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context: movies > history
Silent Movies
As with much of the world, the Japanese started making movies at the end of the 19th Century. They turned them out at a hell of a rate - the biggest silent star was Matsunosuke Onoe, who made nine or more features A MONTH!
Japan had a tradition of itinerant storytellers, who would hold up pictures and tell stories; and the puppet theatre and even noh and kabuki had narrators, so unsurprisingly this carried forward into cinema. These were called Benshi. (Actually this had been done in the West up to around 1910, but in Japan it persisted into the '30s.) Some became big stars, and recorded their narrations. Not only were the recordings sold, some benshi even performed their narrations in theatres without the movies.