トンボ

Tonbo is the somersault turned by the karami—the attackers—to show they have been cut down or thrown by the hero in a fight scene. "Turning a tonbo" is done with the body alone, no apparatus, and it is counted among the fundamental physical skills a kabuki actor must master.

Somersaults appear in nearly every fight scene, including spectacular falls turned from rooftops or embankments. The more beautifully the defeated move, the stronger the hero appears and the finer the stage picture—tonbo is kabuki's characteristic art of losing with consummate skill.

The name tonbo is said to come from the dragonfly, that master of flight which flips its body in an instant, and the word is also written with characters meaning "somersault." The phrase "to cut a tonbo" has traveled beyond the theatre and survives in everyday Japanese for any somersault—a technique drilled into the body in the rehearsal hall that leapt, as a word, into daily life.

Tonbo belongs to no single acting house; it is a bodily language underpinning all of kabuki. Even the boldest aragoto fight scenes of the Ichikawa Sōke resolve into a finished picture only through the superb somersaults of unnamed actors.