Yedo was the seat of the Tokugawa Government, the Shoguns ruling the country with an iron hand. The feudal lords and their vassals paid allegiance to this Government, and Yedo swarmed with two-sworded samurai. It was the liveliest centre of the country for the ronin, or samurai unattached to a master, and in consequence all the adventurous spirits of the time were attracted here as moths to a candle. Yedo Kabuki thus developed marked characteristics of its own. The atmosphere of Kyoto was entirely different. Here lived in seclusion the Emperor, surrounded by the Imperial families and the nobles. The usurping Shoguns had reduced the Emperor to impotence. Kyoto was the home of artists, poets, writers, and the people were calm, elegant, and given to refined pursuits. The actors of Kyoto contributed not a little to the taste and style of Kabuki. Osaka, also, had a great influence upon Kabuki. Here, people were well-to-do and full of energy. This town had for centuries been one of the foremost centres of trade, and the inhabitants counted theatre-going among their chief pleasures. Osaka Kabuki contributed some of the most important material that went to the building up of the theatre of the people. When the handsome young players of Wakashu Kabuki no longer held the centre of the stage, acting made rapid progress. Theatre construction greatly improved; the introduction of the samisen caused a special music of the theatre to come into being, which was soon to differentiate Kabuki from the farces of the Nō theatre it had imitated so slavishly. There also arose a new school of music, Yedo Nagauta (long poem or song), the basis of Kabuki’s interesting music-dramas. At this period the onnagata, or specialty of acting women’s rôles, began, a convention that makes the Japanese stage so unlike anything to be found in the Occident. It had been customary on O-Kuni’s stage, and later on the women’s stage, for men to assume women’s rôles and women to appear as men, but when the Government forbade women appearing on the stage it was necessary, not only from an art point of view, but also from a business one, to find substitutes. Therefore, in the natural course of events, men came to monopolise female rôles. This was no new thing after all, for the Nō, that flourished for two hundred years before Kabuki had sprung into being, was also a male theatre, and not only did men wear women’s masks when impersonating the tragic heroines of the Nō drama, but the impersonators of females in the farces of Nō, or Kyogen, were likewise males, wearing cotton coverings over their heads, as may be seen to-day in the performances of the Nō. Besides, the male impersonator of women had long been a convention of the Chinese theatre, and as Japan had absorbed within herself so much of the civilisation from the continent, it was not surprising that her theatre conventions, as well as those of her other arts, should be akin to those of China.