A New History of Medieval Japanese Theatre: Noh and Kyōgen from 1300 to 1600

By Noel John Pinnington

This book traces the history of noh and kyōgen, the first major Japanese theatrical arts. Going beyond P. G. O'Neill's Early Nō Drama of 1958, it covers the full period of noh's medieval development and includes a chapter dedicated to the comic art of kyōgen, which has often been left in noh's shadow. It is based on contemporary research in Japan, Asia, Europe and America, and embraces current ideas of theatre history, providing a richly contextualized account which looks closely at theatrical forms and genres as they arose. 

The masked drama of noh, with its ghosts, chanting and music, and its use in Japanese films, has been the object of modern international interest. However, audiences are often confused as to what noh actually is. This book attempts to answer where noh came from, what it was like in its day, and what it was for. To that end, it contains sections which discuss a number of prominent noh plays in their period and challenges established approaches. It also contains the first detailed study in English of the kyōgen repertoire of the sixteenth-century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030061401

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© The Author(s) 2019

Noel John PinningtonA New History of Medieval Japanese TheatrePalgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06140-1_1

1. Contexts: Japan in the Muromachi Age

Noel John Pinnington¹  

(1)

Department of East Asian Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Noel John Pinnington

Email: [e-mail]

Introductory Remarks

This short history of noh tells the story of the development of a group of performance arts and plays in medieval Japan. These traditional performances have been handed down to the present day and are generally known in the West by the term noh.¹ They consist of three genres: okina sarugaku, celebratory and ritual performances featuring masked old men; noh plays proper, elevated and serious plays usually focusing on a major character and including musical accompaniment, singing, and dancing; and kyōgen plays, shorter comic performances. These three genres (and local versions of them) are the only dramatic performances originating in medieval Japan that have survived as continuous traditions to the present day (some 600 years later).²

In their current guise, all three genres are acted on a stage of about 5.4 m² against a backdrop bearing a design of a pine tree. Musicians seated on stools at the back play a flute with a discordant overblow ( nōkan ), a hip drum ( ōtsuzumi ), a shoulder drum ( kotsuzumi ), and sometimes a stick drum ( taiko ). A chorus of men in formal dress (jiutai) kneel in two rows to the right of the stage. A bridge on the left connects a changing room to the stage, and it is from here that actors make their entrances and exits. Actors belong to one of three specializations: shite (main), waki (side), and kyōgen (comic).³ Shite and kyōgen main actors can wear masks, which are often specific to roles or generic roles. Okina sarugaku too has its own genre of masks. Noh actors only perform in Okina and noh plays, but kyōgen actors appear in all three genres.

Noh plays last between one and two hours, and are slow moving, with the actors gliding over the stage with a unique sliding gait. The delivery of the words of the play accords with a number of particular song types and singing styles such as declamation, recitative, nonrhythmic, and rhythmic melody. At the professional level, these parts are generally sung by men, with a deep-voiced vibrato. The general impression for newcomers is that of an ancient ritual.

For a long time, it was assumed that noh is performed today much as it was when it was established in the fourteenth century, but it has become clear that this is not the case. Like many theatres, the words, in so far as they have been recorded in writing, have changed less, while the production elements that are difficult to record—dance, song, gesture, pace, and vocal style—have been more fluid. Even the words in the early days were not fixed—each generation of actors adjusted the scripts to their taste. The significance or purpose of noh in the different periods of its history has also varied. For example, the entertainment of kyōgen, a brisker art form than the noh plays, broadly understood as comedy at the present, had other kinds of emphases in the medieval period, being possessed of religious, terpsichorean, lyrical, as well as satirical qualities.

This book is a history of the noh arts. All histories interpret extant materials and this study is no exception. I have visualized this book as to some degree an updating of O’Neill’s Early Nō Drama (published in 1958), but covering the longer period that scholars now realize is necessary to embrace the establishment of the art and also reflecting recent discoveries and changing intellectual assumptions.⁴ I expand the subject matter to include the art of kyōgen, the study of which has often been left in the shade by its sister art. Moreover, I wish to broaden the readership of this work beyond that of O’Neill’s volume (which was for experts on Japan and others with specialist interests in the Far East) to the wider audience of those interested in theatrical and performance arts throughout the world. To that end, while I fully document my sources, Japanese as well as others, I also embrace the insights of modern conceptions of theatre historiography, and moreover, I endeavour not to assume a knowledge of Japanese terminology and history.⁵ It is particularly with this broader readership in mind that I make this first chapter an overview of the historical and other contexts in which these medieval Japanese performance arts developed.

Most histories of noh concentrate on individuals—listing leading performers and playwrights and describing their interactions with their wealthy patrons.⁶ This to some extent reflects the historical evidence that survives. The primary example of this tendency is the concentration of studies on the performer and playwright Kanze Zeami (1363–1443).⁷ Many of his writings were preserved in his family line, and he performed before or associated with powerful people who appear frequently in diaries from the time. His writings are the source of most of what we know of the life of performers in his time. Scholarly writing starts with the interpretation of data, and as a result, studies of noh give the impression that Zeami was the dominant actor of the medieval period, if not of all periods. Of course, reflection persuades us that very likely there were numerous other fascinating actors who left behind fewer traces of their existence.

The idea that Zeami was the dominant figure in his time was the result in part of the amount of information that survived about him, but there has also been a hagiographical tendency in Japan that has ascribed everything good or interesting in the tradition to him. I have endeavoured to be aware of gaps in the record, and to search for broader contexts and conditions than simply the thoughts and talents of prominent individuals. We have, nevertheless, while there are no time machines, no choice but to reflect the disposition of sources in our writing.

A history of a performance art should discuss not only actors, audiences, and their worlds, but also the development of genres, exemplified by specific performances or plays, and this I have tried to do. Another topic of great importance to noh is the development of theories about acting and training methods. A good deal of theorizing by actors from the medieval age survives. Indeed, many people find early writings by actors about noh more interesting than the plays themselves.⁸ Although my own interest began with those writings, I refrain from giving them a prominent position in this book, for that would make it overwhelmingly long. The central concerns of this book will be the history of performers, performances, and plays.

Historical Conditions

The Japanese word chūsei, usually translated as medieval or middle ages, was first used systematically in Japan in the late nineteenth century to designate a historical period (although the word itself has older uses). It is now usually taken to refer to the interim between the Heian period, when the Heian court administered the country from the capital now known as Kyoto (from the early ninth to the late twelfth century), and the Tokugawa or Edo period, when the Tokugawa lineage of shoguns ruled Japan from Edo, now known as Tokyo (from the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth century).⁹ This long interim, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, is a fascinating time for those interested in Japanese culture. On the one hand, it described a steady drawn-out descent into social chaos and fragmentation after the relative peace of the Heian polity. On the other, it contained the origins of much of what we now see as traditional Japanese culture. In broad terms, misery after misery afflicted ordinary Japanese, with famine, disease, and war following one after the other, and many Japanese seem to have taken refuge in escapist philosophies focused on avoiding hellish afterlives. The collapse of a vertical social order eventually generated a spirit of ruthless violence which swept away much of the old religious world. Fierce power struggles among warlords led to the centralizing of power under a dictator in the late sixteenth century, which in turn brought another long era of relative peace, albeit subject to an extraordinary totalitarian vision.

Nevertheless, there was much that was positive in the medieval period. It was a time of expanding population and great cultural vigour, starting out with the establishment of a new national legal system run by an idealistic warrior government in the seaside town of Kamakura, a spread of literacy among middle as well as upper classes, the establishment of a national culture including many of the forms that are thought of today as characteristic of Japan (tea ceremony, the architecture based on tatami and tokonoma, black and white ink painting, the formulation of martial arts like kendō and kyūdō, flower arrangement, noh theatre, Zen gardens, etc.). Central to the cultural story were the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The period known as the Northern and Southern courts, 1333–1392, was a watershed for Japan.¹⁰ A new organization of society began to form, where individuals in similar situations or localities banded together to resist the demands of the powerful and distant, taking advantage of numbers and solidarity. It is again easy to fall into the trap of assuming that what becomes apparent in records reflects changes in society—it may well be that social patterns in the provinces that were invisible before the medieval period merely became increasingly visible as time passed. Still the power of numbers over class ( gekokujō ) was seen in a series of prominent medieval social phenomena. In the performance arts of the time, the comic genre kyōgen (which we discuss in Chap. 7) reflected a new consciousness in the lives of the ordinary and rural classes.

Political Conditions

Early in the medieval period, power shifted from an aristocratic civilian government surrounding an emperor to military bureaucrats led by warrior leaders. The system of a lineage of hereditary emperors was probably originally modelled on Chinese examples, but unlike China, the Japanese managed to maintain a single dynasty, providing emperors (as they are called, although a more appropriate term would be divine sovereigns) from before the seventh century to the present day. Histories declared this line to have descended directly from the sun goddess Amaterasu. At certain times it was believed that the emperors incarnated characteristics of this divine ancestor and hence were themselves gods. From the eighth century, the line of emperors was at the centre of a court administration of the country again based on Chinese examples, known as the ritsuryō legal codes. From 1185 until 1333, however, the emperor’s court in Kyoto was forced to share its rule of the country with a military council or shogunate, based in the Eastern seaboard town of Kamakura. Powerful families became distinguished into two groups: the aristocracy, associated with Kyoto, and a warrior class, whose power base lay in the provinces. The leaders of the warrior class, in Kamakura, saw their shogunate as an organ serving the imperial court in Kyoto by policing the provincial middle class and adjudicating rural and military disputes, mainly relating to landholdings. There was a continuous friction between civil and military administrations in the period, exacerbated by the dissatisfactions of other powerful social groups, which resulted in a civil war in the 1320s and 1330s. The side led by the emperor (Go-Daigo) won in the end, whereas many of the warriors who remained loyal to the Kamakura regime either died in battle, committed mass suicide, or were executed. For a few years Emperor Go-Daigo held undivided power, but his actions alienated loyal warriors, and competition between his and a competing imperial line resulted in a further long series of conflicts lasting until the latter half of the fourteenth century. During the war, Go-Daigo had employed as his shogun (or general) Ashikaga Takauji. Takauji founded a hereditary line of shoguns. The third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), at long last brought the war between the two imperial courts to a settlement in 1392 and established another military government, this time in the Muromachi district of the capital Kyoto: hence the name generally given to the 15 successive Ashikaga shoguns—the Muromachi shogunate.¹¹

Ashikaga Yoshimitsu made no pretence that he was a servant of the imperial court. His ascendency over the emperor was symbolized by the fact that his Muromachi residence, built in 1379, was far larger than the imperial palace situated nearby.¹² Yoshimitsu was a polymathic, Henry VIII-type of figure, equally active politically, diplomatically, in the literary arts, and in religious matters. His education was symbolic in this regard; he was trained in aristocratic culture by courtiers like the leading aristocrat Nijō Yoshimoto, who bore in himself and in his hand-copied library the inheritance of the ancient court tradition; but he was also close to priests of the recently imported Zen sect, like Gidō Shūshin and Shun’oku Myōha, who taught him not only meditation but also the Chinese literary culture of the Song (960–1279), where Zen had developed its current form. Yoshimitsu also interested himself in the culture and entertainments more closely linked to the warrior tradition of Eastern Japan, of Kamakura, from which his family derived, and which provided the members of his administration. Kamakura warrior culture included a passion for the performance art called dengaku . Yoshimitsu was also active in the cultural world of the nouveaux-riches warriors of his day in the court capital, attending noh plays, composing linked verse, and patronizing new styles of architecture. Yoshimitsu, like Go-Daigo before him, claimed authority over all aspects of the life of his time, combining aristocratic, warrior, and religious spheres. There is evidence, in fact, that he intended one of his sons to supplant the imperial line and establish a new imperial dynasty, but after Yoshimitsu’s death, the next shogun, another son Ashikaga Yoshimochi (1386–1428), strove to return to a primarily military identity, leaving the aristocratic court to its own practices.¹³ Successive shoguns from this period lost control of their administrations, but their importance as leaders and representatives of medieval arts and literary life continued for the rest of the fifteenth century. Yoshimitsu is supposed to be the first shogun to have patronized noh, and his patronage set a precedent for subsequent shoguns.

From the high point of Yoshimitsu’s hegemony at the turn of the fifteenth century, Japanese political structures became increasingly fractured until they collapsed into a new civil war in the Ōnin period, from 1467 to 1477. The civil war died down, but the result was not peace; rather the hierarchical organization of society was irretrievably disrupted. The vertical power structure that had radiated outwards from the centre in Kyoto to the provinces was challenged by repeated struggles for power between the layers of the hierarchy, with increasingly ad hoc solutions arrived at in different places. Both emperor and shogun dwelt in Kyoto but lost control of anything outside. Throughout Japan, towns and cities formed their own polities to manage their affairs. Rural regions became divided into large domains administered at will by military lords and their samurai retainers, who built castles around which market towns developed. Battles between domainal lords led in the end to the reunification of Japan under a new system of government, the Tokugawa dictatorship established at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Capital Cities: Kyoto and Nara

Kyoto was a capital city built at the turn of the ninth century to house the emperor and his administration. It was the primary locus of the imperial palace for the next thousand years. At the start of the thirteenth century, it was the home of aristocratic courtiers and of the secondary society that served their needs. The residences of noble families, surrounded by their libraries, gardens, and ornamental ponds were gathered in the avenues near the court complex around the imperial palace. Many prestigious Buddhist temples and monastic complexes, as well as shrines dedicated to indigenous Shinto deities, were found in its environs, including monasteries representing the older Buddhist sects: Hieizan on the mountains to the north (Tendai sect), and Daigoji to the southwest (Shingon sect), the imperial Kamo shrines on the upper and lower reaches of the Kamo river, and the Yasaka shrine, with its purificatory Gion festival, near the centre. From the thirteenth century, Kyoto was subject to waves of change, and much of the old aristocratic world and its buildings were destroyed or abandoned. In 1212, Kamo no Chōmei commented in his essay on the insecurity of life in the capital, Account of My Hut (Hōjōki), on a series of disasters that afflicted the capital in his lifetime: a great fire, whirlwinds, a military attempt to knock down the capital and rebuild it elsewhere, a long famine with attendant epidemic, as well as an extraordinarily destructive earthquake. Perhaps because of the loss of income resulting from the shift of power to the warrior regime, as well as these frequent disasters, the capital in the medieval period never regained its former condition. In the fourteenth century most of the old court and its lifestyle no longer existed except in the memory of its culture: its literature, arts, and knowledge preserved in the libraries and traditions of its descendants.

Whilst fourteenth-century Kyoto was the site of a decaying aristocratic culture, it was also profoundly stimulated by a new and vigorous eclectic way of life. Particularly visible were the great Zen temples that were constructed in both Kyoto and Kamakura in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Song-era Zen arrived in Japan first with Japanese returning from study in China, and then with a wave of Chinese intellectuals and priests fleeing Mongol domination. Zen masters founded lineages in Japan and established temples and monasteries. Their primary patrons were the leaders of the warrior class, who ranked these temples, placing those in Kyoto at the top, and used them in their national administration. Thus, Kyoto in the fourteenth century became a palimpsest with new layers of culture associated with the medieval warrior world overlaying that of the old court.

There was, however, a former imperial city perhaps 20 miles to the south of Kyoto in the province of Yamato that managed at this time to preserve to a greater degree an undiluted aristocratic culture. This was Nara, site of the imperial palace in the eighth century, and still at this time populated by ancient Buddhist temples and illustrious shrines. The leading institution of Nara in the thirteenth century was the huge sprawling Kōfukuji temple complex and a group of shrines more or less under its control known as the Kasuga shrine.¹⁴ These were regarded as the clan temple and shrine of the most powerful aristocratic family, the Fujiwara, for long the provider of ministers in the imperial administration and wives to emperors. The abbots of two of Kōfukuji’s cloisters, the Ichijōin and the Daijōin, alternated the position of superintendent, the head of the whole monastic community. These abbacies were routinely gifted to sons of the Fujiwara clan. In the old civil administration of the country, the court had sent out governors to run the provinces. Under the Kamakura shogunate, a parallel warrior authority was placed in each of the provinces, with the title shugo (commonly translated as constable). Yamato province, however, never took in a shugo, but rather developed its own administrative organization and armies under the control of Kōfukuji. Although the aristocratic scions in the Kōfukuji were monks, and thus expected not to marry, in other ways they managed to preserve the prestige, power, and cultural lifestyles of the old court aristocracy.

Some of the primary performing troupes which developed the tradition of noh performance were affiliated to this Kōfukuji temple in Nara. The set of four Yamato troupes (yamato shiza), consisting of Enmai, Sakado, Tobi, and Yūzaki—later called Konparu, Kongō, Hōshō, and Kanze—managed to dominate the noh tradition in Kyoto warrior society from the mid-fifteenth century onwards. It was the plays they performed that became the foundation of the current repertoire.

Social Conditions: Illness, Famine, Social Collapse

Documents surviving from medieval Japan repeatedly refer to war, famine, and disease (these three disasters closely followed by earthquake and fire). War, famine, and disease are of course linked. In war, armies take food and despoil the landscape. Subsequent shortages of food lead to starvation, and starving populations are prey to epidemics. There are also natural causes for famine: cold and drought seem to figure prominently in medieval Japan. There is an important cultural connection between the insecurity of life and performance art in Japan. It was generally thought that disease and famine were caused by invisible beings, who could be exorcised/pacified by parades including music and dancing.¹⁵ We thus find in the background of noh traditions references to apotropaic and purificatory effects,¹⁶ and a belief that performance art could lengthen the lifespan of audiences and actors.¹⁷

On the other hand, for the arts to develop, often some kind of general improvement in human conditions and excess of productivity is necessary. In this regard it is interesting to note that there was a period from about 1368 to 1420 that was exceptional for its political stability and social expansion.¹⁸ This was precisely the period when the noh play developed its characteristic form.

Economic Conditions

The noh play that appears for the first time in fourteenth-century records is the only dramatic genre to appear in Japan after eight centuries of literacy and artistic development.¹⁹ This fact has recently led scholars to speculate about why the new play form should have appeared when it did, and to situate that appearance within the cultural and historic conditions of the time.²⁰

One important factor is a profound change in medieval economic life that made a popular theatre viable. This was the use of coinage, primarily in the form of Chinese cash.²¹ This medium seems to have become particularly widespread in Japan in the thirteenth century when trade with China brought in Northern Song copper coins. Cash had an extraordinary impact on Japan, which had previously used commodities such as rice, silk, and linen for payments of all kinds, including taxes. At first copper coins were simply privately owned goods that began to be used as one more means of exchange, but eventually, in the Muromachi period, they usurped the roles of other commodities, and became the basis of a money economy. Cash facilitated the trade in goods, but it also brought with it financial manipulation with its related advantages and ills, as well as a new idealization of wealth.²²

Linked to this new form of economy was a craze for conspicuous consumption known as basara .²³ The traditional aristocracy that in previous centuries had sufficient excess to be able to indulge in a rich artistic culture had become increasingly conservative and conformist. Their wealth had been based on goods and produce, through traditional relationships with the land. Cash however brought different avenues for the acquisition of wealth—monopolies, usury, gambling. There are frequent references in the fourteenth century to a rising class of wealthy warriors and others whose excess was based on cash. Basara, a fashion among some of them, seems to have meant at first highly decorated or unconventional clothing, but it also embraced an excessive use of traditional treasure that amounted to despoliation.²⁴ The basara craze was sufficiently prominent and new to be criticized in the opening sections of the first legal code of the Ashikaga shogunate, the Kemmu Shikimoku. The code declared the need for the wealthy to practice frugality, deploring the fashion for basara which it claimed caused poverty in other parts of society. The second section of the code called for the strict control of mass drinking and carousing (gun’in itsuyû 群飲佚遊) and criticized related activities: [T]he obsessive involvement with attractive women and types of gambling, and the enormous wagers made at what are called tea gatherings and linked verse meetings. What incalculable sums are wasted in these ways!²⁵

The free flow of wealth criticized in such works was rooted in the use of cash, as was another social phenomenon that impacted the arts: the new financial arrangement known as kanjin, sometimes translated as subscription in the compound subscription performances (of which more later). The basara craze and the presence of men, known as tokunin (a pun on two similar sounding words, toku, meaning wealthy and virtuous), rich in money rather than land, must have been closely connected to the new fashion of buying and collecting rare Chinese and other artefacts, decried by, among others, the aristocratic essayist Yoshida Kenkō.²⁶ The trade in art objects was served by a growth in connoisseurship, particularly in the Kyoto region, and the development of a class of artistic experts to serve the newly rich and powerful members of the warrior government. Along with all these trends was a new spirit of cultural competition, rewarding sensual discrimination, spontaneous wit, and the readiness to take risks. We see here the roots of what were to become staid and aristocratic pastimes in the future: competitions as to who could distinguish (expensive) teas grown in various districts, and similar ones to distinguish varieties of a single type of incense (the prized jin: aloeswood), and also competitive linked verse in which people strove to produce on the spot witty replies to posed half verses, obeying a variety of rules and conventions. All of these, as well as drinking contests, shooting contests, and so on, were supported by gambling and the need for judgments over who won. Out of these developed the solemn Zen-inspired arts of tea ceremony, incense ceremony, and the subtle and highly cultured renga, linked verse of the fifteenth century.

One of the key effects of the increasing use of cash was that a new form of patronage was added to cultural life. When, at the end of the twelfth century, war resulted in the destruction of numerous ancient temples, especially in the old capital of Nara, support was needed for their rebuilding. One method of gaining such support was for priests to sign up prominent people to supply raw materials or manpower in return for religious merit. This system was called kanjin . With the spread of cash, however, it became clear that, rather than the support of one powerful man, one could do just as well by getting small donations from the many: as a mid-thirteenth-century kanjin appeal stated: donate only a scrap of paper or a half-penny, … specks of dust will accumulate to form a mountain.²⁷ Religious appeals could also be enriched by the