Kabuki: Four Centuries of Resilience Between Tradition and Digital Revolution

In Italy, we tend to think of tradition as something fragile, to be preserved behind glass. Kabuki proves the opposite: that a theatrical form born four hundred years ago can fly above a stage on wires, duet with a hologram and dominate the box office in 2025 without losing anything of itself. It is from this distance, from Italy, that certain phenomena become clearer. Not as exotic curiosities, but as mirrors.

Kokuho and Kabuki on Screen

In the early summer of 2025, something unexpected happened in Japanese cinemas. A nearly three-hour film set in the world of kabuki theatre dominated the box office, becoming the highest-grossing Japanese live-action film of all time and breaking a record that had stood for twenty-two years. That film is Kokuho – The Kabuki Master, directed by Lee Sang-il, premiered at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes in Cannes and released in Italy in April by Tucker Film. An epic spanning almost a century of rivalry, friendship, obsession and sacrifice, with kabuki as both stage and soul.

Kokuho is an deeply intimate film, one that strikes at the viewer's emotions by showing characters who sacrifice themselves in the pursuit of perfection, who can only find themselves on stage. But it is also a film that tells the story of an art form. By staging excerpts from some of the most celebrated works in the repertoire, Lee Sang-il goes beyond narrative and shows something greater: the contemporary resilience of a theatrical art that, four hundred years after its birth, proves itself more alive than ever.

Kabuki is not a museum relic. It is a living organism that breathes, transforms and speaks to the present. It does so in ways that Western audiences, accustomed to thinking of traditions as something fixed and frozen, may find difficult to imagine. Watch the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0KfXj3Skao

A Brief History of a Revolution Started by a Woman

To understand, we need to go back. It is 1603. In Kyoto, a woman named Izumo no Okuni begins performing with her troupe on the banks of the Kamo River in shows that blend religion, fashion and provocation, defying all notions of decorum. Audiences were captivated. That iconoclastic and popular spectacle, known as kabuki odori, spread across Japan in less than ten years. The word itself, formed by the kanji for song (ka 歌), dance (bu 舞) and theatrical skill (ki 伎), derives from the archaic verb kabuku, meaning "to be inclined", "to go against the norm". Kabuki was born as an act of transgression.

The Tokugawa government did not share this vision. Female performances were deemed immoral and banned, making kabuki an art form for men only. This gave rise to the tradition of the onnagata, actors who perform female roles, perfecting a technique of transformation that has become one of the most recognisable and fascinating elements of kabuki, and that remains at its heart to this day.

Returning to the film, Kokuho portrays exactly this world: unbreakable family ties, traditions passed down through rigid and almost ruthless rules, a circle of actors judged not only on skill but on bloodline, set against the backdrop of the twentieth century, amid the ruins of war and the rise of Japan. And yet, precisely within those rules, kabuki has always found a way to remain contemporary.

The Classical Kabuki Repertoire: Koten, Jidaimono and Sewamono

Kabuki has always absorbed what surrounds it. On one side persists the tradition of koten: the classical repertoire with its jidaimono (grand historical sagas featuring battles, samurai and legendary heroes) and sewamono (dramas of ordinary people, filled with jealousy, debt and impossible love).

Kabuki Shinsaku: New Works Between Manga, Anime and Pop Culture

On the other side sits shinsaku, a term that literally means "new creation" and encompasses works written from the postwar period to the present day. It is an umbrella category holding very different experiences together, united by a single ambition: to bring kabuki into new territory without abandoning the grammar that defines it. In recent years, the stage has welcomed adaptations of Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Naruto, the Mahabharata and even Final Fantasy X, worlds of global pop culture reinterpreted through traditional costumes, movement and music.

Super Kabuki and Cho-Kabuki: Pop Culture and Technological Innovation

The most emblematic case is Super Kabuki, a subgenre founded in 1986 by Ichikawa Ennosuke III with Yamato Takeru. At its debut the show caused a sensation with modern dialogue and music and the use of wires that made actors fly above the stage. Ennosuke III's idea was paradoxically to bring kabuki back to its origins, to the popular and spectacular theatre it had been before becoming a cultural institution. His nephew Ennosuke IV continued down this path with Super Kabuki II, staging an adaptation of One Piece in 2015 that dominated theatres.

Then there is Cho-Kabuki, a project born in 2016 from a collaboration between the Shochiku company, NTT and the Niconico platform. On stage, actor Nakamura Shido performs alongside Hatsune Miku, the country's most famous virtual singer, projected as a hologram in traditional dress. The two open the show with the kojo, the ceremonial kabuki greeting, side by side. The debut programme, Hanakurabe Senbonzakura, intertwined the classic Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees with Miku's song Senbonzakura. At Expo 2025 in Osaka, the show returned featuring NTT's ultra-fast IOWN transmission technology, linking the Japanese stage in real time with performers in Taiwan with zero delay.

Tradition and Innovation in Kabuki: Two Routes That Converge

What strikes you, looking across four centuries of history, is one constant: this art form has always known how to distinguish between what can change and what cannot. Stories are updated, technologies are integrated and audiences are renewed, but kabuki remains rooted in its essence, in the actor's body as the primary instrument, in the slow and rigorous transmission between generations, and in fidelity to a form that has its own laws.

This is precisely where tradition and innovation meet. Two apparently parallel routes that inevitably end up converging. Without innovation, tradition dies. But without tradition, innovation is merely ephemeral.

Kabuki does not need to be saved. It needs to be seen. And CZMOS is here for that.