With regard to the stage performances there was very little difference between the Onna Kabuki and the Wakashu Kabuki—the young actors always appeared as the stars, while the older actors had to be content with minor rôles. The handsome youths, attired in female costumes, with long sleeves that swayed with their movements, wearing their hair arranged in the most fetching fashion, carried on O-Kuni’s dancing traditions. These had originated in the descriptive dance, or posture movements, of the Nō, while the comic plays, more or less based on the Kyogen, as performed by the older actors, soon began to change into something special that was to develop still later into the varied forms of the Japanese drama of the present. The dances largely borrowed from the Nō also underwent gradual transformation into the Shosagoto, or modern music-drama, that more closely resembles a Western ballet than any other Occidental stage form. The externals of the Wakashu theatre were also the same as those of O-Kuni, except that the bamboo fence had given place to a more substantial wooden one, and a gallery had been introduced for the entertainment of high-class patrons. The drum tower of O-Kuni’s theatre remained and persisted long after the entire construction of the theatre had been changed, becoming in time more elaborate and permanent. The most interesting person of this period is Saruwaka Kansaburo, Yedo’s first actor-manager. Many details of his career have been handed down, while the facts relating to the theatre proprietors of Osaka and Kyoto are both meagre and vague. Kansaburo, like most of the theatre men of his time, came from Kyoto to Yedo. He was of good stock, one account stating that he had sprung from the lord of the castle at Numadzu in Suruga Province, called Nakamura. However, a more reliable record appears to be that handed down by his posterity, that the family was descended from a daimyo called Nakamura, a follower of Hideyoshi, and that a member of this family, Nakamura Jiyemon, came to Yedo, became a ronin, and married his daughter to Saruwaka Kansaburo, who took the name of his father-in-law. The name “Saruwaka” was given to the comic actors who acted with O-Kuni, and as Kansaburo excelled as a comedian, he took this as his stage name.