Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 477. What a twist.

One of the many things I've always really enjoyed about history is seeing humor crossing

the boundaries of time. A good fart joke from the Canterbury tales, a silly pun in a Chinese poem.

All of those show one of the greatest themes of the study of history,

that wherever you go you still find yourself surrounded by other people, in all of their

greatness and terribleness and occasional need for silly jokes.

And it is in that spirit that I want to finally turn our attention to the topic of Rakugo,

first described to me as Japan's tradition of stand-up comedy.

That classification, however, does not really do it justice.

Rakugo is not just a series of comedy bits,

though the basic setup, one storyteller on a stage dressing an audience,

definitely reads like stand-up comedy at first.

As an aside, the name Rakugo literally means falling words, though more accurately it might be translated as stories with a twist.

The name itself, Rakugo, actually comes from the Meiji period and was not

the standard term of reference for the first few centuries of the arts existence. Otoshibonashi,

a variant reading, was much more common for a time. However, for consistency and clarity, I'm going to say

Raku go here. So So Rakugo is ultimately a form

of oral storytelling, but of course the tradition of storytelling is far older than Rakugo

itself in Japan and everywhere else. Fundamentally, after all, it's the most basic of all art

forms. One imagines storytelling was the birth of all performance.

Broadly, in Japan, all storytelling traditions fall under the genre of Yose, though again

that term is anachronistic and wouldn't have been used in the early eras of the genre.

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