Tozaburo Yanagiya III performing Rakugo, seated on a cushion mid-gesture

ZABUTON SCHOOL

Japanese,
as it is spoken.

Your students learn Japanese. But have they ever heard a native speaker tell a story — changing voices, waiting for the right moment, making people laugh? I would like to perform for your students online, free of charge.

Request a performance

30 minutes over Zoom · No fee · Nothing to prepare

What is on offer

A professional Rakugo storyteller performs for your class, live over Zoom. Your whole school can watch at once.

30minutes

Twenty-five, then five

Twenty-five minutes of storytelling. Then five minutes in which your students say a short comic story out loud together, with the gestures.

0to prepare

You only connect

No fee, no travel cost, no materials to print. If you can open Zoom, you can host it.

2languages

In Japanese, or in English

I have performed Rakugo in English at Carnegie Hall and Harvard University. Beginners can follow it.

1,500at once

Any size of audience

At a Japanese school in San Francisco, 1,500 students and parents watched a single online performance.

One minute, to see what it is

Why a story, and not a lesson

Rakugo is Japan's traditional comic storytelling. One performer sits on a cushion and plays every character, using only a fan and a hand towel. It is spoken language from beginning to end — two people talking, voices changing, a pause before the right word. And the students laugh.

Each of the things a student does during Rakugo has been studied on its own. How that works, in five parts →

Only

Children trained in acting improved at reading other people's feelings. Children trained in art did not. Children trained in music did not.

Goldstein & Winner, Journal of Cognition and Development, 2012 · Boston College

10–20%

Words said aloud are remembered better than words read in silence.

MacLeod & Bodner, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2017 · University of Waterloo

43%

of teenagers who screened as socially anxious no longer did so after ten weeks of improvisational theatre.

Felsman et al., The Arts in Psychotherapy · University of Michigan

47

studies, pooled, found drama-based teaching had a significant positive effect on achievement — strongest when it ran for more than five lessons.

Lee, Patall, Cawthon & Steingut, Review of Educational Research, 2015
These findings are not about this school. They are about the activities that Rakugo practice happens to contain. A fuller research note — seventeen distinct acts within a Rakugo lesson, each matched against the literature, with figures and twenty-two references — is published here.

The storyteller

Performing at Carnegie Hall Rakugo Association of America at the Japan Parade in New York A Rakugo workshop with participants

Tozaburo Yanagiya III. Apprenticed under Gontaro Yanagiya in 1999. Promoted to shin'uchi — the highest rank in Rakugo — in 2014. Over 250 performances in Japanese and English, including Carnegie Hall and Harvard University. Recipient of the Agency for Cultural Affairs National Arts Festival Award. Lived in New York for seven years and founded the Rakugo Association of America. Author of A New World of Rakugo.

Request a performance

Write with a few possible dates and roughly how many students would watch. That is all I need to reply.

Write to me

zabuton.school@gmail.com

The studies cited on this page were not conducted on this school. They report findings on the individual activities that Rakugo practice contains. ZABUTON SCHOOL is an educational programme and is not intended to diagnose, treat or prevent any condition.