Medieval Artistic Elements in Japanese Folk Theater

MEDIEVAL ARTISTIC ELEMENTS IN JAPANESE FOLK THEATER THE PERFORMING ARTS OF JAPAN THAT MIGHT BE TREATED under the topic, folk theater,! are many in kind and diversified in content. Published reports in most instances provide us with a panorama of folk arts which are being performed in hundreds of localities. Details that would enable us to gauge the esthetic effect, audience reaction, and so forth are seldom given. The topic of folk theater is treated in breadth, and only rarely does one see a descriptive study in depth of anyone form. This state of affairs reflects the direction being taken by Japanese specialists in this area; and this direction has been dictated by the urgency to survey and record as many of the extant folk performing arts as possible, for these arts have been disappearing at an alarming rate. The phase of preliminary survey and cataloguing seems to have been completed, and we now look forward hopefully to detailed analytical studies, without which one could not formulate general statements with regard to social, artistic, or whatever dimensions may be implicit in Japanese folk theatre as a whole. There are possible perils in relying on reports that treat individual items less than comprehensively, as I became aware of when I compared my own notes on the kowaka, an obscure performing art I had studied in some detail, with comments on the kowaka which appeared in a survey study of folk performing arts.2 In this particular study-an excellent pioneer study, incidentally, in which an attempt is made to establish a few meaningful categories-the author has classified dozens of performing arts according to the general age group and sex of the participants. In doing so, he This paper was presented at a panel on "Social Dimensions of Folk and Popular Theater in Asia" at the 18th annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in April, 1966. I record my thanks to Mr. Masato Matsui of the East-West Center Library at the University of Hawaii, who very kindly responded to my special requests for material. 1 The definition of "folk" in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, "Originated or widely used among the common people as distinguished from the academic, the cosmopolitan, the modern and professional, or the sophisticated," seems to agree closely with the Japanese concept of minzoku ("folk"), and it is in this sense that I shall use the word. "Theater" is a convenient referent for performances that are staged formally; this qualification becomes necessary since not all the performances to be described are dramatic presentations of the sort we would ordinarily associate with the word "theater." 2 Misumi Haruo, Kyodo geino (1958). 373 374 MODERN DRAMA February assigned the kOwaka to the "young people" category, whereas no such distinction is made as to age by the performers themselves; and he suggested that a local custom requires the youths of the village to learn to perform the kowaka and that its performance contains implications of adulthood passage rites, whereas the local inhabitants are unaware of such a custom. Although the over-all tone of the performance may seem folkish to the audience of the modern age, the kowaka actually has no folk significance and very little, if any, ritualistic significance. The casual observer, having assumed that the kOwaka is typically a folk performing art, may quite easily read a ritualistic significance into the performance. It only stands to reason that each performing art must be analyzed thoroughly before it can be grouped together in a category with others like it. And yet, as Honda Yasuji has insisted, there exists the need to begin organizing the huge clutter of piecemeal information on the almost countless, varied folk arts that are being performed throughout Japan. Mr. Honda, the most eminent and qualified among such specialists, has proposed a provisional set of categories,s the validity of which must now be substantiated through the analysis of individual forms within each proposed category. I have chosen to treat in this paper three prominent examples of performing arts that originated in the Medieval Era in J apanese history (ca. 1160-1600) and have been transmitted down to us as essentially fixed forms...