後見

The kōken assists the performance from on stage: passing and clearing props, adjusting costumes, executing the hikinuki quick-change in which a costume transforms in an instant. Reading the actor's movement for each cue demands knowledge of the play and of the performer's habits and condition that day—so the role is almost always taken by actors of the performer's own school.

Besides the black-clad form, the kamishimo kōken—wigged, and dressed in formal black with the stiff-shouldered kamishimo—appears in highly stylized pieces such as the Kabuki Jūhachiban, sitting composed behind the principal actor as part of the stage's formality itself.

The kōken's craft shows most brilliantly at the instant of the hikinuki. In the great dance Kyōganoko Musume Dōjōji, the attendant draws out the basting threads and the dancer's robe changes colour in a single beat—again and again, without the dance ever pausing. The feat is said to succeed only when attendant and dancer breathe as one.

The kamishimo kōken belongs above all to stages of high formality like the Kabuki Jūhachiban, the hereditary repertoire of the Ichikawa Sōke. In plays such as Kanjinchō, the attendant supporting the lead embodies the very system by which kabuki's art passes from master to disciple, generation to generation.