
The show is based on the Ogiri style of rakugo, a form of traditional Japanese storytelling. The ogiri system sees a host put questions to a panel of fellow rakugo storytellers who must produce a funny or witty response. Shoten's format thus sees the host—currently Shunpūtei Shōta—pose questions to six storytellers (known as "ogiri members") seated left to right (as the audience sees them) as follows: San'yūtei Koyūza (sky-blue kimono), San'yūtei Kōraku (pink kimono), Hayashiya Kikuo (yellow kimono), Hayashiya Sanpei II (beige kimono), San'yūtei Enraku VI (purple kimono), Hayashiya Taihei (orange kimono).
Shouten is a Japanese drama of 281,919 characters, with 11,381 unique words and 1,845 different kanji. Its difficulty rating on Jiten is hard, 3.0 out of 5. The full vocabulary list ranks all 11,381 words by how often they appear, and you can study them on Jiten or download them as an Anki deck.
Here are some of the words that appear most often in this media, as well as a sample of its rarer vocabulary.