Kabuki and Japanese Culture

'Japanese culture' is not a term with a single definition. Japan's cultural-property system, however, does define one part of it: skills without physical form — theatre, music, craft techniques — are 'intangible cultural properties', the most important are designated 'Important Intangible Cultural Properties', and the people and groups who embody them are recognised as their holders. Among traditional culture, what has been performed on stage and handed down by people is the 'traditional performing arts'.

Nōgaku, ningyō jōruri bunraku, kabuki and gagaku are all Important Intangible Cultural Properties and are inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. Kabuki, the subject of this site, is one of them.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes kabuki as 'a form of Japanese theatre nurtured in the Edo period, called with nōgaku and ningyō jōruri one of the three great national theatres', which 'absorbed preceding and parallel arts — dengaku, noh, kyōgen, folk dance — and stylised and popularised them into a comprehensive performing art' (designated an Important Intangible Cultural Property on 20 April 1965).

In 2008 UNESCO inscribed kabuki on its Representative List. Its description begins with kabuki's origin in the early seventeenth century and notes that it 'was particularly popular among townspeople'. Where noh was protected as the ceremonial theatre of the warrior class, kabuki grew in the town theatres, sustained by its audiences.

Kabuki is traced to the kabuki odori that Izumo no Okuni performed in Kyoto around 1603. After the shogunate's restrictions, performance passed to adult men, and through the Edo period kabuki matured into a full theatre. The National Theatre describes these four centuries as 'a history of repeated change through turbulent times'. Tradition here is not the absence of change but the name for what has continued by changing.

Kabuki grew up with the townspeople's culture of Edo. Each actor's house has a yagō, a house name — said to have been used because Edo-period actors were not allowed surnames, or to derive from the shops actors ran on the side (the origin is not settled). The kakegoe, the house name shouted from the seats, still carries the closeness between the town and the stage.

Actors were also a source of Edo fashion. Woodblock prints of actors circulated widely, and the persimmon colour Ichikawa Danjūrō II wore in Shibaraku became known as 'Danjūrō brown'. The hanamichi walkway, the striped jōshikimaku curtain and the revolving stage were all devices born in Edo theatres for their audiences.

Kabuki's beauty lives in kata, its forms: the mie, in which an actor freezes at the height of emotion; kumadori, which paints a character's nature in coloured lines; stylised speech and gesture. Building a world through exaggeration and restraint rather than realism is one expression of a Japanese aesthetic shared with noh and the woodblock print.

The Agency calls kabuki a 'comprehensive performing art' because so many arts meet on one stage: drama that carries a story and dance that shows music itself; the nagauta and takemoto (gidayū) music and the crack of the tsuke clappers; costume that embodies a role and the hikinuki that changes it in an instant; kumadori make-up and wigs; sets, props and stage machinery such as the revolving stage and trap lifts; the plays of Tsuruya Nanboku and Kawatake Mokuami as literature; and physical expression from fight choreography to the roppō exit. No single one of these is kabuki.

Intangible cultural properties are embodied by people, not objects (Agency for Cultural Affairs). A kabuki stage, too, is not made by actors alone: the tokoyama who dress the wigs, the costume staff, set and prop makers, the kurogo and kōken stage assistants, the tsuke player, the musicians. These skills pass not through books but from person to person on the stage itself. The National Theatre runs training for successors in noh, bunraku and kabuki.

Kabuki actors belong to houses; houses are known by their yagō, and names are handed down as myōseki, hereditary stage names. To succeed to a name — shūmei — is to take on the art and roles bound to it. Some houses have fixed their signature roles as a repertoire; the Kabuki Jūhachiban, established by Ichikawa Danjūrō VII in 1832, is regarded as the first.

The Naritaya house of Ichikawa Danjūrō is called the Ichikawa Sōke. Its house art is the aragoto style created by the first Danjūrō, and it carries the Kabuki Jūhachiban. The Kabuki Encyclopedia describes the family as 'a house of actors representative of Edo kabuki in both popularity and ability'. Its current head is Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII (Hakuen). This site covers that house and that person in greater depth, primary material included, than anything else.

Establishing the Kabuki Jūhachiban in 1832 was itself an act of re-founding: gathering the past into a defined house art. The same Danjūrō VII premiered Kanjinchō, drawn from noh, in 1840; Danjūrō IX pursued the Meiji theatre-reform movement and 'living history' plays while leaving a standard still called the 'Danjūrō style' in the period plays of the gidayū repertoire (Kabuki Encyclopedia). Keeping and changing have been one movement in this house's history.

Danjūrō XIII keeps classical performance at the centre while continuing film and digital work and introducing kabuki abroad. What tradition is, why a name is inherited, how tradition and innovation coexist — those questions are taken up, on the facts, in 'Ichikawa Danjūrō and Japanese Culture'.