benshi on radio

[Peter B. High]

This is not directly related to Markus' query, but, while investigating very early 
days of radio in Japan, recently, I came across an intersting sidelight to the history 
of the late-era benshi.which I'd like to share here. I deliover it to you in the form 
of a snippet (a few paragraphs) from a piece I'm working on right now:


   Radio broadcasting entered Japanese national life in March  1925, the amateur radio 
boom and the dozens of tiny, unregulated "stations" having already sprinkled the 
nation with twenty thousand receiving sets. Thereafter, the number of radios 
compounded at about the same rate television sets did in the early sixties. By 1926 
there were 200,000 home radios and thousands more set up in tea rooms and lower class 
eateries to lure in customers. By 1932 the government had stopped counting, assuming 
there was at least one set in every household that could afford one. 
   The early content of the programs directly reflected government ownership: lectures 
on radio technology, health, traditional culture, speeches on spiritual uplift, and 
news. For entertainment, there were popular songs, rather crudely produced radio plays 
and humorous rakugo  narrations, the Edo era art of the  raconteur thus receiving a 
new lease on life via the wireless. Less successful were the experiments using benshi, 
seen as practitioners of an allied art form, who attempted to perform segments form 
popular films sans the visual. As one listener wrote in, "Its as irritating as 
listening at the door of a movie theater without being able to get in." The rakugo 
artists meanwhile became the first prima donnas of the airwaves and when they 
complained they couldn`t hit their stride in front of an impersonal microphone, the 
station staff had to troop in to provide him an audience. After listeners wrote in 
querying the ghostly bursts of laughter, the staff men used pillows to smother their 
guffaws.
   Coverage of boxing and sumo matches did much to spread the popularity of radio in 
the same way cinema popularized itself among the masses with its Veriscope 
"illustration" of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight in 1897. Egi Ri'ichi's Radio 
Calisthenics had almost a million families stretching and bending before breakfast. At 
first Egi did his show clad only in shorts and running shirt, but when it became known 
Imperial Prince Terunomiya and his wife were also devoted listeners, he was ordered to 
change to formal tuxedo.

--well, for whatever its worth...
Peter B. High
Nagoya University



--
Peter B. High
j45843a at nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp