The pine tree at Mio.

Recently, I’ve begun writing a paper about Hagoromo, which I will be submitting for my application to the master’s program at the University of Tokyo. A lot of what I’ve written will be revised multiple times, especially when I translate it in Japanese, before I hand it in.  Following is just one section of my paper.  I would love everyone’s feedback on my ideas.

In this section, I’m writing about standard plot and character development patterns.  I have never written about this before, so please correct me if any of my statements are oversimplified or plainly wrong.

Character development in Hagoromo

A plot is generally described as a conflict, which builds into a climax that is finally resolved at the end of the plot.  In the process of the story, the characters undergo a change, which is called character development.  In a conservative description of the Hagoromo plot development, we have two characters, a main character and a supporting character.  The two characters’ meeting brings about a conflict, which builds into the climax of the play.  This conflict is suddenly resolved when the main character is appeased, or in other words gets her own way in the matter.  Therefore, the main character does not undergo character development.  She returns to her previous state of existence.  It is the lesser supporting character who undergoes development, but this development is understated.  Instead, the effect of the resolution on the main character is emphasized.  The majority of the play focuses on the events after the resolution, which is an uncommon plot development.

The main character is an angel from the moon.  The supporting character is a fisherman.  Their meeting occurs when the fisherman takes the angel’s feather cloak hanging from a pine tree.  In effect, he decides to steal it and is confronted by the angel who wants it returned.  The angel pleads with the fisherman until he capitulates and returns the cloak in return for a performance of the dance of the moon.  The angel agrees, receives her cloak, and her dance becomes the main focus of the play.

This final dance can be said to express the joy of the main character, the angel, at having received her cloak again.  It may also be said that she expresses her thanks to the fisherman through dance. However, this interpretation seems simple to a point of being superficial.  Could it not be said that the main character is representing the development in the supporting character?  Is not the angel’s dance an expression and celebration of the fisherman’s change for the good?

This idea is not a mere conjecture.  Technically speaking, in noh theater the chorus often take up lines from the main character.  Furthermore, main and supporting characters engage in mondo, which literally translated means question and answer, but the structure of such mondo is rather something like finishing the other person’s sentence.  The two characters continue each other’s lines.  These lines are broken up differently from one school of noh performance to the next.  In performance, a mondo generally builds tension as the two performers push the boundaries of the rhythm.  Before this part of the mondo, the fisherman has refused to return the cloak.  At the end of the mondo, the chorus delivers a dramatic chant.

Here is the mondo from Hagoromo as it is performed by the Kanze school first, followed by the Kongo school version.  The main character, the angel, is indicated as “Shite,” the supporting character, the fisherman (named Hakuryo), as “Waki.”

Kanze Version:

Shite    In her desperate plight, the angel now,
like a wingless bird,
moving to rise, still lacks her mantle,
Waki    yet the earth to her is the nether world.
Shite    What then shall I do?
in distress she cries,
Waki    and when Hakuryo still withholds the mantle,
Shite    helpless,
Waki    hopeless,

Kongo version:

Shite    In her desperate plight, the angel now,
like a wingless bird,
Waki    moving to rise, still lacks her mantle,
Shite    yet the earth to her is the nether world.
Waki    What then shall I do?
Shite    in distress she cries,
Waki    and when Hakuryo still withholds the mantle,
Shite    helpless,
Waki    hopeless,

(Translation of the Kanze version by Royall Tyler, adapted to the Kongo version by the author.  Please note that the pronouns were added by the translator, however, the word “angel” said by the angel in the first line and the name of the fisherman “Hakuryo” said by the fisherman in the seventh line are unchanged from the original Japanese version.)

Although in both schools of performance, the main character begins the mondo and the supporting character ends it, in the middle section, whole lines shift from one character to the other.  In the Kongo version, the fisherman’s description of the angel moving to rise, but unable to fly without her mantle or cloak seems more coldhearted on his part than the same line delivered by the angel in the Kanze version.  In the Kanze version, the fisherman’s description of the earth as the nether world could be applied to his situation as well as the angel’s situation.  Similarly, in the Kongo version, the fisherman’s cry of “What then shall I do?” could be applied to his situation instead of to the angel’s.  In this way, the meaning of the lines and therefore the depiction of the two characters shift from one version to the next.

Thus, it becomes obvious that the distinction between the characters is vague.  They are not two unique individuals.  Instead they are connected.  They share traits and ideas that are difficult to assign to one or the other character.  Precisely as the conflict between them builds, they seem to switch roles.  The fisherman seems to react coldly to the angel’s predicament as he laments his own situation living on earth, the nether world.  The angel has become helpless and hopeless.  She has become mortal exactly like the fisherman, who joins in her lament.  Or it should be said that the angel joins the mortal fisherman in his lament, for he has been mortal for far longer than she.

Here, our initial attempt to describe the plot development of the play as a conflict between two distinct characters falters.  This in addition to the early resolution of the plot and the consequent dance, which takes up the majority of the play’s duration give the play an enigmatic quality.  Despite the narrative’s initial impression of simplicity, it does not conform easily to interpretation.  Certain elements tease the viewer to reconsider the play’s meaning.

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 a surprise E-mail from two young women from Sweden, who were coming to Japan and wanting a guide into the world of noh.

I met them at the end of the month in Asakusa over a sushi meal.  Ylva and Kajsa 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.  Waiting for him to return, 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.

It seems to me in Mishima’s case that the young man doesn’t seem to understand the woman’s madness.  Is this perhaps indicative of something larger in our society?  Do we emphasize conformity so much that we cannot understand individual pain?

Ylva, Kajsa, and I 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, so I asked them if there were a similar tale in Sweden.  In reply, Ylva told me a wonderful contrasting tale.  In the deep dark forests of Sweden, 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.

Ylva told me another story.  On a small island off of the Swedish coast there was once an old woman, a witch with a magic ball of yarn.  When all the other families were milking their cows, she let the ball of yarn bounce out the door.  It would roll through every home and soak up all the fresh milk.  Filled up, it would come back to the old woman and fill her bucket with fresh, warm milk.  The worlds and mythical threads of far away countries came together there over a luxurious meal of raw fish in the heart of Tokyo.

We met again in Shibuya a few days later.  There, at the large intersection, they took pictures of the large crowds, bright lights, and over-sized plasma screens.  Stockholm is not nearly as large as Tokyo, they said.  Stockholm has a population of 825,057.  Tokyo has 12,790,000 inhabitants, and is neighbored by other large cities including Yokohama, the second largest city in Japan.  In Tokyo, you can practically dissolve into the crowd and disappear.  Nowhere is that more possible than at that intersection in Shibuya.

Ylva’s picture of me at the Shibuya intersection.

I met Ylva and Kajsa again about two weeks later on September 9th in Kyoto.  Early that morning, I went to Kyoto station to pick them up.  They came through the ticket gate from the bullet train, suitcases in tow.  There, hardly a few minutes in Kyoto, and Kajsa paused.  “It feels completely different.  The people walk slower, and the atmosphere is more refined, more elegant,” she said.  She said she could feel the city had once been the capital and the cultural center of Japan.

They stowed their luggage in a locker, and we headed off to Arashiyama, in the western hills.  We passed through the Arashiyama tourist area, stopping at a few souvenir shops to browse, and came to the Togetsukyo bridge across the river.  From there, the green hills rise over the Oi River on one side and continue through Kyoto as the Katsura River on the other side.  We were far far away from Tokyo now.  Despite being only the first week of September, the air was slightly cooler.  It felt like summer was coming to an end.

We crossed the river and climbed up the hill to Horinji Temple.  I’ve written about the annual noh performance on September 9th (9/9) in previous posts (here and here).  This year, Sensei used a mask Natsuko had carved, a mask which in his dance was somehow more pure and kind-hearted than the mask he had used the year before.  His dance was also different.  Instead of a powerful show of seemingly supernatural strength, this year the dance’s strength was thinly veiled with a strange supernatural wisdom or insight.

After the performance, the yearly tradition is for all of Sensei’s students to join him to eat shaved ice (flavored with green tea and sweet azuki beans) at a roadside cafe.  The cafe overlooks a small lake.  The far side is farmland, behind which the green mountains of Arashiyama rise.  We arrived there in mid afternoon, and despite the cool weather, many of us had a green mountain of shaved ice like every year.

With Kajsa at the lake in Arashiyama. (Photo courtesy of Ylva Henrikson)

Because of the cool weather, we sat inside the cafe instead of in the garden like we had the year before, but having finished our food, we wandered over the street to the edge of the lake.  The sun was already hovering above the hills, so we had to shade our eyes looking at them.  Kajsa stretched her arms wide and Ylva lay down on the grassy slope.  Their homes in Sweden were more like this than Tokyo.  They could relax in a place like this, they said.  Of course, in Sweden, they are probably already wearing warmer clothes by now, they said.  It’s already fall there.

They also spoke about the winters in Sweden.  Almost the whole day is dark.  To see the sun, they have to go outside at noon or they will miss it and see only the night sky all day long.  It is cold and dark.  In contrast, in the summer, there is almost no nighttime.  It is warm and light.  Kajsa said the first time she had felt hot weather at night on a trip near the equator, she couldn’t comprehend it.  For her, hot weather could only be concurrent with sunshine.

Since that time at the equator, however, both Ylva and Kajsa have traveled the world to engage in their art with artists everywhere.  Kajsa spent a summer in France.  Ylva was in Southeast Aisa and Denmark.  Kajsa’s boyfriend was coming to Tokyo to play his guitar for a dance performance at the end of the month.  While I was with them, the world seemed very small.

That evening, I took Ylva and Kajsa with me to a meeting of all of the foreigners studying noh.  We went to Sensei’s practice stage in Iwakura to watch a recording of the play Iori, which he authored (see previous posts about its performance in Paris, Dresden and Berlin), and to drink sake with chrysanthemum flowers floating in it to celebrate the holiday – a toast to everlasting youth! (to be continued . . .)

Two of Kajsa’s Daily Dances filmed in the Stockholm tube:

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.

“Hagoromo” is  the play young Noh performers often perform for their debut, and yet the simplicity of the play belies the depth and drama of the full story.  In the three years of my Noh training to date, I have performed both shimai (short dances for recital taken from the play) and have chanted the part of the shite (main role) in a suutai performance (in concert).  (For a previous post on one of these performances, see here.)  Soon I will begin learning the dances for “Hagoromo,” and yet the possibility of actually performing the full Noh is a dream just beyond my reach.

My teacher, Udaka Michishige, has asked me to perform the full Noh of “Hagoromo” next year in Kyoto for a great recital by all his students from all over the world on June 12, but I have had to preliminarily decline his offer.  For an amateur to perform a full Noh, musicians and supporting actors must be hired and honorariums paid to one’s teacher and to the head of one’s particular school of Noh.  Further costs cover venue and costume rental.  The total amount needed for such a performance is 1,000,000 yen (approx. 10,450 USD).

If I were not a student living frugally on a government scholarship, I might be able to save the necessary money.  But at the moment, I can hardly give up my place at Tokyo University under perhaps the most prominent Noh scholar in Japan, Professor Matsuoka Shinpei, to find work.

I have always been fascinated by the magical and divine world represented on the Noh stage.  My current studies concern the mythological and Buddhist epistemology represented in Noh.  I want to see how a mythological view of the world, in which all things in nature are viewed as a unified whole, is integrated into a Buddhist view of the world, in which the individual and a stronger distinction between good and evil play larger roles.  Noh plays and performance theory written by performers in the 14th and 15th centuries provide a window into that world view.

If I could actually perform a Noh play, I would be able to recreate the world in my research for a wider audience, and I would be able to experience the world view as it has been transmitted through generations of Noh performers to the masters who would be performing with me.

Therefore, for the sake of my studies, both academic and in performance, I am attempting to raise the money necessary for my performance.  I am approaching various foundations and individuals to help me finance the project.  If successful, I hope that many of my friends, relatives, and supporters can attend.  I would be honored to welcome everyone to Kyoto next June to for Noh workshops, cultural tours of the city, and to see my performance of “Hagoromo.” Please contact me if you would like to contribute your support.

Hanna McGaughey

EMAIL: hannam@gmail.com

TEL: 080-5363-0303 (in Japan)  +81-80-5363-0303 (from outside Japan)

ADDRESS:

Sanserite Hakuraku Apt. 202
Kohoku-ku, Nakatehara 2-4-32
Yokohama  222-0023
JAPAN

(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.

I saw Jan Fabre’s Orgy of Tolerance in Saitama today.  It was more surrealist theater than I had ever been exposed to.  It was the first surrealist performance I had ever seen live.  The scenes were obscene, violent, and disturbing, but they were kept just short of repulsiveness by cariacature, mystique, and a relevant message for modern society.  A few lines from some of the music written by Dag Taeldeman show the message of the play most clearly.  Here is part of Everybody Talks about Freedom (taken from Fabre’s Troubleyn website):

Everybody talks about freedom freedom
So let’s get some
Everything’s good good
Great great
Normal liberal
Acceptable adorable
Ignorable ignorable
Damn!!! Right!

You can be a fascist, communist,
Racist, Budhist
Catholic, Muslim,
Scientist, terrorist,
Jesus Christ, Anti Christ,
As long as you don’t bother anyone
Damn!!! Right!

(click on lyrics for full text on Troubleyn website)

And here’s a little of Fear Sublime (also taken from Troubleyn website):

We are here to thank our beloved government, who has taught us how to fear but above all how to use it!
What would our lives be without this most basic human instinct?
Fear creates work.
Without fear: no war, no jobs.

. . .

With fear we can be suspicious
and suspicion creates safety.
We all must make sacrifices
to have the privilege to live in this clean, safe and comfortable land.
So let us all come together and thank this most basic human instinct.
Fear sublime!

(click on the lyrics for full text on Troubleyn website)

The Japanese advertisements and the whole show is staged in a student-guerrilla-revolutist design that created a beautiful unity to the piece.  The lighting reminded me of interrogation scenes by the light of a single bare bulb.  The luscious leather sofas, cigars, liquor, and drugs display the actual affluence of the bourgeoisie portrayed by the revolutionists.  Beyond the consumerist bourgeoisie characters blinded by grand delusions of sex, violence, consumption, gratification, safety, and tolerance, the same performers also portray prisoners, designers, Jesus, torturers, and terrorists.  Thankfully, Fabre does not leave the audience frustrated with the raw force of the majority of the play.  At the end, he gives them catharsis in the climactic angry attack on absolutely everything and in the full out celebration of the beauty of life in the dance at the end.

By showing audiences Orgy of Tolerance, Fabre hopes ‘that I can help people to look and think in a different way, or even cure the wounds they have in their minds.’ (from The List review)  [I would interpret that as a moral goal for his works, which] is an admirable goal, which I think he achieves, but I think what he says can be broken down into two [more specific moral] goals.  The first goal of art is to point out our [moral] weaknesses.  That is what Fabre’s work does splendidly.  He provides overstimulation and catharsis.  He plays with the power of theater and art in general, which is to say he plays with the audience’s emotions, making them realize their own emotional insufficiency.  The second goal of art is to nurture the audience’s emotions [through moral reflection].  I do not think shock treatment like Jan Fabre’s will educate people beyond the initial realization of their state of existence.  Ever escalating novelty and sensationalism does not have the power to nurture.

To nurture the audience, a more reflective atmosphere is necessary. Needless to say, I have Noh in mind.  The ability to create a reflective atmosphere is Noh’s greatest strength.  It draws on older systems of beliefs no longer held in scientifically-minded modern Japanese society: mythology and Buddhism.  These two contrasting forms of religion confront and engage the powers beyond our rational understanding, including our fears and desires, each in their own way.  In that sense, religion is very close to art, and one must only think of all the art inspired by Christianity to understand how universal the relationship is.  But Noh does not simply praise the beauty of life as Fabre and his dancers do in the final scene of Orgy.  Noh questions the [moral] conditions of our existence.  It examines the forces within and outside of us and develops possible [moral] resolutions to the universal human challenges of jealousy, sexual desire, wisdom, rejection, beauty, mortality, pain. . .

Having thus stated Noh’s greatest strength, its greatest weakness is its lack of novelty and its seeming irrelevance to our modern lives.  Resolving this problem is the greatest challenge for Noh actors and supporters, because here the integrity of Noh’s tradition is challenged.  What may be changed and what must remain the same to preserve the tradition?  I cannot resolve this problem simply nor alone, but perhaps exchanges with avante guarde artists like Jan Fabre and productions like Orgy of Tolerance might provide appropriate inspiration.  For now, I can only brainstorm and daydream, for few actors and supporters seem to look beyond Noh itself for its meaning.

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.  For now, I’d like to tentatively posit that philosophy is the search for the truth, for the reasons and circumstances of our existence, and for the ideal way to live, but how philosophy is engaged in and how its traditions are preserved is the focus of my question.

Does Japan have philosophy? I couldn’t find it when I first came here. I was completely baffled by the society I saw around me. Where does the society’s ideals come from?  There is probably no satisfactory answer to that question, but I couldn’t find the same kind of philosophical canon or historical dialogue as I was used to in European philosophy.   But at the time I noticed that the society nevertheless functioned in certain idealogical patterns, and my teachers in the traditional arts taught me what seemed like fragments of philosophical thought, so perhaps the question needed to be revised:  Where is Japan’s philosophy?

The Japanese polymath Shuichi Kato, a medical doctor who became heavily engaged in Japanese literature since WWII, had a very large collection of philosophy-like documents published in 1974 in his Compendium of Japanese Thought (Nihon shiso taikei), and in it are included various historical texts on religion, education, government, etc. from which philosophical ideals might be gleaned, but although I have a feeling Kato intended this collection as a proof of Japanese theoretical thought, it doesn’t seems to be a philosophical dialogue like that in Europe.  I own one volume from the Compendium, a collection of Zeami and Zenchiku’s treatises on Noh theater, and from what I know, these documents have been heralded for their discussion of aesthetics, but there are difficulties interpreting these documents as philosophical documents – for example, the fluctuating meaning of its key terms.  These texts were originally intended not as philosophical documents, but as references for educating students of Noh.  In other words, these documents cannot be approached in the same way as European philosophical texts.  So, my question is now:  What is the key to unlocking the ideas these texts contain?

Before I address that question, let me take a step back a few years to a meeting with my college Japanese history professor in my favorite coffee shop in Kyoto, on the second floor of an old Kyoto townhouse with retro advertisements on the walls behind the bar, heavy wooden beams above our heads, and solid wooden tables on which are served solid meals and delicious coffee.  (Unfortunately, the building was torn down two years ago when I went back.)  Telling my professor about my realization about the pointlessness of philosophy towards the end of high school, he began to protest, “What about looking at the simple things of everyday life!”

I began to laugh, “How Japanese of you,” I teased him, how Zen, I thought at the time.  I didn’t quite understand, but recently a text by Heinrich Zimmer, the Indologist, gave me a hint to understanding what my professor had said.  In a chapter entitled “Philosophy as a Way of Life,” he quoted a friend of his as saying, “After all, real attainment is only what finds confirmation in one’s own life.  The worth of a man’s writing depends on the degree to which his life is itself an example of his writing.”  (Characteristic of Germans writing in English around the time of WWII,  Zimmer likes to use “man” for “person” or “human.”  It’s probably a direct translation of the German “man.”)  Although Zimmer writes about not just Buddhist philosophy, but also Hindu and Brahman philosophy, and this statement is made without referring to any particular denomination of philosophy.  It’s a broad statement that – simply put – a philosopher’s greatest achievement is living.  So, it is not the logical soundness of the ideas or their ability to weather centuries of dialogue that proves their worth. Even if a philosopher writes no texts, his life is the proof of his ideas. (I wish there were a gender-neutral pronoun! Haha!)

For thinkers of the present, this approach is fantastic.  The artists and thinkers who have inherited oral traditions from their masters (who inherited them from their masters, etc.) are the living result of the history of Japanese philosophicy.  They are the heirs to a long line of people who wanted to know the truth of their existence and who searched for an ideal existence during their lifetimes.  My tea ceremony teacher Matsumoto-sensei and my Noh teacher Udaka-sensei are such embodiments of philosophical history.  Their lives are molded on the ideals upheld by their art, and they engage their traditions in their own practice.  There is no other way to learn these master’s ideas beyond becoming their student, and to put what I’ve learned from them into words would require defining the subject-specific terms they use to express their ideas.  That would require a few books rather than a paragraph here.

It also becomes more difficult to look at thinkers of Japan’s past. It is impossible to untangle the various ideas from the oral tradition held by a living master.  There are so many voices compressed into the Japanese tradition – the great and fantastic characters of Buddhism, like Ippen or Ikkyu or courtiers like Sei Shonagon or Ki no Tsurayuki, who documented their lives in diaries and poetry.  The lives of Zeami and Zenchiku needn’t be forgotten here either.  The problem in applying this idea to most thinkers of the past, however, is then how do you reconstruct the life of a philosopher who left no texts of his own or who left texts that are not logical as we expect philosophy to be?  How do we interpret their work from outside the context of a society that doesn’t exist anymore?

Furthermore, the teachings of contemporary and historical thinkers alike are laced with mystery.  Discovering meaning through practice, esoteric mysticism, and aesthetic allusion cannot be sifted out, they are a fundamental part of their philosophies, but how could meaning be extracted from them?  It is the same problem as Nietzsche proposed when he said in his Self-Critique, he wished to look at scholarship through a lens of the arts, but at the arts through the lens of life itself.  In other words, he couldn’t find all the answers he wanted in scholarship and rational thinking and turned to the arts to gain more insight into life.  But how can the arts in turn be discussed in scholarship?  How can the philosophical ideals contained in art be written about?

Another German who immigrated to the states in WWII, Ernst Cassirer gave me the next clue: symbols.  Instead of defining the human being as a rational animal, he proposes we consider ourselves symbolical animals.  What differentiates us from animals is not that our thoughts are logical, but that our thoughts are one more step removed from reality, they are abstract, and therefore symbolic.  Whats more, symbols are universal.  “Universal applicability, owing to the fact that everything has a name, is one of the greatest prerogatives of human symbolism.” (An Essay on Man, p 56)  Symbols are not the bricks that build up our conception of the world, but the architectural structure by which we organize things.  Also, “a genuine human symbol is characterized not by its uniformity but by its versatility.  It is not rigid and inflexible but mobile.”(p 57)  A symbol is shaped by what we perceive.  For example, a dragon in Europe can have very similar or very different associations from a dragon in Asia.  It depends on the values a story-teller wishes to express in his story.  The fascination is in untangling the various threads of symbols to discover a philosophical idea, but I do not doubt it is possible.

From here, the main body of work begins.  Now I must put the ideas to the test in discovering the contents of the philosophy of Noh.  However, that is not the end of the work.  Working with symbols in and of themselves could lead in erroneous directions.  I read here that Cassirer lived completely in that world, and according to his daughter, he did things like put bottles of milk on the stove to warm them up.  Once warm enough, they promptly exploded. A connection between the world of symbols and the reality we live in must be maintained.  As I wrote before, the test of ones ideas is in practice, and nowhere is that more pronounced than in the traditional Japanese arts.  I do not know much about Daoism, but I imagine this idea of practice is strongly influenced by its ideas of emphasizing “the path,” or process of acomplishing one’s goals.  The Dao or path character is found in almost all the traditional arts: sado (the way of tea), kado (the way of insence), budo (the way of martial arts).  That character doesn’t exist in Noh, because Noh goes one step further and becomes entertainment, but the practice of Noh, it’s training and development in a young performer, is based on the same principles of “the way.”

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.

Of course, the pictures that Wade Davis presents along with his explanations are from all corners of the globe, from the Tibetans high in the Himalayas, to the Indian tribes of the Sierra Nevadas, to the Zombies of Haiti, but these things can happen also within one culture.  For, to put it simply, as soon as one idea is trumpeted as the one and only answer, all other questions are dismissed.  In our internationally commercialized, post-industrial culture one such answer is empiricism.  It is the belief that our senses provide us with all the information necessary to understand the world.  Another such answer is logic, be it inductive or deductive reasoning.  Don’t these answers dismiss too many questions?  What about our dreams, the far reaches of our minds and spirits, or the beauty of an awesome landscape?  These things have been dismissed as flights of imagination or entertainment, while science continues to give us the fruits of progress, but even in the most scientific and progressive of nations, has not another, spiritual heart been forgotten or at least hidden deep in the past like a skeleton in the closet?

Here in Japan, I see exactly that phenomenon in the people’s ignorance about their country’s legends and myths.  The gods are confined to their shrines, where they can be approached when convention necessitates it at births, weddings, and the New Year.  The gods strength to connect the people with their landscape is forgotten as the landscape is molded to conform with logical and scientific progress.  Alex Kerr speaks plenty on the subject of concrete riverbeds and mountainsides.  But what is lost is more than a rich biosphere, but a rich state of spiritual being.

You may say, “Myths can’t be true!  They are fabricated stories from a distant, uneducated past.” You must admit, however, that in many cases an explanation falls short of a metaphorical story. Think only of Plato’s allegory of the cave, and you may see my point.  Myths are stories containing the most valuable kernels of human insight that have been passed down through generations over the centuries.  Admittedly, stories need the context of their culture.  They need a listener who can translate their kernel of insight into a tool that helps decipher what it means to be human.

In Japan, the culture that created Noh has dissappeared, and the people who understand the insight of its stories are few.  A Noh performance has become the most luxurious opportunity for a nap, and according to some, even the performers simply act their part without knowing its meaning.  What will it take for listeners to be able to understand the cultural code of Noh?  To anyone who reads this post, I would like to hear from you.  How can you make one culture intelligible to another?  Is it even possible, or will the other culture be interpreted in terms of the primary culture?  If it is possible to understand another culture on its own terms, how long does it take?  Is there any way to compress the time needed so that the culture’s pearls of wisdom can be communicated more widely?  Please tell me what you think.

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.

A video of “Azuma Asobi” that I uploaded to YouTube.  Sorry about the bad quality, but I decided to put it up anyway to give you a rough idea what the dance is like.

After the kagura performance, young boys performed bugaku.  Bugaku is a dance form of the ancient imperial court.  It is said to be heavily influenced by continental dances that were brought to Japan along the silk road.  The piece the boys performed, however, is entitled “Azuma Asobi,” which a heavenly maiden first danced on the plains where Tokyo now stands.  This dance is therefore assumed to be purely Japanese, and a Noh play about the heavenly maiden entitled Hagoromo exists and is regularly performed on the contemporary Noh stage.

The musicians who accompanied “Azuma Asobi.”

The music for bugaku is very different from that for noh.  Whereas noh is accompanied by a flute and two or three drummers who communicate with vocal calls to one another, the performance of “Azuma Asobi” was accompanied by a koto (Japanese zither) held by two assistants, a percussion instrument made of two wooden paddles (left, next to koto player), a transverse flute, and reeded woodwinds, which I can’t find in the picture but can hear in the video recording.

Behind the musicians, you can see a large canvas tarp, which was protecting a massive drum – one of two – from the rain.  These drums are usually on display in the Kasuga Shrine museum.

A dengaku performer with a ridiculous hat and high clogs.

The next performances were dengaku, which was a competitor to Noh when it was being developed in the 14th century.  No doubt there were strong influences from dengaku in the formation of Noh, but at the Onmatsuri all I saw were the backs of the performers all lined up in a row, one of whom had an elaborate hat to rival that of Miss Chiquita Banana.  He also wore unusualy high clogs, perhaps to balance his height with the height of his hat.

By the time the sky was growing dark, I was too wet and tired of standing to stay for the end of the dengaku performance, much less for the sarugaku performance by Noh actors, which was not until late in the program.  As I left, I took a picture of the entrance to the temporary shrine for the festival that was built outside the grounds of Kasuga Shrine.  The white umbrellas you see in the back of the picture behind the crowds of spectators are protecting the dengaku performers from the rain.

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 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.

September 9th is a holiday that dates back to China.  It is one of the five sekku 節句 holidays that mark the changing of the seasons.  They all fall on days with when the month and date are the same.  The 7th day of the 7th month is the famous Tanabata festival, in which the celestial maiden Orihime is visited by her lover Hikoboshi from across the milky way if the weather is clear.  People celebrate by decorating bamboo branches with origami and strips of paper inscribed with their wishes.  However, the 9th day of the 9th month, which is called Choyo, has not gained as much popularity in contemporary times and remains a holiday celebrated only in places rich in tradition such as Horin-ji.  However, the Choyo celebration at Horin-ji seemed to glorify the temple’s deep ties to the Asian continent.

Horin-ji is not a vast, stunning temple which impress foreign visitors with its grandness.  Although it is in Arashiyama, a popular tourist destination in western Kyoto, it is probably overlooked in favor of the large Tenryu-ji complex across the river, but Horin-ji is older.  Something I found out about Horin-ji afterwards that I found interesting is that it was originally built by the Hata family in 713.  The Hata family were closely related to the imperial family at the time, although they were immigrants from the Korean peninsula.  They had brought continental agriculture, technology, religion, and culture to the Japanese archipelago and settled in the Arashiyama area of Kyoto, which prospered under their efforts.  Perhaps it is because of this continental connection that Horin-ji still celebrates the Choyo holiday of Chinese origin.

The Noh performance was held right in front of the Buddhist altar as is visible in the video I posted earlier.  The bodhisattva worshiped there is Kokuzo (Akasagarbha), a bodhisattva whose wisdom is said to be as boundless as empty space.  Before the Noh performance, however, there was a service to the bodhisattva, in which four monks of the temple dressed in purple and orange robes (one in all black robes), faced the altar and chanted, the beginning and end of their chant being accompanied by the droning pipes of gagaku or ancient court music.  The altar itself was decorated with countless chrysanthemums, which if I could understand the the priests’ chant correctly are adored by the bodhisattva, but also mark the season.

That may be one reason for all the chrysanthemums, but what I found even more interesting was yet another very prominent connection to the Asian continent, namely that to the right of the main altar in a smaller alcove, a life-sized doll of a boy dressed in “Chinese style” was enshrined surrounded by many chrysanthemums and with fruit and rice offerings in front of him.  This was without a doubt Makura-Jido, the character which appeared also in Sensei’s performance.  The story takes place in China.  A young boy exiled from the imperial court to a place deep in the mountains lives for 700 years by drinking the dew that he collects from cotton placed on chrysanthemum flowers.  In front of the main altar were two rows of large, gorgeous chrysanthemums with colorful pieces of cotton (you can see them in the first picture).

After the priests’ had finished their prayers and all the people gathered had placed chrysanthemums in front of the altar, space was cleared for the Noh dance to begin, for it wasn’t a full Noh, but the culminating dance of the piece “Makura Jido.”  The musicians and chorus appeared and then, in the small doorway on the far side of the altar, a living version of the doll in the alcove appeared, came in front of the altar, and began to dance.  Although I knew it must be Sensei, perhaps due to the spiritual energy in the temple, it seemed like the child Jido was dancing in front of us, but is was all too short.  After the performance, I found a Tatsushige’s student Ben, who happens to be from Belgium, who asked me who had performed, because he had thought it was a young man in his mid 20s.  It was one of the finest Noh performances I have ever seen, because Sensei reached beyond the technicalities of the performance to bring to life the supernatural spirit of his character.

After the performance, chysanthemum sake was served to everyone from the audience.  May all of us enjoy long lives as well.

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.