Are there family schools and traditions in stage makeup?

Kumadori is the stylised makeup said to have been created by Danjūrō I, and so is inseparable from the Ichikawa art. That does not mean it belongs to the Ichikawa alone: other houses play aragoto roles, and when they do they paint the kuma. It is there that differences between houses emerge.

Where do they show? In the weight of the line. Even in the suji-guma of Shibaraku, one transmission draws thick and powerful, another somewhat finer and sharper. In the sweep — how a stroke is released at its end. In the blur — how far the edge is softened. In the placement and angle of the brows, the handling around the eyes. Each such detail is said to carry a house's or an actor's transmission. On stage the difference passes in an instant; set photographs or prints side by side and it is unmistakable.

How the difference travels is characteristic of kabuki. Since actors paint their own faces, the teaching happens in the dressing room. A child watches his father at the mirror, tries it himself, and is corrected. There is no written manual; it passes by word and by practice. And what is interesting is that copying is not the end of it. A father's bones are not a son's, and the same strokes may not sit. So an actor works from his forebear's face while searching for the lines that hold on his own. Inheriting and making one's own at once — kabuki's whole way of transmission appears inside this daily task of painting a face.