**Voices of the Night, Lights of the Show--Reverberations of Boundary Arts (1979)**

**Voices of the Night, Lights of the Show--Reverberations of Boundary Arts (1979)**

This work sheds new light on the existence of "borderline performing arts," which had been almost forgotten as Japanese society moved toward urbanization and informatization following the postwar period and high economic growth. Kaguji, street performers, enka performers, street performers, street performers, strippers, freak shows, and freak shows-at first glance they may appear to be commonplace or even vulgar, but in fact they were the raw performing arts with deep roots in Japan's popular culture.

The culture of kaguji and freak shows can be placed in the lineage of "drifting and living" that continued from the Edo period through the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa periods. Performances that were inseparable from daily life, such as festivals, fairs, and kadotsukegei, were supported by people living on the margins of society. Although their art was not protected by the system, there was a trained storytelling, physical skills, and intense interaction with the audience.

In particular, from the 1960s to the 1960s, nagashi and amorous singers who were active in urban drinking areas created another lineage of entertainment that was not covered by television. They played songs on request, shared the atmosphere of the bars, and accompanied the passions of the drunken customers. Their singing voices were the very sorrow of the common people, heard through the noise and bustle of the city.

Stripping and freak shows were also devices that questioned the roots of the performing arts. Themes such as "naked entertainment" and "exhibition of deformities" that would be the subject of ethics today were, at the time, the occasion to deeply question "what the stage is" and "what the gaze is. In the structure in which people with disabilities became performers and were rewarded for performing on stage, we can even see the germ of today's "economy of recognition.

The year 1979 was also a milestone year for the complete shift of the center of the entertainment industry to the broadcast media, with the complete penetration of television into households. The "performing arts of the place" that once existed on street corners were relegated from the theater to the streets, and then to the fringes of extinction. However, there are stories and memories that cannot be ignored. The words of the perfume maker, the singing in the street, the interactions between acts in the striptease - all were free, excessive, and deeply expressive precisely because they were outside the system.

The documentation of these boundary arts is not mere nostalgia. Rather, they are a record of the arts that casts a backlight on the question, "What have we excluded and what have we called culture? The arts that were not shown on television, the voices that were not picked up by the system, the expressions that made people laugh, cry, and live in the midst of discrimination and poverty--this is nothing less than another history of the performing arts that Japan has nurtured. This is another history of the performing arts that Japan has nurtured. It was the light of the night, the light of the freak show.