Ylva and Kajsa I

Ylva, me, and Kajsa (in that order) on the Togetsukyo bridge in Arashiyama.  (Photo courtesy of Ylva Henrikson)

In the beginning of August, I got an E-mail out of the blue from two young women from Sweden, who were coming to Japan and wanted some guidance into the world of noh.  I met them at the end of the month in Asakusa over a sushi meal.  They are contemporary dance artists and were researching for a performance inspired by Mishima Yukio’s modernized version of the noh play Hanjo.  The story centers around a young woman, who has been left by her lover, who promised to come back after he finished some pressing business.  She becomes distracted to the point of madness and wanders Japan looking for him.  In the noh play, she eventually meets him at a shrine in Kyoto.  In Mishima’s play, after spending every day in a train station in Tokyo, waiting for him to come, he comes to her home, but runs away when she doesn’t recognize him.  In Mishima’s case, he doesn’t seem to understand her madness.

We spent the sushi dinner talking about folktales.  After I told them the basic plot of “Hagoromo,” in which an angel comes to earth to bathe in the ocean, and while she is unaware, a man takes her clothes.  The story is known nearly all over the wold as the swan maiden tale.  Ylva then told me a contrasting tale from Sweden.  There, in the deep forests, a beautiful young man sails the rivers in a small boat, with no clothes on, playing the violin so exquisitely, anyone who sees him draws near, slips and falls into the river, drowning.

Hagoromo in 2010

A recital performance at the Kongo Noh Theater in Kyoto.  My teacher, Udaka Michishige, is the chorus leader just below my fan.

A long time ago on Mio cape, near present day Shizuoka, a man of low birth is cursed with the bad karma from taking the lives of animals for a living.  He is a fisherman in this life, but his name indicates a more glorious past.  White Dragon.

In the ancient Chinese collection of stories, “Garden of Tales” from the 1st century BC, is a story an adviser tells the king as a warning not to take on the guise of one of his own subjects.  The adviser tells about a white dragon who turned himself into a fish and lived in a pond on earth until one day a fisherman shot him in the eye with an arrow.  The dragon flew away to the king of heaven to complain, but the king of heaven replied that fishermen shoot fish for a living and there was nothing he could do.

And so, it is said by some that the dragon died and was reborn, this time as the object of his hatred, the fisherman.  Of course, the fisherman has no knowledge of his past life as a dragon and lives in ignorance of a greater good, except for a strange affinity for natural beauty.   This is the point in the story from which the play “Hagoromo” begins.

Orgy of Tolerance

(c)Frederik Heyman

In the 20th century, logic came to power.  That which was unnecessary was eliminated in Bauhaus, communist propaganda, American manufacturing, engineering, war, design. . .  Life was simplified to a minimum that could be logically understood.  Everything else was eliminated.  That is the world we still live in today.  Our scientific understanding abstracts from all emotion.  Subjectivity is set aside in search of a greater truth, but what is good for research is not necessarily good for life in general.  We lost our ability to understand ourselves.  We do not know how to deal with our desires except to satisfy them or to cry out in want and pain.  We abstract our emotions when sympathy is called for.  We are emotionally dead to violence when it is performed in the name of our own protection.  We are slaves to fear when violence draws near.  Hoping to escape from or at least deaden our fear and desires, we overcompensate with consumption.

Does Japan have philosophy?

I grew up with a philosopher and theologian for a father.  He taught me about Heiddegar, Plato, and Kant.  I would then argue metaphysics with my best friend in high school.  But by the time I entered college, I had come to the solid conclusion that my feeble capabilities of logic and reason could never lead me beyond a certain point along the path to the Truth. One thing only I knew and that was that I knew nothing, and I didn’t know how to proceed after that. It has taken me eight years since then to figure out how to move on, and the search, which led me to Japan, has questioned my assumptions about what philosophy is. 

My Corner of the Ethnosphere

Wade Davis from the National Geographic is an inspiration.  He says that humanity’s greatest legacy is the “ethnosphere,” the cultural counterpart to the biosphere and “the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, myths, ideas, inspiration, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.” An indicator that this richness of culture is dying out is the demise of languages, for “every language is an old-growth of the mind.” (see TED profile) This is very similar to what Goethe said about languages, “If you know one, you know none,” which can be applied as readily to culture.  However, Goethe’s quote also encourages the individual to explore a world that will challenge his or her unquestioned beliefs.

Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri

Shrine priestesses dance kagura to open the Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri dance performances.  The kagura piece pictured above is entitled Sensai or One Thousand Years.

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon in December, I took the trains to Nara, the capital of Japan from 710 to 784 and a center of Japanese religion ever since.

I had set my mind on seeing the Kasuga Wakamiya Onmatsuri since I had first read the 1349 records of the shrine festival.  That year, a shrine priestess named Otozuru Gozen performed Okina, which in the contemporary repetoir of Noh is performed exclusively by men (see my previous entry about Okina here). In 1349, Okina was the first dance of the day’s performances.  Okina’s position at the beginning of the program shows the religious weight of the piece.  Even 650 years later, contemporary performances of Okina are always at the beginning of a program, and it is said that a god decends and inhabits the dancer during his performance.  Now Okina is not performed at the Onmatsuri, but priestesses dance kagura to open the day’s performances (see picture above). Kagura are shrine dances, and the titles of the four dances performed all indicate the celebratory nature of kagura.

Rilke, Japanese electronica, and me

I met Rurihiko Hara in an undergraduate class I audited at Tokyo University last spring on Noh theater.  He came up to me after class, because he’d heard that I’d taken Noh lessons in Kyoto.  He had done the same under a different Noh master.

Last summer, after I’d returned to Kyoto to work for a few months, Rurihiko introduced me to his brother’s electronica band, Rimacona.  I heard Rimacona live and really enjoyed their music.  It’s sometimes jazzy, sometimes folksy sounding, dreamy electronica that incorporates piano riffs and female vocals with some almost natural-sounding noise.  Here is a link to Rimacona’s MySpace site: http://www.myspace.com/rimacona

In early October, Rurihiko, was back in Kyoto for a while and asked me if he could record me reading a German text.  This we did in the garden of a subtemple at Daitokuji on a sunny afternoon.  The text is Rilke’s Das Märchen von den ungehorsamen Händen Gottes.  This he mixed into his own electronica and performed at a live concert on my birthday, which I unfortunately couldn’t attend.  He’s done me the great favor of uploading it to his own MySpace site.  So here is his MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/rurihikohara

Scroll down in the playlist and click on i_sink to play it.  I hope you like it.

The End of Summer at Horin-ji

The priests’ prayers before the Noh performance.  Their robes were sumptuous purple and orange silks.  Only one of them wore black silk.

The temple Horin-ji annually holds a Noh performance on September 9th.  I wrote a little about it two posts ago.  Usually Udaka Michishige performs, but two years ago I was too busy with work to go watch, and last year September 9th landed on a weekend, so Udaka-Sensei was too busy to perform.  Finally, I had another opportunity this year and made sure I was able to take time off from work to go to the temple in Arashiyama.

I joined Sensei and a troop of young people who study with him and generally support his activities, including his two sons, Tatsushige and Norishige, who are actors in their own rights, his daughter, Keiko, who carves masks, his daughter-in-law, Haruna, who is also a semi-professional actor, and Natsuko, who also studies mask-carving, but has taken on a leading role in organizing events and working PR for Sensei.  We made an excursion out of the event, for the weather had grown sunny after a few rainy days that had brought an end to the summer heat.

“Makura-Jido” at Horinji Temple

For those of you who have heard me talk about Noh and about Udaka-sensei, but have never quite understood what it was I was talking about – maybe you simply haven’t seen a Noh performance before – here is a You Tube recording that may show you some of the appeal. This video is of Udaka Michishige-sensei dancing “Makura-jido” at Horenji Temple in 2006 on September 9. I do not know who took it, and there are some shaky spots and a pillar that gets in the way of the view, but I am glad they did. I remember that morning getting a call from Sensei saying he was picking me up to go, but I was already at work and had been unable to get the day off. Seeing the video only makes me regret not having gone even more.

Watching the video, you can see the chorus sitting across from the camera. It was a pleasant surprise when I realized I knew all of them. On the left is Ono-sensei, a professor of environmental biology at Okayama University and student of Udaka-sensei, in the middle is Udaka Tatsushige-sensei, Udaka-sensei’s son, and on the right is Urushigaki-san also a student of Udaka-sensei. To the left are the musicians, and the performance is taking place facing a Buddhist altar inside a temple, which is a very rare setting. I haven’t had another opportunity to see a similar performance.

Die Udaka-kai Europa Tournee: Dresden & Berlin

Im Schauspielhaus Dresden beim Vorlesen der Botschaften der Bürgermeister von Hiroshima und Nagasaki

Nach den im Vergleich gemütlichen Tagen in Paris, sind wir über Frankfurt nach Dresden geflogen für einen langen Abend mit Aufführungen von Han-Nô (nur der zweiten Akt) „Funabenkei“ und „Inori (Gebet)“ ein originelles Stück geschrieben von Meister UDAKA Michishige. Am nächsten Tag ging es am Morgen nach Berlin für Aufführungen von „Aoi-no-Ue“ am gleichen Abend und von „Inori“ am Abend darauf. Die Reaktion im deutschen Publikum war wie erwartet anders als die in Paris, aber was ich nicht gewusst und nicht erwartet habe war daß sogar innerhalb Deutschland die Reaktionen in Dresden und Berlin ganz unterschiedlich waren.