own tastes, their own knowledge, and that of their audience, which was increasingly townsfolk and not nobility. Not many notable practitioners are known, but an important one was Amakasu Hōin. Amakasu founded the Taiheikiba (Place where the Taiheiki is recited) at the end of the 17th century, as well as being known to perform for Tokugawa Ieyasu. Another important Kōdan storyteller was Fukai Shidōken, who lived during the early 18th century. Fukai’s style of Kōdan was more comedic and ironic, which contrasted to other contemporaneous practitioners who were more serious. In 1700, a man by the name of Nawa Seizaemon opened the Taiheiki-ba in the Akasaka section of Edo (now Tokyo), becoming the first professional kōshakushi. Kōdan remained strong for many years, and gained a new popularity after the Meiji Restoration (1868), which, being a quite major event, supplied the performers with much new material. At one point, there were fifty performance halls in Tokyo devoted primarily or exclusively to kōdan. By the beginning of World War II, there were still six or seven. Though the arrival of movies, records, and other forms of entertainment eclipsed kōdan in the early 20th century, the art form contributed heavily to various forms of Japanese theater and to the development in Japan of the modern popular fiction novel. See also Yose References Nagai, Hiroo (1985). "kōdan." Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Tokyo: Kodansha Ltd. Theatre in Japan Japanese literature