Yumiko Naito, Visiting Instructor in Chinese and Japanese, has secured a grant for Arts and Culture from The Japan Foundation, New York, for her project Taishu Engeki: Discovering “Popular Theater” in Japan. Traditional Japanese performing arts such as Noh or Kabuki are famous all over the world. However, there is a lesser known performing art in Japan known as “Taishu Engeki.” It is a genre of theater that, unlike Noh or Kabuki, has little exposure to Western audiences and very little academic literature available to students. A workshop at Vassar will be developed to introduce this hidden performing art to the United States for the first time.