{"id":3693,"date":"2025-04-11T17:18:56","date_gmt":"2025-04-11T22:18:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/?p=3693"},"modified":"2025-07-21T18:45:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T23:45:09","slug":"did-you-know-kabuki-was-invented-by-a-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/did-you-know-kabuki-was-invented-by-a-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Did You Know? Kabuki was invented by a woman"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Picture credit:\u00a0Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. (Public domain)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>

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[Note: I am re-posting some short articles I wrote for Theatre Unbound's website many years ago. Read the full series<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

Kabuki was invented by a woman.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Izumo no Okuni (1572?-1620?), or \u201cOkuni from Izumo\u201d, was a dancer at the Shinto shrine in Izumo in Shimane Prefecture, Japan. Around 1603, she developed a new style of performance which included both dancing and short satirical skits. Some of the leading characters in these skits were based on kabuki-mono or \u201ceccentric people\u201d, defined by Yoko Takakuwa as \u201cyoung men with \u2018unusual\u2019 (but perhaps fashionable) clothes and hairstyles,\u201d who \u201cput up group resistance to the new political institution which [the shogun] Tokugawa [Ieyasu] keenly strove to inaugurate.\u201d In 1606, Tokugawa took action against the kabuki-mono. Takakuwa says he \u201cregulated\u201d them. Galia Todorova Gabrovska says he \u201cexecuted\u201d them.<\/p>\n

Okuni specialized in kabuki-mono male roles.<\/p>\n

In 1629, the Tokugawa Shogunate banned women from the stage, claiming that fights were breaking out in the audiences among rivals for the alluring actresses\u2019 sexual favors. All-male troupes began performing kabuki (whereupon fights broke out in the audiences among rivals for the alluring actors\u2019 sexual favors). Kabuki remained an all-male domain for more than 250 years.<\/p>\n

Further reading:<\/p>\n

Ariyoshi, Sawako. Kabuki Dancer<\/em> (Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International, 1994 (1972)).<\/p>\n

Gabrovska, Galia Todorova. \u201cOnna Mono: The \u2018Female Presence\u2019 on the Stage of the All-Male Traditional Japanese Theatre.\u201d\u00a0Asian Theatre Journal<\/i>\u00a032, no. 2 (2015): 387\u2013415. http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/24737038.<\/p>\n

Kominz, Laurence R. \u201cOrigins of Kabuki Acting in Medieval Japanese Drama\u201d in Samuel L. Leiter, ed. A kabuki reader: history and performance (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002).<\/p>\n

Takakuwa, Yoko. \u201cPerforming Marginality: The Place of the Player and of \u201cWoman\u201d in Early Modern Japanese Culture.\u201d New Literary History v. 27 no. 2 (1996), pp. 213-225.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1603, Okuni made her great innovation, appearing in drag as a kabuki-mono, in a comedy sketch where she flirted with a woman played by a man in drag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[155,164,163,165],"class_list":["post-3693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theatre","tag-did-you-know","tag-izumo-no-okuni","tag-kabuki","tag-tokugawa-shogunate","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Okuni_kabuki_byobu-zu_cropped-e1753141502161.jpg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3693"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3699,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693\/revisions\/3699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}