番付・筋書

In the Edo period, woodblock-printed playbills called banzuke—listing plays and actors' names—served as the theatre's advertising and guide. With modern printing in the Meiji era came the sujigaki, a typeset booklet of casts and plot summaries, the direct ancestor of today's theatre program.

Today the program is customarily called sujigaki in Tokyo and banzuke in the Kansai region. Beyond synopses and cast lists, these booklets are valuable records of performance history—and a favourite keepsake of a day at the theatre.

The word banzuke is still very much alive as the ranking sheet of sumo. In the Edo period, playful mitate-banzuke borrowed the sumo format to rank everything from famous places to local specialties and the wealthy—and the modern expression chōja-banzuke, the 'rich list,' carries that spirit of playful ranking to this day.

Banzuke and sujigaki are also primary sources preserving the stages of great actors past. Many traces of the Ichikawa Danjūrō line since the Edo period survive in precisely these printed records.