ABSTRACT
T He growth of commercial forms of passive mass entertainment is as much a feature of Tokyo as of any other modern city. And the development is not new. The old Edo of Tokugawa times compared well with any of the contemporary capitals of Europe in the number and variety of its forms of popular commercial entertainment. There were the restaurants, brothels and geisha-houses which provided private entertainment in the form of food and drink, music and dancing, juggling and jesting, and feminine company trained to be amusing and skilled in the literary arts as well as sexually attractive. There was a considerable production of wood-block-printed fiction, and commercial lending-libraries for those who could afford to borrow but not to buy. There were also well-developed forms of impersonalized mass entertainment. There were the popular theatres with their constant new productions and their repertoire of well-known classics—colourful dramas of samurai chivalry or merchant passion, played with rhetorical declamation and vociferous stylized dance by star actors whose block-printed portraits sold briskly on the streets. There were street booths with their freaks of nature, and music halls featuring jugglers and acrobats, story-tellers with their epic tales of battle and intrigue among the feudal lords, and humourists with their mimed anecdotes full of the broad Chaucerian humour of fleas and farts and unplanned pregnancies. There were wrestling matches between professional wrestlers whose short sharp bouts were preceded by ritual muscle-flexing dances and courteous civilities.
