Blue Collar Performance Art and the Creation of New Urban Spaces in Japan, 1930-1960

The performance art form kamishibai (literally, "paper theatre") was extremely popular in Japan from 1930 to 1960; at its high point in the 1950s kamishibai performances were viewed by 1.5 million people each day. The kamishibai man would ride through the streets of the city on a specially-equipped bicycle, tracing the same route daily. At suitable locations he would sound wooden clacker to summon neighborhood children and adult passersby to view his performance. After selling cheap candy to the children (his source of profit), the kamishibai man would perform three short narratives, using picture cards, a stage built on the back of his bicycle, and an assortment of simple objects to produce sound effects. One of the salient aspects of kamishibai performance was its location on the urban streetcorner, a spatial concept that did not exist prior to about 1930. It was, in fact, partly the paths traced through the city by the kamishibai men on their bicycles, as well as their claiming of a space known as "the streetcorner" through their performances, that created meaningful spaces in the rapidly modernizing Japanese cities. Building on de Certeau's notion of "space as practiced place," I will discuss the ways that the interaction of bodies--most of them members of the urban working class, in this case--and the seemingly intractable architectural structures of the city functioned to produce new concepts of nation and selfhood in modernizing Japan.