What are Japan's traditional performing arts?

Japan's Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties calls skills without physical form — theatre, music, craft techniques — intangible cultural properties. In the Agency's words they are 'embodied by individuals or groups who have mastered the skill'. Because the skill exists only in people, the state designates the important ones and recognises holders and holding groups to secure their transmission. 'Traditional performing arts' are the stage arts handed down this way, from person to person.

Nōgaku (noh and kyōgen), in UNESCO's account, originated in the sangaku transmitted from China in the eighth century and reached its height in the fourteenth and fifteenth. Ningyō jōruri bunraku is a puppet theatre uniting sung narrative (gidayū-bushi), shamisen and puppets, which UNESCO ranks 'with Nô and Kabuki as one of Japan's foremost stage arts'. Gagaku is the court music and dance that UNESCO calls 'the oldest of the Japanese traditional performing arts'.

Kabuki is the youngest of these and the closest to the town. Born in the early seventeenth century as the entertainment of townspeople, it matured through the Edo period into a full theatre, absorbing the forms of noh, the humour of kyōgen and the stories and music of bunraku, and — in the Agency's words — 'stylising and popularising' them.

The Agency places kabuki among the 'three great national theatres' with nōgaku and bunraku; UNESCO notes it 'was particularly popular among townspeople'. Unlike noh, protected by the warrior class, kabuki survived on its audiences: people who shouted actors' house names from the seats, knew the yagō, and bought actor prints. The audience, too, was part of the culture of kabuki.

From Okuni's kabuki odori around 1603 through the three licensed theatres of Edo, the aragoto and wagoto styles, the adoption of the gidayū repertoire, Meiji theatre reform and on to today — kabuki's four centuries can be followed in 'What is kabuki?' and, generation by generation, in the pages on the thirteen Ichikawa Danjūrō.

Intangible cultural properties are embodied by people — in kabuki, those people are the actors and their houses. When kabuki was designated an Important Intangible Cultural Property on 20 April 1965, the holders recognised collectively were the actor-members of the Association for the Preservation of Traditional Kabuki. Names are handed down as myōseki, houses are known by their yagō, and some houses have fixed their signature roles as a repertoire.

The Ichikawa Danjūrō family (Naritaya) is called the Ichikawa Sōke; its house art is the aragoto style created by the first Danjūrō and the Kabuki Jūhachiban established by the seventh. The current head, Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII (Hakuen), is a member of the Association for the Preservation of Traditional Kabuki (11th recognition, 2005, then as Ichikawa Ebizō XI) — one of the actors recognised collectively as holders of the Important Intangible Cultural Property 'kabuki'.