Asakusa District 
See also: 
Theaters: Panorama-kan
Landmarks: Asakusa Ryounkaku
A recent visitor described Asakusa, the park and the theater district in this fashion: "... Kyoto, with its shrines and handicrafts, is like grandmother's china cabinet; Asakusa is crazy Aunt Mae's steamer chest. It's been around a bit and is full of surprises, laughs and stories that'll put colour in your cheeks."1 Indeed, Asakusa has a long, colorful history of catering to the whims and fancies of pleasure-seekers. Edo's Kabuki 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 entertainment all into one place. (Kabuki would return to respectibility, and the city limits, after the Restoration.) For a hundred years thereafter, until wartime firebombing in 1945 laid waste to the area, "Rokku" served as the capital city's cultural lodestar, hosting a sometimes bawdy mix of pleasures -- unlicensed prostitution, restaurants to suit all tastes, dance halls, cinemas, and theaters. (For many years, the Asakusa movie theaters had to show their fare, by law, with the house lights up; seating was segregated between men and women, and all the usherettes were required to wear underwear!) Cinema and opera gave way to cabarets and revues after the 1923 earthquake; these in turn were superseded by strip shows in the years following WWII.
(Above:) Chinsekai at Asakusa Tokyo. A ca. 1903 view of Theater Street. Chin can be variously translated to mean "curious," "strange" or "novel," and, indeed, all three translations described Theater Street's reputation no matter the conclusion. Banners and barkers outside the theaters announced what merriment, and mischief, lay within.
(Above:) No. 3 Asakusa Park, Tokyo. The staple entertainment of Asakusa Rokku in the late Meiji period, until moving pictures arrived in 1903, was dororen and musume gidayu (forms of narrative chanting). The latter worked its audience, mostly young students, into such frenzy that the Ministry of Education, in 1900, would ban entrance to students during musume gidayu performances.
(Above:) No. 30 The Asakusa Park Tokyo. The arrival of "moving pictures" to the district in 1903 created a sensation and only added to Theater Street's bawdy reputation. For each film, live translations and sound effects were provided by a benshi (speech gentleman). A solitary benshi would use a number of different voices to act out all the parts, sometimes adding in the odd impromptu joke or two or burning incense during funeral scenes.
(Above:) Famous Place at Tokio. A nighttime view of Theater Street, from a similar perspective to the previous image, that very much reminds me of the Trocadero cabaret district in Paris, France.
(Above:) View of Tokyo. A ca. 1915 photo view looking across one of the Asakusa Park ponds toward Ryounkaku. Of interest in the air above the buildings are two biplanes, perhaps putting on an early demonstration of flight for a crowd below a few years after the first Japanese-made powered airplane took to the sky in 1911.
(Above:) The Premises of Various Shows and Performances in the Asakusa Park. An aerial view, ca. 1920, of the same street shown in the first image above. Concurrent with the rise of cinema after 1903 was the performance of teriha kyougen (shining play), locally known as "Asakusa opera," that combined elements of Noh and kabuki with the popular songs and dances of the day.