Access is the market,
not the mission statement.
Since April 2024, accessibility in Japan is a legal obligation rather than a courtesy. At the same time, a full house that cannot follow the play is revenue a producer cannot collect. One line item answers both.
April 2024: goodwill became compliance.
Since April 2024, reasonable accommodation (合理的配慮) has been a legal obligation for private business operators in Japan. Theatres and producers are business operators. What was previously a matter of goodwill is now a matter of compliance.
This page describes what that shift means in practice for a production. It is not legal advice, and it is not a statement about what satisfies the obligation in any particular case. That question belongs with your own counsel and your venue.
The obligation lands on the run, not on the building.
Accessibility provision is usually discussed as a property of a venue. A run is where it becomes concrete: this cast, this script, these performance dates, this audience. A permanent installation cannot answer for a production that opens in three weeks and closes in five.
A production also carries a constraint a venue does not. The script may be unreleased. The staging may be embargoed until opening night. Any provision that moves the text or the audio off site turns an access decision into a security decision.
The audience you currently cannot sell to.
Record inbound tourism means a substantial audience is physically able to attend and unable to follow. Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences face the same wall for a different reason. In both cases the seat is sellable and the show is not legible.
This is why access reads as a market rather than a mission statement. The same line item that discharges the accommodation obligation reaches an audience a producer currently cannot sell to. One line item, two budget lines: compliance and inbound ticket revenue.
Nothing leaves the theatre.
Storytelling Supertitles™ runs entirely on the device in the venue, and can run fully air-gapped. No audio, no script and no performance data leaves the theatre. For a producer handling an unreleased script, or a venue with a security policy, that is a requirement rather than a feature.
Captions are rendered inside the stage design rather than on a screen beside it, in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean, during the performance. The audience does not look away from the stage to read.
Storytelling Supertitles™ combines on-device processing with captions integrated into stage design. A venue should assess language coverage, timing, readability and audience needs in its own setting.
Frequently asked questions
What changed for Japanese theatres in April 2024?
Since April 2024, reasonable accommodation (合理的配慮) has been a legal obligation for private business operators in Japan, theatres and producers included. Accessibility moved from goodwill to compliance. What satisfies the obligation in a particular case is a question for your own counsel; this page does not give legal advice.
Who does multilingual captioning in a theatre actually serve?
Two audiences at once. Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, who need the spoken text rendered visually. And audiences who do not share the language of the performance, including inbound visitors. The same provision reaches both.
Does captioning mean sending the script or the audio to a cloud service?
Not with this system. Storytelling Supertitles™ runs entirely on the device in the venue and can run fully air-gapped. No audio, no script and no performance data leaves the theatre.
What languages are supported?
Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean. All transcription and translation runs on the device in the venue.
How is this different from a side screen or a caption-guide device?
A side screen carries pre-cued text beside the stage; a caption-guide device puts it in the audience member’s hand. Storytelling Supertitles™ is generated during the performance by on-device AI and rendered inside the stage design itself, in four languages at once, so the audience never looks away from the performance.
Tell us the run.
The useful first conversation is short and specific: the production, the dates, the venue, the languages you need, and whether the script can leave the building. That is enough to say what is possible and what is not.
Start that conversation