Kamishibai

Kamishibai (Japanese: 紙芝居^?, "paper play") is a form of Japanese street theatre and storytelling that was popular during the Depression of the 1930s and the post-war period in Japan until the advent of television during the twentieth century. Kamishibai was told by a kamishibaiya (kamishibai narrator) who travelled to street corners with sets of illustrated boards that he or she placed in a miniature stage-like device and narrated the story by changing each image. Kamishibai has its earliest origins in Japanese Buddhist temples where Buddhist monks from the eighth century onward used emakimono ("picture scrolls") as pictorial aids for recounting their history of the monasteries, an early combination of picture and text to convey a story.

The exact origins of kamishibai during the twentieth century are unknown, appearing "like the wind on a street corner" in the Shitamachi section of Tokyo around 1930. It is believed, however, that kamishibai has deep roots in Japan's etoki ("pictorial storytelling") art history, which can be traced back to the twelfth century emaki scrolls, such as the Choju giga ("Frolicking Critters") attributed to the priest Toba Sōjō (1053–1140). The scroll depicts anthropomorphised animal caricatures that satirise society during this period but has no text, making it a pictorial aid to a story. It can therefore be considered a direct precursor of kamishibai.

During the Edo period (1603–1868) there was a flourishment of the visual and performance arts particularly through proliferation of ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world"). Etoki once again became popular during the later eighteenth century as storytellers began to set up on street corners with an unrolled scroll hanging from a pole. In the Meiji Period (1868–1912) tachi-e ("stand-up pictures"), similar to those in the Edo period, were told by performers who manipulated flat-paper cut-outs of figures mounted on wooden poles (similar to the shadow puppets of Indonesia and Malaysia). The Zen priest Nishimura is also credited to have used these pictures during sermons to entertain children. Another form of etoki was the Japanese modified stereoscope imported from the Netherlands. Much smaller in size, six engravings of landscapes and everyday scenes would be placed one behind the other on top of the device and lowered when required so that the viewer, who looked at them through a lens, could experience the illusion of space created by this device. The artistic and technological developments of the Edo and Meiji periods can be linked to the establishment of kamishibai.

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