benshi moved into kamishibai. Their performance skills,
honed over years of experiment with audiences and married to the skilful use of
graphic imagery, made kamishibai a successful street entertainment. The simple
box frame with pictures inside was brought to life by the performer’s voice,
timing, and ability to read his audience.
It’s not surprising that when television first appeared in
Japan
it was known as “electric kamishibai”. After all, TV is just a wooden box
displaying pictures brought to life by performance skills. Kamishibai was also
using serial narratives to capture an audience and then sell them goods, long
before TV advertising was invented.
ROOTS OF KAMISHIBAI
Japan
’s
first motion pictures were imported. A benshi would introduce them and explain
the exotic places, clothes and customs the audience was about to see. These
introductions were called maesetsu in
Japanese. Many early movies were newsreels or documentaries, but as narrative
film developed, the benshi also described characters and gave plot synopses in
their introductions.
Gradually, different kinds of narrative summary developed as individual
performers experimented and adopted the most successful, audience-pleasing
styles. From the early 1920s onwards the plot and character summaries extended
from the introduction into the film itself, and benshi would use different
voices and perform each role, adding banter and description and giving the
cinema experience a new dimension. The most popular benshi became stars in their
own right.
If you're interested in finding out more about benshi, media company Digital
Meme offer several DVDs of early anime and silent film from the 1920s and 1930s,
with benshi narration and multilingual translation, on their website:
http://www.digital-meme.com/en/our_products/dvds/index.html#st010e
TALKIES
KILL BENSHI
When film acquired a synchronized soundtrack, benshi were no longer required.
The release of The Jazz Singer in the
USA
in 1927 marked the beginning of the end for silent film throughout the world.
In less than ten years, silent film had disappeared completely from cinema
screens.
The late 1920s were a bad time to be in a collapsing industry. A global economic
downturn had led to global depression. In 1929 the
US
stock market crashed, triggering a worldwide economic collapse. Markets kept on
falling until 1933, and millions were thrown out of work. There was very little
alternative employment for the benshi who lost their jobs with the collapse of
silent film.
BEGINNING OF KAMISHIBAI
The first kamishibai performances are believed to have been in
Tokyo
’s shitamachi, or working-class
district, round Ueno station, but kamishibai soon spread throughout
Japan
.
Kamishibai gave redundant benshi a chance to use their existing skills, perform
for audiences and earn a small but viable income.
The kamishibaya, or kamishibai
performer, used the same methods as Buddhist monks and picture storytellers of
old times, adapted for 20th century life through modern technology
– the bicycle.
The kamishibai performer was a traveling salesman, offering sweets and snacks
and using stories to entice customers to buy his wares. He would travel from
village to village, or around the suburbs of big cities like
Tokyo
and
Osaka
, with a collapsible wooden frame on the back of his bike. At each stop – a
street corner, a public square or park – he would knock two wooden clappers,
or hyoshige, together as hard as he
could, to announce his arrival.
As people gathered he would sell his snacks. The audience was mostly children,
as men were out working and women had household duties. There was no obligation
to buy anything, but those who did got the best positions, right in front of the
stage, while those who didn’t had to stay at the back of the crowd.
When he had sold enough snacks, the storyteller would insert a set of boards for
the first story into the stage. Withdrawing them one by one, revealing each
image in time with his narration, he would tell several short tales – some
complete, but usually ending with a serial and a cliffhanger to bring the
audience back next time he visited.
An outline of the story could be written on the back of each card for the
storyteller to refer to if he lost his place or was distracted, but kamishibai
storytellers were seasoned professionals. Like star benshi narrators, the best
performers would use humor and drama to make each story their own, developing
their own style and varying the jokes and comments to reflect current events and
popular children’s stories, or to suit the particular audience.
Over time, performers started to include questions or puzzles for the children
to answer at the end of the show. Children who got the right answer would get an
extra treat, or later, a cheap trinket or picture card.
THE BUSINESS OF KAMISHIBAI
The profit from the day’s snack sales had to cover costs, which included the
hire of a bicycle and theatre frame as few performers owned one. Performers also
had to hire new story cards to use each day.
The business infrastructure was run by middlemen - “bosses”, or kashimoto,
who rented out bicycles, theatre frames and stories. Kamishibai performers would
buy their snacks wholesale from the kashimoto, or get their wives to make them
at home. The kashimoto would take payment from the performer’s takings at the
end of the day, so an unemployed man without a penny to his name could start
work right away as a kamishibai performer.
Most performers followed a regular route, so as to build up repeat custom and
not to have to travel along unfamiliar routes . Their working days began and
ended at the kashimoto’s premises, where they had to collect new stories every
morning and return them with payment that evening, Performers would give several
shows a day to 20 or more children, plus any adults with time to spare. After
paying rent for the story cards, frame and bicycle, the average performer would
usually be left with at least enough to keep his family fed, clothed and housed.
Bad weather was the only real threat to the kamishibai performer’s trade in
the 1930s. Ordinary working families couldn’t afford many entertainments and
treats, so the regular arrival of the storyteller with inexpensive snacks and
exciting tales became a highlight of the week, just like a favorite TV show.
Children all over
Japan
would listen eagerly for the sound of the wooden clappers that told them the
kamishibai man had arrived in their street.
Because it could be set up anywhere, kamishibai was one of the few forms of
public entertainment to keep going through the war. Kamishibai performers could
take their bicycles into bomb shelters to calm frightened children, and into
areas that had been firebombed flat to cheer up the civilian population.
After the war, people needed entertainment more than ever but they were still
desperately poor. Despite the rebuilding that had started with American aid,
many buildings needed repair or renewal, and entertainment had lower priority
than homes, schools and hospitals. So cheap, portable, readily available
kamishibai enjoyed huge popularity, hitting a peak in the 1950s. . The most
conservative estimates suggest at least 10,000 performers nationwide, and some
go as high as 25,000, with over 3,000 in
Tokyo
alone.
THE ART OF KAMISHIBAI
A typical kamishibai story was made up of 10-12 cards. Some stories were
complete, some ran for several episodes. The most popular, like the dramatic
tales of Ogon Bat, a masked fighter for justice and hero of popular novels,
could have hundreds of episodes, but most serials averaged around 30 episodes so
as to build a solid repeat audience.
The demand for new stories was huge. Performers could not repeat their stories
too often – their customers came to hear something new. It might be possible
to retell an old favorite every six months or so, or to present the same classic
folktale every year at a festival, but too many repeat performances were bad for
trade. So the kashimoto hired writers to create new stories, and artists to
create new story cards.
Kashimoto built up huge libraries of stories that could be rented out again and
again, giving the performers a wide choice of new material. Although several
artists might work on versions of the same story, every card was a unique, hand painted
work, so no two stories were ever the same.
An artist who was fast and skilled could produce the dozen paintings needed to
make up a new episode in a day. Two or more artists working as a team, perhaps
with one outlining the drawing and the other painting it, could produce more.
Working fast and constantly meant that artists could earn a good salary, but
they had to adapt to the particular needs of kamishibai performance.
The kamishibai theatre frame is built so that cards are pulled out from right to
left. Pulling out a card partway reveals the card behind. The storyteller can
use this in many ways – for example, to create dialogue, to allow a character
to “come into” the scene and interrupt, or to chase a “departing”
character on the previous board, or to build suspense.
Some kamishibai artists went on to become manga artists in their own right, the
most famous being Shigeru Mizuki, creator of GeGeGe
no Kitaro. The story of Kitaro originated as Hakaba no Kitaro, a spooky, scary kamishibai tale. Mizuki, with the
agreement of his former colleagues, later adapted and revised it for his manga.
Many manga artists also watched kamishibai when they were children. Osamu
Tezuka, the “God of Manga”, loved kamishibai and made his own stories. Fuku-chan
Goes Fishing, a Tezuka childhood story based on one of his favorite comic
characters, is still preserved in the Tezuka Manga Museum in Takarazuka, near
Osaka.
KAMISHIBAI STORIES
A kamishibai performance would usually start with a light-hearted comedy about a
child or animal. These were called manga
– Manga Monkey is a typical example.
The leading character, and their sidekick or friend, would often get into
trouble through their own silliness, so there was a moral to the tale, but one
well wrapped in laughter. An action tale with a daring boy hero who foiled
criminals, traveled to exotic lands or other planets would also be on the
agenda.
Horror stories were very popular. As well as contemporary spook tales like GeGeGe
no Kitaro, historical horror abounded. A wronged ghost, usually female,
comes back to haunt her tormentors and avenge her own death. There would also be
a tragedy or melodrama, often starring an orphan girl who went through
heartrending experiences in an uncaring world. These could be historical epics
but were also set in the present or recent past, reflecting the reality of life
for orphans in hard times. The roots of manga such as Candy
Candy, Yumiko Igarashii’s tale of a sweet-natured orphan whose every joy
is dogged by tragedy, can be traced back to these stories, which were also
popular in girls’ magazines of the time.
Kamishibai was even used for preaching. A Japanese Christian woman named Yone
Imai created many Christian kamishibai to use as preaching aids in the 1930s.
Other Christians, and Buddhists, also used the technique to spread their
beliefs.
The influence and power of kamishibai was spotted by the Japanese education
authorities and it was soon being used in schools, both to teach morals and
ethics and to make foreign literature easier to absorb. Tales from authors like
Dickens, biographies of famous Japanese and stories of good conquering evil were
all adapted for schools, providing another line of work for kamishibai artists.
Street performers, however, were looked down on by the authorities, who found
their action-packed cliffhanger serials vulgar.
THE DE
CLINE OF KAMISHIBAI
Kamishibai was so popular that television was called “electric kamishibai”
when it appeared in
Japan
in 1954. However, it would soon displace kamishibai in public affection. At
first the Japanese were slow to take up TV – new technology is always
expensive, and most people were still poor. But in 1959, when it was announced
that the wedding of Crown Prince Akihito would be televised, television sales
shot through the roof. Just as everyone in
Britain
who could possibly afford it bought a TV for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth
II in 1953, two million Japanese households got TV sets so that they could see
their future Emperor and his bride.
With this huge boost in TV audiences, programming became more varied and
television gained popularity. Its biggest advantage over kamishibai was that it
sat in the corner of the living room, so it could be watched in comfort at any
time, regardless of the weather. Kamishibai performers did their best to adapt,
some even fitting up their bicycles and theatre frames with lights, and adding
music to their performance, but to no avail. Kamishibai became a dying art. But
for its use in education, and the determination of a few performers who survived
mainly by working at cultural festivals and nostalgia events in holiday resorts,
it might have been lost forever.
One of the saddest effects of this decline was the loss of huge quantities of
kamishibai art. With no performers hiring their cards, many kashimoto simply
junked their picture libraries. Jeffrey A. Dym, Associate Professor of History
at
California
State
University
and one of the few people to study kamishibai, estimates that only about 10-12
thousand postwar episodes and a handful of prewar episodes remain in the whole
of
Japan
. When one considers, that at the height of kamishibai’s popularity, at least
10,000 performers were performing 3-4 different stories every day, it gives some
idea of the scale of destruction.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that
Japan
, reborn as a prosperous, progressive world power, began to look at its street
arts and popular culture with new respect and to realize that there was much
worth valuing and preserving in art forms such as kamishibai.
MODERN KAMISHIBAI
Kamishibai is still used as an educational tool by teachers in Japanese
elementary schools, and seen at cultural festivals. It’s an ecologically
friendly entertainment, needing only human energy.
There are still a few registered performers who were trained in the old
tradition. Yuushi Yasuno, who works as Yassan and who can be seen elsewhere on
this site, works with the
Kyoto
International
Manga
Museum
, performing old and new stories. Visitors to the Museum can also see a display
of original kamishibai boards dating from the 1930s onwards.
When he visited
London
in September 2008, Yassan told us there are only six or seven traditional
kamishibai artists left in the
Osaka
region. Most kamishibai in
Japan
is now performed by schoolteachers. However, things are looking more hopeful.
Yassan is training an appentice to carry on the tradition, and the worldwide
interest in kamishibai will help to ensure the survival of this fusion of street
art and storytelling.
Japanese-American author Allen Say wrote a beautiful illustrated book, Kamishibai Man, in which a retired kamishibai performer decides to
return to his old rounds one last time. His wife makes sweets for him to sell,
just as she used to, and he rides into a completely changed city, with huge
buildings and traffic where there used to be old wooden houses and trees. But
the people who live there remember him from childhood days, and when he opens up
his wooden frame they gather round to reminisce.
Kamishibai is also spreading into the workplace. It has been adopted by some
Japanese companies as a means of communication.
Toyota
uses kamishibai on the factory floor as part of its ongoing audit process, and
for PR purposes. You can see an example of
Toyota
’s use of kamishibai on page 7 of the first section of this PR article on the
company’s overseas initiatives, Accelerating
Environmental Initiatives as Global Toyota:
http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/environmental_rep/01/pdf/p54_61.pdf
Many companies, including
Toyota
, sponsor kamishibai in Japanese elementary schools and produce storyboards for
use in education. One of
Toyota
’s examples, Papin and Tirol Go Fishing,
teaches traffic safety rules, using two little rabbits to help pre-schoolers
understand how to cross the road safely. You can see some of the boards in Jon
Miller’s article here:
http://www.gembapantarei.com/2006/11/what_is_a_kamishibai.html
Artists like Sanzo Wada (1885-1960) used kamishibai as inspiration for prints
and drawings. Masaki Miyamae (1957-2000) also used kamishibai as an experimental
medium, merging performance art with drawing. Three years before his death,
Miyamae performed a piece called Kamishibai
at the opening of his solo exhibition at Galleria Finarte,
Tokyo
, having developed it over about five years with performances in his studio and
other spaces. In one of these experimental shows he made a group of narrative
drawings and then shuffled them at random before performance, deconstructing the
story. In another he asked on an onlooker to perform using his drawings.
Kamishibai is changing, using new media and merging with many art and narrative
forms. It’s even going digital – American company Accursed Arts have been
selling a computer kamishibai package for several years, and anime and manga
fans are beginning to use kamishibai as a medium for fan fiction. At the same
time, the traditional kamishibai format of illustration-enhanced storytelling is
going from strength to strength. Adults and children alike respond to the
immediacy, personal connection and fun of a kamishibai performance.
Having come so close to losing this 20th century street art form
forever, it seems we’ve managed to preserve it for the children – and adults
– of the new millennium.
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