Kabuki Actors, Print Technology, and the Theatrical Origins of Modern Media

FAIN: FEL-263245-19

Satoko Shimazaki
UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the impact of new recording technologies on Japanese kabuki theater in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This project uses kabuki actors and kabuki theater more broadly as a framework to reconsider the media history of early modern (1600-1867) and Meiji and Taisho Japan (1868-1926). I argue that long before the emergence of mechanical recording technology, public fascination with actors and the theater turned woodblock print into a vehicle for the production and circulation of a communally shared sense of star actors' corporeal and vocal "presence." I then turn to the early decades of the modern period to show how mechanical recordings were made to serve the same fascination with actors and the theater, and how, over time, the new technologies transformed the way actors' bodies, voices, and kabuki theater were understood by enabling machines to record what people had formerly remembered by looking at books and prints.