The tercentenary of this historical event was not allowed to pass unnoticed, and in December 1917 the establishment of Dansuke’s male theatre and the three hundred years of Kabuki development were celebrated by special performances given at the Minami-za, in Kyoto, where Nakamura Ganjiro, Osaka’s leading actor, and Matsumoto Koshiro of the Imperial Theatre, Tokyo, played together to commemorate the event. Kyoto slumbering in its wide valley, enclosed by its templed hills, once the scene of great theatre activity, is now far surpassed by the stages of Tokyo and Osaka, but the leading actors of these two cities met to celebrate one of the most important anniversaries in the history of the Japanese theatre. It was before mixed companies were prohibited that the male theatre took its rise. Handsome youths had taken part with the women players, and the separation was an easy step. With the strict prohibition of the Onna Kabuki, these young male players were left in entire possession of the field, because the chief players were youths, the entertainment they afforded was called Wakashu Kabuki, or Youths’ Stage. Numbers of these theatres arose in rapid succession in the three theatre towns, and even spread to the provinces. In Osaka the first Wakashu theatre was established in 1624, while Saruwaka Kansaburo founded Yedo Kabuki, or the Yedo Stage, in the same year. From Dansuke’s first theatre in Kyoto there grew seven flourishing theatres. And they might have gone on increasing, but the authorities considered it safer to place a limit on these places of amusement, and licences were granted to seven persons who were considered the descendants of the first theatre proprietors in Kyoto who had acted in the imitation Kyogen during the intervals of O-Kuni’s dances. These men were retainers of the Ashikaga Shogunate, and when this regime came to an end they were obliged to take up Kabuki, the new entertainment of the people, as a means of livelihood, and became managers of theatres. If they had been in the service of the Shogun, who was the chief patron of the Nō, they must have been entirely familiar with the Nō stage, and so introduced much of this older theatre art into the newly developing stage of the people. In Osaka, also, theatres grew apace and were finally limited, but it was in Yedo, the capital of the newly established Tokugawa Shoguns, that the theatres made greatest headway. Saruwaka Kansaburo founded the first theatre in Yedo in 1624, when he established the Saruwaka-za. Nine years later, Miyako Dennai started the Miyako-za, and the following year Murayama Matasaburo opened the Murayama-za. Still later Yamamura Kobei erected the Yamamura-za, and these were for some time the chief theatres of Yedo.