大道具

Ōdōgu ("large properties") are the big elements dressed onto the stage—mountains, rivers, and other backdrops, buildings, trees, rocks. The line dividing them from kodōgu (hand props) is not size but function: what stays fixed belongs to the ōdōgu, what an actor holds or wears does not. Stage machinery such as the revolving stage and the seri traps is also counted among them.

The ōdōgu crew builds the sets, dresses the stage, and drives the scene changes. In some plays the transformation itself is a highlight—making their work not mere backstage labour but part of the staging.

The everyday word dondengaeshi—a sudden reversal of fortune or plot—is also said to be born of the ōdōgu's craft. Its source is the gandōgaeshi, a scene change in which a set piece tips backward to reveal a new world in an instant; the name donden is sometimes traced to the drumbeats that cue the change. Behind the modern sense of an upended ending lies the memory of a stage turning over entire.

In Narukami, one of the Kabuki Jūhachiban, the ōdōgu conjure an entire world — the hermit's mountain cave and the waterfall of Kitayama. The generous, larger-than-life world of the Ichikawa Sōke's aragoto has always been built together with the bold scale of its stage settings.