When Danjuro Ichikawa stomps around the stage in flamboyant costumes, his face painted in red-and-white makeup and his voice virtually bellowing, it is kabuki in its rawest, most dramatic form. This actor and his ancestors through 11 previous generations have been wreaking havoc in the elegant world of what has been one of Japan's main traditional theatrical forms for the last 300 years.

In the early years of the Edo Period (1603-1867), kabuki was supposedly created by a shrine maiden in Kyoto named Okuni, who excelled at Buddhist folk dances. Thus the performing art combined art and eye-candy, with women taking most of the roles. That, though, was soon quashed from on high on the grounds it was corrupting public (i.e. male) morals, and it was into this small firmament that Danjuro I stepped with an acting style called aragoto (wild thing) that was unlike anything audiences had seen before.

The complete opposite of the subtler wa (harmony) way of acting then typical in western Japan's cultural pressure-cooker of Kyoto, Danjuro I drove audiences crazy. The mystique surrounding him was such that even the people of the new political capital of Edo (present-day Tokyo) believed his stare was powerful enough to prevent a person catching a cold for a year.