Asakusa "Rokku"
(Theatre District)

(Above:) A Part of Asakusa Park, Tokyo. District of Photoplay Theatre. Asakusa Rokku, ca. 1920, with its pre-earthquake bawdy mix of playhouses, movie theaters, dance halls and restaurants. "Crass" and "unrefined" could describe some of the district's charms but, what mattered most, it was very popular with the common man.

Asakusa Rokku [Asakusa Sixth] derived its nickname from its location as the sixth district of Asakusa Ward [ku], and it had a long, colorful history of catering to the whims and fancies of Tokyo pleasure-seekers.

Edo's Kabuki theater troupes, thought to be degenerate and subversive by puritanic Tokugawa authorities, were banished in 1841 to the then-hinderland of the Asakusa farm fields located outside the city limits. That did not so much as remove the problem as it did concentrate the "subversiveness" all in one place. Meiji officials were less prudish. Kabuki would return to respectibility, and return to within the city limits, after the Restoration.

Regardless of regime, Rokku hosted a bawdy mix of working-class pleasures. It was the equivalent of Broadway, off-Broadway, North Beach and Times Square all rolled into one ... and much more so. Storytellers, jugglers and dancing girl magicians, vaudeville and dance halls, yose performances, lantern shows, movie houses, Shinpa and Shingeki theatre, opera, restaurants to suit all tastes, and unlicensed prostitution. For a hundred years, until wartime firebombing in 1945 laid waste to the area, Rokku served as Tokyo's cultural lodestar.

Asakusa's Denkikan [Electric building] would, in 1903, become the first hall in Japan to show movies on a full-time basis. For many years, the Asakusa movie theaters had to show their fare, by law, with the house lights up. Theater seating was segregated between men and women and all the usherettes were required to wear underwear beneath their kimono! The cinema houses and theatres gave way to cabarets and dance revues after the 1923 earthquake; these in turn were replaced with strip shows and topless dancing in the years following WWII.