Topic summary
Stage actress
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Actor.
East Asian theatre
In Japan, onnagata, or men taking on female roles, were used in kabuki theatre when women were banned from performing on stage in the 17th century during the Edo period; this ban ended in the 19th century. In 1858, Ichikawa Kumehachi made her debut and became the first actress in kabuki theatre since the ban on female actors in 1629, and thus acting as a profession was reintroduced for women in Japan. In 1882, she was accepted as a pupil of Ichikawa Danjūrō IX and took the stage name Ichikawa Masunojō. Western modern theater was introduced in Japan in the late 19th century during the Meiji era, with Kawakami Otojirō as a prominent theater pioneer, and his wife, the geisha and dancer Sada Yacco, who had already performed in underground Kabui theater in the 1880s, made her debut as a stage actress of modern Western theater in 1890s.