Star power and the malleability of 'tradition’ — The case of Kamigata Rakugo

Star power and the malleability of 'tradition’ — The case of Kamigata Rakugo

From 2004 to 2017, Kamigata Rakugo Kyōkai (KRK) – the professional comic storytelling guild for the Osaka area – issued the magazine Nna aho na (That’s ridiculous). Concurrent with the tenure of one of the art’s most recognisable and progressive artists, Katsura Bunshi VI (b. 1943), as KRK chairperson, the magazine hailed Kamigata rakugo’s ‘new era’. It heralded the first dedicated rakugo hall open in Osaka in 60 years, as well as several other big-ticket enterprises. Nna aho na presented a brassy campaign of building and monument erection teamed with pageants and re-enactments of history, displays of tradition, and ritual. These served to promote Kamigata rakugo as a venerable art and one worthy of official recognition by Japan’s government.

Examining the reforms that Bunshi VI orchestrated in the early twenty-first century, one sees a tension between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ negotiated through an expedient trade-off. KRK was able to use Bunshi VI’s considerable star power to improve the art’s exposure, status, and infrastructure, while he became the face of the art, advanced his own agenda, and cemented his name in rakugo history.* 

* This talk is informed by Shores’ recent article, ‘A Celebrity’s Fifteen-Year Reign and Reinvention of Kamigata Rakugo’, Japanese Studies 43, no. 1 (2023). 


Speaker

Matthew Shores is a Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Sydney. He is a scholar of Japanese literary arts and entertainment, with a focus on modern comic storytelling (rakugo) and its early-modern precursors, literary and otherwise. Cambridge University Press published his monograph The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo in 2021. After receiving a PhD in Japanese literature from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Shores was Director of East Asian Studies and a Governing Body Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge’s oldest constituent college. He spent over a decade in Japan in postgraduate study at Tezukayama University as well as undertaking research at Ritsumeikan University’s Art Research Center and Waseda University’s Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum. He has also undergone two informal rakugo apprenticeships.