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When first introduced to kamishibai, most Americans hear about the street-performance artists who typically sold candy or treats to crowds of children on busy urban street corners in Japan from the early 1930s until the 1950s when the arrival of television all but extinguished this unique form of popular culture.
During the Shōwa depression, which was triggered by the Great Depression in the United States, many jobless men turned to performing kamishibai for immediate income. After the emergence of the megahit adventure play Golden Bat , a quintessential portrayal of poetic justice, with virtue conquering evil, came the golden age of street kamishibai .¹
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What is a kamishibai?
From the 1930s until the 1950s, kamishibai was the most popular form of entertainment for children, so much so that when television came to Japan in the 1950s, it was referred to as “ denki kamishibai ” (electric kamishibai).
Mar 1, 2021 · Kamishibai flourished in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, offering storytellers and artists an easy way to make money during a period of economic depression, according to the website Kamishibai for Kids. During World War II, kamishibai storytellers traveled through neighborhoods and bomb shelters to offer entertainment to all ages.
It became especially popular during the 1920s because of the growth of the silent film industry, which was actually narrated in Japan, and took on the characteristics of silent film dialogue and stage set aesthetics.
The basic structural nature of kamishibai is montage, a visual technique that was enormously popular in modern(ist) consumer culture and much theorized in cinema and art in the 1920s and 1930s. 27 Kata Kōji, one of kamishibai’s pioneers as both a practitioner and theorist, reports that in the 1930s, as the medium was developing on both the ...
Gaitō kamishibai became hugely popular: for example, in 1933 there were 2,500 performers in Tokyo, who regularly performed for audiences, typically averaging about thirty children. The performer would park his or her bicycle at a familiar intersection and banged hyōshigi
