Kamishibai

• 1. Introduction

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  Kamishibai, the Japanese art of telling stories with painted boards on the street, turned up in Tokyo's Shitamachi district around 1930, "like the wind on a street corner." Nobody knows exactly where the twentieth-century version came from.

  What is certain is how fast it grew. In 1933, Tokyo alone had 2,500 kamishibaiya, the narrators who performed it. Each gave ten shows a day, for audiences of up to thirty children. Together they reached a total of one million children daily, in the depths of the Great Depression.

  How did a performer with a stack of pictures draw such crowds? Where did the idea come from, if not from nowhere? Why did teachers, parents and a wartime government all want a say in what was shown? And what happened to the shows when the crowds finally drifted away?

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• 2. Ancestors on Scrolls

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  From the 8th century onward, Buddhist monks in Japanese temples used picture scrolls, called emakimono, to recount the histories of their monasteries. It was an early marriage of image and text built to carry a story.

  The priest Toba Sōjō, who lived from 1053 to 1140, is the name attached to the 12th-century scroll Chōjū giga, or Frolicking Critters. Its animals are drawn as caricatures that poke fun at the society of the day. Strangely, the scroll has no text at all. It works as a visual aid for a story told aloud, which makes it a direct precursor of kamishibai. This kind of pictorial storytelling is known in Japan as etoki.

  The Edo period, which ran from 1603 to 1868, brought a flowering of visual and performing arts, above all ukiyo-e, the pictures of the floating world. In the later 18th century, etoki returned to popularity as storytellers set up on street corners with an unrolled scroll hanging from a pole.

  During the Meiji period, from 1868 to 1912, performers worked with tachi-e, or stand-up pictures. They moved flat paper cutouts of figures mounted on wooden poles, much like the shadow puppets of Indonesia and Malaysia. A Zen priest named Nishimura is credited with using such pictures in sermons to entertain children.

  Another pictorial novelty of the age was a Japanese version of the stereoscope, imported from the Netherlands. Six engravings of landscapes and everyday scenes sat one behind another on top of a small device. Each was lowered in turn, and a viewer looking through a lens saw an illusion of depth.

  The next link in this chain would travel by bicycle.

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• 3. The Street Performance

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  A gaito kamishibaiya, meaning a street-corner storyteller, would park a bicycle at a familiar intersection and clack together a pair of hyōshigi, which are wooden clapping sticks. The sound announced the show and built anticipation among the children.

  Payment came in a roundabout way. The storyteller sold sweets to the children who gathered, and those sales stood in for an admission fee. They were the performer's main source of income.

  Then the stage went up. The butai was a miniature wooden proscenium that held the illustrated boards. The narrator swapped each board as the tale moved along and supplied the sound effects personally. There was no script, so every telling could differ.

  In 1930, some 1.5 million people in Tokyo were out of work, and kamishibai gave many of them a way to earn a living. That helps explain why the Depression years were the most prosperous and vibrant the art ever had.

  After Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces in August 1945, a second boom followed. Newspapers and magazines filled with comics full of humor about daily life, and a strong publishing industry grew from the demand. Outside that industry, people still craved cheap entertainment, and kamishibai supplied it to five million children and adults across Japan each day. Together, the Depression and postwar years are remembered as the Golden Age.

  Every one of those shows depended on pictures, and someone had to paint them.

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• 4. Painted by Hand

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  Kamishibai kashimoto were dealers who commissioned artwork and rented it out to narrators for a small fee. The boards themselves came out of a workshop system that resembled an American comic book company.

  Different people colored different panels. The principal illustrator first made pencil sketches, then went over them with thick brushes of India ink. Watercolor paint marked out the background and foreground. An opaque tempera went on top of that, and a coat of lacquer finished the job, adding shine and protecting the board from the elements.

  Not every picture earned respect. True artists, by the standards of the trade, used only hand-painted originals. They looked down on the mass-produced kind found in schools or made for other forms of communication.

  The result was a hybrid. The source describes kamishibai as a blend of "trashy pop culture" and fine artistry. It joined the traditional linear style of Japanese painting to the heavy chiaroscuro of Western painting. Contrasting light and dark gave the figures depth and dynamism.

  The characters painted on those boards would outlive the boards themselves.

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• 5. Heroes Before Manga

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  In 1931, Ōgon Bat, or Golden Bat, appeared on the boards as one of the first illustrated costumed superheroes in the world. Another favorite was Prince Ganma, whose alter ego was a street urchin. Secret identities were already part of the formula.

  The genre of gekiga, which means drama pictures, flourished alongside these heroes. Many of the stories and themes seen in contemporary manga and anime first appeared in kamishibai.

  The link runs through people as well as plots. Shigeru Mizuki and Sanpei Shirato, both prolific manga artists, once worked as kamishibai artists. GeGeGe no Kitaro, which later became a popular manga and anime, began life as a kamishibai program.

  Suehiro Maruo drew Shōjo Tsubaki, an ero guro, or erotic grotesque, manga built around the kamishibai character archetype of the title. Yamishibai, an anime, goes further and borrows the whole kamishibai look to tell myths and urban legends.

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• 6. Teachers and Critics

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  As the 1930s went on, educators and parents began to complain that kamishibai taught children nothing. They also objected to its link with vulgar or grotesque content.

  Some progressive educators saw promise instead. The Christian educator Imai Yone argued that kamishibai could carry moral lessons to children in cities and in the countryside, especially children from poor families.

  In 1938, the Nippon Kyōiku Kamishibai Kyōkai, the National Association for Educational Kamishibai, was founded. It produced storycards with progressive themes, often set in rural places, that stressed the sincerity of working people. One notable card was Uzura, or The Quails. It portrayed a selfless girl living through famine in Tōhoku.

  Soon another set of authorities would take up kamishibai, with lessons of its own.

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• 7. Kamishibai at War

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  Through the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese government co-opted kamishibai for wartime propaganda. The medium was easy to reach and highly performative, which made it a strong tool for mobilizing both city and country people.

  Propaganda plays were mass-produced and sent out through official networks. Their audiences lived in Japan and in its colonies, including Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria. The plays aimed to build loyalty and sacrifice for the emperor and the nation.

  Conscripted young women often did the performing, in schools, factories and neighborhood associations. Street-corner kamishibai had been lively and improvised. Wartime shows followed strict scripts and a subdued delivery, so that the story mattered more than the performer. Even so, some plays quietly suggested that war was futile, dwelling on shared suffering and collective endurance.

  During the Second World War and the Allied Occupation, which lasted from 1945 to 1953, kamishibai also served adults as an evening news.

  One theory explains why Asian nations accepted drawing as a means of communication more readily than Western ones. In the West, Gutenberg's movable type eventually pulled text and image apart. Woodblock printing made it much easier to depict the complex characters of the Japanese language. This use was often tied to propaganda.

  Another technology, with a name borrowed from kamishibai itself, was about to end the era.

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• 8. The Electric Rival

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  In 1953, as the Allied Occupation came to a close, television arrived in Japan under the name denki kamishibai, meaning electric kamishibai. Its wider range of entertainment took the audience away.

  Many narrators and artists lost their work. The artists turned to drawing gekiga, and they brought fresh talent and new narrative ideas to a growing genre.

  The art form has largely disappeared since then. Yet its contribution is large enough that kamishibai is credited as an origin of manga.

  A different use survives in factories. Within the Toyota Production System, kamishibai boards act as a visual control for audits. A series of cards sits on a board, and supervisors and managers pick them at random or on a schedule. The method keeps safety and cleanliness in check and confirms that quality checks are being done.

  The storytelling tradition survives too, in a campaign to promote world peace. Maki Saji, a Buddhist nun, created a kamishibai about Sadako Sasaki, one of the many children who suffered from the atomic bomb raid on Hiroshima in 1945. In May 2010, Saji was a delegate at a Meeting of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations in New York. There she performed it, appealing for a world in harmony and free of nuclear arms.

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