Thirteen local children from grades five to seven received shouts of encouragement as they performed Kanjincho, one of the most popular kabuki plays, in front of a full house at the All-Japan Children's Kabuki Festival (the site is in Japanese) held in Komatsu City, Ishikawa Prefecture, on May 12 and 13. Kabuki performed by adults is a form of traditional Japanese drama featuring male actors who mostly come from kabuki acting families, but children's kabuki is open to anyone in the community, both girls and boys.

When the kids first start practicing kabuki and have to learn how to pronounce the words and shuffle their feet properly, they often don't understand their lines and have to work hard to grasp the meanings. One said, "Although kabuki was tough at first, as I practiced more and more I came to really enjoy it."

This marks the 3rd year of the All-Japan Children's Kabuki Festival, but children's kabuki has been part of Komatsu City's Otabi festival for about 230 years. The annual Otabi festival, which usually lasts four days but this year lasted six, from May 11 to 16, is held in honor of two shrines in Komatsu and is famous for the children's kabuki.

In the Otabi festival the children's kabuki is performed on hikiyama, elegantly decorated roofed wooden floats that are built without the use of nails. There are eight towns in Komatsu City. Each town has their own hikiyama, all slightly different, and all of them are displayed at the Otabi festival every year. Each year two of these towns supply their hikiyama to stage the children's kabuki event. The hikiyama are generally about 6-7 meters high and about 7 meters long, with the stage where the children perform measuring about 3 meters across.

This year has seen a huge rise in visitors with over 300,000 people (three times the population of the city itself) visiting Komatsu City during the Otabi festival and, according to officials, children's kabuki had an important role to play in this.

Festivals like this establish ties between children all over Japan. Besides this year's participants from Shinshiro City in Aichi Prefecture and the town of Tajima in Fukushima Prefecture, groups from the prefectures of Shiga, Saitama, Gifu, and Toyama have also come to perform over the years. Children from the town of Ogano in Saitama Prefecture expressed it best when they said that touring other places, seeing other kids perform, and making friends was the best part about kabuki.

Kabuki also brings children closer to their local communities. Elementary school principal Katsuhiko Kitano, who directs the students in Komatsu, says: "Children's kabuki provides a chance to preserve an important tradition. When the school week in Japan is reduced to five days in 2002, I expect children will become more and more involved in their local communities. I am looking forward to a time when children will draw out the community's strength and the local communities will also become teachers for the children."

Photos: (top) Kids performing kabuki in full costume; (above) The performers practiced hard for the festival. (Komatsu City)