ABSTRACT
As awareness of kamishibai’s potential uses in educational contexts grows around the world, more attention needs to be paid to the variety of practices that are available and to understanding how they enable different relationships of agency and authority between performer and audience. Kamishibai may have had its beginnings as a democratic and popular form of street entertainment developed by people on the margins of society for the children of the poor and disenfranchised, but it was quickly appropriated by the Japanese military government, along with all other forms of social media, as a powerful venue for propaganda during World War II. In his classification diagram, reproduced and translated in Chapter 1 , Suzuki Tsunekatsu places “educational kamishibai” together with “military propaganda kamishibai,” and he later goes on to explain how the practices around kamishibai performance changed dramatically as it shifted from the hands of street performers to government-appointed officials:
Street Performance and Preschool Kamishibai
(Characterized by interactive communication)
Military and Educational Kamishibai
(Characterized by communication flowing in only one direction-from the top down)
(Suzuki 2005, 90; my translation)
As Suzuki makes clear, kamishibai performance practices in classrooms in Japan since World War II have evolved to be much more aligned with those of the militaristic kamishibai, in which the teacher reads the story to a silent group of listeners, than with the original street performances, in which audience and performer interacted through oral improvisation so that their identities merged. In fact, many Japanese today express surprise when they learn that kamishibai was originally an oral storytelling form because the practice of reading the backs of the cards has become normalized in most classroom settings. 1 Only preschool kamishibai, which are designed to be more interactive, still retain vestiges of the democratic relationship between performer and audience that once characterized kamishibai as a street performance art.
