![]() ![]() Kamishibai produced and narrated over this period give insight into the minds of the people who lived through such a tumultuous period in history. This period is known as the " Golden Age" of kamishibai in Japan. Kamishibai, cartoons, and comics became substantially popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s and after the Japanese surrender to the Allied Forces in August 1945 at the end of the Second World War. The artistic and technological developments of the Edo and Meiji periods can be linked to the establishment of kamishibai. 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. ![]() ![]() Another form of etoki was the Japanese-modified stereoscope imported from the Netherlands. The Zen priest Nishimura is also credited to have used these pictures during sermons to entertain children. 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 cutouts of figures mounted on wooden poles (similar to the shadow puppets of Indonesia and Malaysia). Etoki once again became popular during the later 18th century as storytellers began to set up on street corners with an unrolled scroll hanging from a pole. It can therefore be considered a direct precursor of kamishibai.ĭuring the Edo period (1603–1868), visual and performing arts flourished, particularly through the proliferation of ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world"). 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 is believed, however, that kamishibai has deep roots in Japan's etoki ("pictorial storytelling") art history, which can be traced back to the 12th-century emaki scrolls, such as the Chōjū giga ("Frolicking Critters"), attributed to the priest Toba Sōjō (1053–1140). The exact origins of kamishibai during the 20th century are unknown, appearing "like the wind on a street corner" in the Shitamachi section of Tokyo around 1930. Kamishibai has its earliest origins in Japanese Buddhist temples, where Buddhist monks from the 8th 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. Kamishibai were performed by a kamishibaiya (" kamishibai narrator") who travelled to street corners with sets of illustrated boards that they placed in a miniature stage-like device and narrated the story by changing each image. Kamishibai ( 紙芝居, "paper play") is a form of Japanese street theater and storytelling that was popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the post-war period in Japan until the advent of television during the mid-20th century. A kamishibaiya ( kamishibai artist) in Tokyo. ![]()
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