Yanagisawa Nobutoki

• Born: 1724
• Died: 1792
• Japanese: 柳沢 信鴻 (Yanagisawa Nobutoki)

Yanagisawa Nobutoki was a daimyô of Kôriyama han, known for his love and patronage of the kabuki theater.

Nobutoki stepped down from his position as daimyô in 1773 and retired to a home in Somei, in the Komagome neighborhood of Edo, in part in order to devote himself more fully to engagement with the theater world, and with haikai poetry circles. His diary Enyû Nikki ("Diary of Banquets and Pleasures") is a valuable text for scholars, providing insights into the worlds of patronage and social circles of that time. It contains daily entries every day for a span of some thirteen years, and includes mention of as many as 119 visits to the Kabuki theater.

Yanagisawa not only visited the theater, but also wrote his own plays, which he had his servants and maids perform, granting them actor-sounding names like Bandô Shitsugorô and Ichikawa Benzô. Yanagisawa also commissioned an otherwise unknown ukiyo-e artist named Beisha to produce actor prints of these workers.

Yanagisawa's love of kabuki was widely known enough that it came to be parodied, in a kibyôshi by Kishida Hôsha and Kitao Masayoshi entitled Kyôgen-zuki yabo daimyô ("The Boorish Lord Mad with Theater").

References

• Timothy Clark, "Edo Kabuki in the 1780s," The Actor's Image, Art Institute of Chicago (1994), 28-30.