Things Japanese - Yose Theater

Yose is a Japanese 'vaudeville' style theater which is comprised of two main types, rakugo and manzai. These are called yose entertainments, after the intimate Japanese-style vaudeville theater where they are usually performed.Yose began in the seventeenth century as a form of entertainment for townspeople held in the grounds of temples and shrines. Yose theaters, built specifically to house performances began to appear in the late eighteenth century.

Manzai is Japanese 'stand up comedy' in which two or three people perform a comic dialogue, trade jokes and entertain the audience with instrument playing and singing. Manzai took to the stage and was refined in the late nineteenth century. In the 1930s a new form of manzai caught on after a duo in Osaka started making audiences roll in the aisles with their witty repartees about scenes from everyday life You will often see it performed on TV with the duo, often one quick witted and one playing the naive butt of the jokes wearing western style clothing.

On New Year's Day, there are many manzai comedies performed in Japan and it is most popular in the Kansai region of Japan. The most famous manzai production company is The Yoshimoto Kogyo,based in Osaka. Some of the well known places that manzai is performed are in the Namba Grand Kagetsu theater, Shinsaibashi Ni-chome theater, or the Naniwa-za theater - all based in Osaka.

Rakugo is different from manzai in that it features a single performer telling a comic story whilst sitting on 'zabuton' (small cushions) on tatami or a plain, wooden floor. It is one of the most popular forms of yose and originated at the end of the 17th century. The storyteller, dressed in a kimono, sits upright on the square cushion and entertains the audience with clever narration and humorous facial expressions and body movements, with just a fan and hand towel as props.

To become a rakugoka requires many years of training. It is necessary for the person who wants to become a rakugoka to ask a professional rakugoka to accept him or her as his or her student. If the rakugoka thinks the person is talented and shows enough potential then they will begin training.

As the majority of rakugo monologues date back to the Edo (1603-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods, much of the content reflects an entirely different lifestyle from today's, and as a result, traditional rakugo has lost some of the broad-based popular appeal it once enjoyed. It has a small, but dedicated, following among the older generation but only appeals to very few of the young Japanese who find movies, music and video games a more interesting diversion.

In response to this trend, a number of performers have tried to create new stories more in tune with contemporary living. As with manzai, you can see rakugo performed on television, though it is more interesting to see a live performance.

In the past most yose theaters seated the spectators on tatami mats in Japanese-style wooden buildings, but the urbanization that swept Japan after World War II has left little trace of the traditional variety hall; today many of them take up only one section of a modern concrete building. Therefore, in March 1979 a traditional yose-type theater was set up in Tokyo's National Theater as part of a campaign to preserve the traditional arts performed in yose. Performances, mainly of rakugo, are held there 20 days a month.