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kabuki, one of the oldest show businesses in Japan, started in 1603 when Izumo-no Okuni (Okuni from Izumo) first performed a Kabuki dance on a stage in Kyoto. It was also the year that Iyeyasu Tokugawa established the Tokugawa Regime in Edo (present Tokyo). Okuni\u27s Kabuki dance reflected the fresh atmodphere of this new era. The audience in Kyoto gave a big applause to Okuni who appeared on the stage dressed in the style of \u27Kabuki-mono, \u27 literally meaning \u27slanting person.\u27 \u27Kabuki-mono\u27 was the name given to rescals who liked to draw other people\u27s attention by wearing gaude clothes. They were the men who often did violence causing nuisance to townpeople, but at the same time they were the heroes of the time. In fact, they were the successors of \u27akuto\u27 (rascals), \u27basara\u27 (gilded vulgarians), and \u27kyo-warawa\u27 (children of Kyoto) living in and around Kyoto for over three hunder years since the end of Kamakura Period. Performances of Kabuki were not limited only in Kyoto but soon spread over the whole countrym from Edo to Kyushu, and won a big popularity. The Tokugawa government was not happy with the vulgarity and indecency of kabuki and finally in 1629 decided to segregate Kabuki theaters. However, what the government regarded as \u27vulgarm indecent, and wicked\u27 was nothing but the charm of kabuki and it was exactly what kabuki-goers loved to see on the stage. The root of kabuki and its char, therefore, should be sought for in the characterictics of \u27Kabuki-mono\u27 first turned into a theatrical figure by Okuni. This paper is an attempt to see the true spirit of Kabuki by tracing back the histry of this \u27Kabuki-mono, \u27 the slanting person

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It was the 8th year of Keicho (1603) when Iyeyasu Tokugawa was ordained Shogun, the highest General, and laid the cornerstone of the long Tokugawa Shogunate. It was also the same year when Okuni from Izumo made her first performance in public, mimicking the style of a kabuki-mono, at Kitano-Tenjin Shrine in Kyoto, which was called kabuki-odori and was a real start of the long histry of kabuki in Japan. Okuni\u27s kabuki-odori consisted of vivacious dancing and gay songs with amusing stories, the features found in later kabuki. She acted an outlaw who boasted of being a bandid wearing a hilarious costume and playing aroud with teahouse girls. Such sexual transformation was a theatrical expression of eroticism. By mimicking a kabuki-mono, an anti-social gengster, she expressed the feeling of populace who were obliged to survive through the change from the Wartime of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi to the Peacetime of lyeyasu. Her audience rightly sensed the coming of a new theater, completely different from the traditional noh plays of kyogen comic plays, and gave a big applause to each performance of Okuni, However, the more popular kabuki became, the stricter the Tokugawa government became. In spite of the fact that they meddled into kabuki performance one way and anather, kabuki tactfully outlived their oppression and survived to be a more powerful theatrical existance. The present paper is a part of a coming volume, Kabuki no Seishin (The Spirit of Kabuki), which I am now writing

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Theatrical arts in Japan originally started as one of the sequences of religious ceremonies devoted to gods and Buddhas. However, they underwent a gradual change into public entertainment, beginning in the twelfth century. A famous Noh player, Ze-ami (1363-1443), first theorized this change in the concept of [flower] in a volume named Fuushikaden [A Contemplation on Noh Play], which descended only privately until 1909. Instead of gods and Buddhas, that had already scarecely kept the central position in a performance in his time, Ze-ami advocated the importance of humans in the theater, who always showed plain reactions to the performance. Fuushikaden was his stradegy to face and win popularity from such audience, and his Noh performance was a real actualization of his theory, which proved a great success throughout his career as a player

遊女歌舞伎(三)

This paper takes up yujo as the main topic and will be the first part of \u27Yujo no rekishi\u27, the history of prostitutes, to be followed in the coming papers. The history of prostitutes can be traced back first to maiden servants in a shrine, called miko, then maiden servants to a king, and then to female priests at Ise Shrine. They all share the characteristics of the original miko, in which femininity was an important asset as an intermediary between shaman deities and people. They had an equal function to draw out the power of deities and kings as the receptive sex. Later in the Edo period, a similar ralationship was succeeded between yujo and her customers in the house of prostitutes. A rich man could dream of himself acting a king or an emperor by means of yujo who he believed was his miko. His dream well deserved his fortune