Companies headed by women were formed in imitation of the O-Kuni Kabuki.

They appeared not only in Kyoto, but made grand tours to distant parts of the country. A feudal lord whose domains were near the present prosperous tea-trade centre, the city of Shidzuoka, invited a Kyoto actress and her company, and when the famous Nagoya castle was completed, the daimyo who had co-operated in the building, celebrated by giving an Onna Kabuki entertainment. Even Date Masamune, lord of Sendai, one of the first daimyo to accept the Christian faith, and who sent an embassy to Rome, asked an actress to perform in his fief.

About this time, the O-Kuni Kabuki had finally settled at Shijo Bridge in Kyoto, the head of which was the third O-Kuni.

The popularity of these players was so widespread, that the women of the gay quarters followed their example, and companies of women performers were recruited from the ranks of the prostitutes. A man called Sadoshima Yosanji taught these women dancing, and erected a theatre. Schools for the training of actresses were established, and talented dancers were developed who competed with each other for the favour of the public. One of these women, Sadoshima Shokichi, gave a performance at the Yoshiwara, in Yedo, and at the time a placard was set up on Nihonbashi, the Bridge of Japan, which was one of the chief landmarks of Yedo, as it is of modern Tokyo. The male musicians who performed at this time were very expert, according to this bridge advertisement, and attention was called to the comic nature of the pieces to be performed.

Although the name Onna Kabuki signified a woman’s theatre, it was not long until the two sexes were playing together indiscriminately, men taking the rôles of women, and the characters of men being assumed by women. Upon one occasion Ikushima, an actress, appeared at Nakabashi in Yedo. When the curtain was drawn, the head actor of the company advanced in most gorgeous attire, wearing swords ornamented with gold. With him was an equally resplendent actress. More than fifty females danced together during the performance. They took the rôles of men and wore swords. The musicians sat on camp stools, and the singers recited to the strains of the samisen.

This is the first mention of the samisen in the theatre, the three-stringed instrument that was in after years to revolutionise Kabuki as well as the Doll-theatre. The instruments in use until the introduction of the samisen were the Nō drums and flute, but the samisen with its strident, irregular rhythms was to be associated from this time onward with the whole gay, frivolous world, far removed from the austerity, dignity, and ritual with which the flute and Nō drums were associated. The samisen had been brought to Japan from the Loo Choo Islands. A similar instrument had long been in use in China, so that it seems probable that it had its origin in China, but was imported into Japan from the islands to the south-west, where Chinese influence had long been uppermost.

When Onna Kabuki was at its height, there were four companies in Kyoto called O-Kuni, Sadoshima, Shinobu, and a company managed by a man named Dansuke. Shinobu removed to Ise province, Dansuke and his company established themselves at Osaka, that was then as it is to-day the leading commercial centre of Japan. The Sadoshima party was divided into two, headed respectively by Takeshima and Sadoshima, both of whom had sons who became noted actors in the first period of the male theatre. They were Takeshima Kyozaemon and Sadoshima Dempachi. The latter was a dokegata, or comic actor. Sadoshima’s grandson wrote Sadoshima Nikki, or the Journal of Sadoshima, which deals with the Kabuki of his time, and is a theatre classic.

Had the women companies remained exemplary in conduct and kept their ranks free from the other sex, the history of the Japanese theatre might have been quite different. But the leading actresses were prostitutes; their art was a means to an end, and they abused their privileges as entertainers. No permanent and self-respecting theatre could have continued to exist on such an immoral foundation. The degradation of the Onna Kabuki was due in no small degree, however, to the playing of men and women together. The public very soon came to look down upon these players, and they were referred to as Kawara Kojiki, or Riverside Beggars, derived from the fact that the first Kabuki players had erected their temporary stages on the dry beds of Kyoto rivers. The term was from this time handed down to besmirch the reputations of generations of honest, legitimate actors that followed.

In 1608 a proclamation by the Shogun’s Government was made limiting the Onna Kabuki to the outskirts of the cities, where its baneful influence might be less of a contamination to society. Several court ladies who had carried on flirtations with the handsome young actors of the Onna Kabuki were exiled, in punishment of their misdemeanours, and Government interference was frequent. In 1626 a notice advertising a performance was ordered to be taken down. In 1628, when a company of actresses played at Takanawa near Shinagawa, in the suburbs of Yedo, the theatre was so crowded that great confusion ensued, and the place was ordered to be closed.

The climax came when the Government of the third Shogun, Iyemitsu, issued a strict order (1629) forbidding female performances of any kind. At one stroke the performances of women dancers, the actresses of the Onna Kabuki, and even the women minstrels who sang to the movements of the marionettes in the puppet show, came to an abrupt end.

Again in 1630 a company of mixed players attempted to give a performance, the actors appearing as women and the actresses as men, but an order was immediately issued excluding all females from the stage. In 1640 a company of male and female players announced they would play together, but their performance was stopped, and in 1645 the proprietor of a theatre was severely punished for employing female players. This was done as an example, for violations were frequent.

In the history of the Doll-theatre, also, there had been companies of women who handled the marionettes while female minstrels sang and recited the ballad-dramas to which the dolls moved, and women accomplished in the samisen accompanied the minstrels. These Doll-theatre companies of women were not long to endure, and soon came to grief.

Somewhere about the time that O-Kuni was beginning to dance on her temporary stage by the riverside in Kyoto, Ono-no-Otsu, a lady-in-waiting in the household of the great general, Oda Nobunaga, had composed a long ballad called Joruri Hime Monogatari, or the Story of Princess Joruri. It had been sung by a minstrel to the accompaniment of the samisen.

This was an improvement on the balladry of the blind musicians, who had recited their stories of love and battle to the mournful minor strings of the biwa. The first tayu, or minstrel, to sing the improved balladry inaugurated by Ono-no-Otsu, was a woman called Rokuji Namuyemon. After her there were both male and female minstrels, but the prohibition of the Onna Kabuki also included the female minstrel. The talent of woman had repeatedly tried to express itself in the realm of the theatre, but now the heavy hand of the puritanic shogunate fell upon her activities, and the result was the suppression of all stage aspiration on the part of females for three hundred years.

Ihara Seiseiin, commenting on this in his History of the Japanese Stage, says that although the Shogun’s Government was under the necessity of maintaining the morals of the people, the prohibition had an ill effect upon the theatre, and the injury has not been completely healed. He thinks that if the Onna Kabuki had been left to develop naturally, it is most probable that there would now exist a different state of affairs, and actresses would have adorned the Japanese theatre as they do in the Occident. But, he continues, it was impossible for the Tokugawa Shogunate to have such foresight with regard to art, and the fact that there are no names of actresses adorning the history of the Japanese stage must be attributed to this initial, stern, prohibitive measure of the shogunate.

These strict laws regarding the appearance of females on the stage were enforced until the last days of the shogunate, when its grip loosened on many of the measures that had been made to regulate the morals of the people and to control their democratic tendencies.

With this relaxation there again came into existence a woman’s theatre, headed by a brilliant actress, Kumehachi, who was a contemporary of Danjuro, the ninth, the great star of Meiji. She took male rôles as did other women of her company. With her death her company disbanded. A successor to Kumehachi exists to-day who also acts men’s characters most successfully, Nakamura Kasen, but she loses much of her prestige by acting with mixed players. The establishment of a school of actresses in connection with the founding of the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo belongs to the modern history of the Japanese stage.

Judging from the conditions that have been brought about by mixed players on the Western stage, it was a fortunate thing that women were excluded, for the actors were able to develop a masculine theatre unhampered by petticoat influence. Whether this is an advantage to the art of the theatre remains to be seen when Kabuki, the unique masculine stage of Japan, will become known outside the land of its origin.

In order that men should reign supreme in the world of make-believe, the creativeness of the Japanese woman in the direction of the theatre has thus been clearly sacrificed. But in the future their talent may be able to find scope for development in a theatre of their own, as an expression of the spirit of women. The tendency of the theatre art in Japan is toward a separation of the sexes, and there is hope that in the future a women’s theatre, free from the immoral influences that caused the downfall of the Onna Kabuki, will coexist with Kabuki, the firmly established masculine stage.

O-Kuni’s prominence began in 1596, when she first met Sansaburo, and she reached the height of her fame in 1601. By 1629 women were strictly prohibited from performing in public. Thus the women’s theatre she had founded came to an abrupt end, after an existence of three decades.