Overview of Nogaku in Japan

Nogaku is a very recent name, and from the middle of the Heian Period (782-1185) until the Edo Period (1603-1868), the art was known as "Sarugaku" or "Sarugaku no Nogaku". In addition, since the early Sarugaku and the later Sarugaku were so different from each other during the Northern and Southern Dynasties of Japan, Japanese academics today refer to the former as "ancient Sarugaku" and the latter as "Nohaku".

●There are many differences in the analysis of the origins of Nogaku, but it is well recognized in the academic world that Nogaku is "a collection of both ancient Japanese and foreign performing arts". Many cultural styles have played a role in the formation, development, and stereotyping of Nogaku. Which also includes China's ancient culture, the ancient ape music from China's ancient Nuo opera has *** with the origin, is the evolution of the rituals from the gods; late ape music after the Nengle is from China's ancient military theater evolved.

Ancient Japan has long had a very colorful songs and dances, including praying to the gods and ancestors of the ceremony, praising the production of labor songs, on the subject of war heroes hymns, as well as depicting men and women in love with life songs and dances and so on. In the folklore, there were also wandering performers such as puppet masters, youma (women), and wizards, who were the performers and disseminators of folk theater for a long period of history. In Nara and the early Heian period, which is equivalent to the Tang Dynasty in China, the kabuki, dance music and loose music from the continental countries and the Korean Peninsula were introduced to Japan one after another, and then they were performed in the court for a long time. In this way, the ancient arts of Japan, using China, Korea, and Rinyi as a medium, were connected with early performances in India and European countries, etc., which greatly improved the level of music, dance, and performing arts in Japan, cultivated a lot of artistic talents, and even preserved the valuable artistic treasures that had been lost in other countries later on. The combination of foreign elements and national traditions led to the emergence of a period of high national culture in which "a hundred different kinds of theater were practiced". After the Kamakura period, the new samurai class replaced the old aristocracy. Religious culture also underwent great changes, and the independent development of national culture was increasingly emphasized. At this time, the art of theater performance was combined with widespread religious activities, with various performances based at temples and shrines in various regions. Ennin, Tanakaku, and Sarugaku became popular. By the twelfth and third centuries, a number of professional theater groups (za) had appeared, and a hereditary system of entertainers had begun. In the Muromachi period, a more mature form of theater arose under the influence of our Song dynasty daiku and Yuan dynasty miscellaneous dramas.

●The earliest record of foreign music being played in Japan is generally believed to be a passage in which the King of Silla sent 80 Silla musicians to Japan at the time of the funeral of Emperor Yunkyo in 453, and 100 years later, in 554, it is also recorded that musicians sent by Baekje of the Korean Peninsula to replace his predecessor had arrived at the time of Emperor Kotomine. In addition, there is a record of the arrival of Meiji Kabuki music (Kurenai) in 612, and during the reign of Emperor Temmu in 684, there is a record of the performance of music from the three countries of the Korean Peninsula. From the 5th to the 7th centuries, most of the records of music in Japan relate to music from the Korean peninsula. Later on, Japan sent an envoy to the Sui Dynasty in 607, and then started sending envoys to the Tang Dynasty in 630, and it is believed that Chinese music and dance began to be introduced to Japan as a result of this. Fujiwara Manatoshi (807-897) entered Chang'an, the capital of the Tang Dynasty, in 835 as an envoy to the Tang Dynasty, where he studied the pipa with Dr. Lian Chengwu, who was a pipa expert at the time. It is said that he returned home with a Tang pipa, brought back Tang music scores, and continued to teach pipa after his return to Japan, so there is no doubt that Tang music was introduced to Japan. As early as 701, the Daiho Ryojo (Great Treasure Ruling) stipulated the establishment of a Yakura Ryori in the Ministry of Governance, specializing in the performance of music and the training of musicians. The music performed by this organization included ceremonial music handed down from ancient Japan as well as a variety of foreign music. This shows that Japan had placed the performance of foreign music under the specific management of the state organization, and that the state's prestige was enhanced through the performance of music for foreign ambassadors.

●The main types of music and dance that were transmitted from mainland China to the Japanese islands via the Korean Peninsula or directly were kabuki, maiko, and sangaku. Kabuki refers to music and dance plays performed in the open air, i.e., the music and dance of China, which was named after the seven sections of music set up in the beginning of the Sui Dynasty, namely, Kokubuki, Chingshang Kabuki, Goryeo Kabuki, Tenchu Kabuki, Anguo Kabuki, Kuzi Kabuki, and Bunkang Kabuki, and was called Kabuki Dance after it was imported into Japan. According to legend, in the eighth year of Emperor Yang's Daiye (612), after the naturalization of the Baekje people who had studied music and dance in Wu, they began to teach Kabuki in Japan, and because Prince Shengde loved Kabuki at that time, they gathered a group of Japanese young people to study with them, and set up Kabuki masters and Kabuki students in the staff orders of the Yarakuraku Liao, and finally designated this dance as a Buddhist ritual, and Kabuki was gradually popularized in Japan. Then kabuki gradually became popular in Japan and had a great influence on Japanese Noh music. The kabuki music programs that were handed down to Japan are: "Shishimai", "Wukong", "Vajra", "Garuda", "Brahman", "Kunlun", "Rex", "Daikoku", "Drunken Hu", and "Wudelaku", which are called the ten kabuki music programs.

●Sanle was originally an ancient Chinese music and dance, "Zhou Li. The Zhou Rites. Banner man" contains "the palm teaching dance scattered music, dance razor music." Zheng Xuan note: "scattered music wild people for the music of the good, such as today's yellow door advocate." Originally refers to the Zhou Dynasty folk music and dance; to the North and South Dynasties period, became synonymous with the hundred theater. It includes various kinds of acrobatics, illusions (such as carrying a tripod, swallowing a sword, and spitting fire), music and dances for costumed characters, fish and dragon mania for costumed animals, and the "Huang Gong of the East Sea" with simple stories, and so on. After Sagaku was introduced to Japan, it was first practiced by Sagaku households appointed by the Nara court, and then abolished in the first year of the Erikyo period (782 A.D.), the beginning of the Heian period. As a result, Sagaku was passed down to the people, and many changes and developments occurred. It is said that Sagaku developed into Noh through the intermediary form of Sarugaku, and this is accepted in almost all textbooks on the history of theater and art history in Japan today. The appearance of Sagaku, which was popular in the Japanese islands, can be seen in the Sling-Bow Pictures and the Shinsei Koraku Pictures, which are kept in the Shokurain Museum in Nara City, and includes acrobatics such as ball tossing, pole-vaulting, gun-twisting, stilt-walking, magic tricks such as sword-swallowing and fire-smithing, puppetry, ventriloquism, and comical simulation, which are similar to those of the Chinese Sagaku. In the court, Sagaku is performed as a mundane music corresponding to dance music, and as an after-party to sumo festivals and kagura. The Nara Imperial Court had a policy of protecting the kagura households. However, since the Heian court disbanded the kagura, kagura performers have gone to the private sector and have been enshrined in shrines and temples in various places, as well as performing at temple festivals and other occasions. After the middle of the Heian period, Sangaku became divided, and some of the acrobatic elements were inherited by folkloric artists such as Tanakaku, and simulated performances were developed in the descendants of Sarugaku, from which a full-fledged form of theater, Nogaku, eventually emerged.

●About the appearance of Heian Sarugaku. Fujiwara Akihira, in the mid-eleventh century, showed it in great detail in his "Shin Sarugaku no Ki" (Chronicle of the New Sarugaku). He lists nearly thirty types of Sarugaku performances at the Inari Festival in Kyoto. They can be categorized into four types: stand-alone performances, acrobatic performances, simulated kabuki, and simulated small plays. In the first category, the incantation master, the field music, the puppet, and so on, are different from the Sarugaku system, and it is just a different kind of performing art that participates in the Sarugaku performance; in the second category, it is the inheritance of the original loose music; in the third category, it is the simulation of a single action; and in the fourth category, it already has the characters playing, and the simple story is cleaned up, and the one that is the closest to the later theater form is, for example, "Kyoto children's false Zorai, the easterner's first visit to Kyoto", which performs a play full of city people.

●In the middle of the Heian period, the name "Sarugaku" was changed to the Japanese name "Sarugaku". Why was this change made? There are two general theories in the Japanese academic world. One theory is that "Sarugaku" is a loan word for "Sangaku", and that "Sarugaku" and "Sangaku" are pronounced similarly. The two words "ape" and "scatter" were pronounced similarly and were transferred to blackmail, and they started from linguistics, cited similar examples and searched for the records of mixing the two in historical materials; another view: it was because the macaque's art in the scatter music was very impressive, and its art of sounding the bank gradually became the style of this music. This is considered to be a simple view that puts the effort on the word "ape" itself, rather than looking for the reason on the pronunciation alone.

●The Heian culture, which was dominated by the Heian nobles, who were very elegant, began to decline at the end of the Heian period (the end of the 12th century). And with the collapse of the legal official system, the change in the military system, the development of the manor economy and many other factors. The samurai class, a new force that stood out from the local lords, began to take the opportunity to enter the center of power. The struggle for power within the court led to two civil rebellions, the "Bowen Rebellion" and the "Heiji Rebellion". The power of the Ping clan and other Wu family groups grew rapidly after the civil unrest was quelled, and they were even equal to the Regent's Guan in the court. The conflict between the various forces within the Bukiya intensified, and the Minamoto clan and the Taira clan clashed head-on, with the Minamoto clan emerging victorious. In July 1192, Minamoto no Yoritomo opened a shogunate in Kamakura and became the "Shogun for the Recruitment of the Barbarians", thus starting the so-called Bukka politics, and the Kamakura period began. The Minamoto clan died three generations later, and the Hojo clan continued to maintain the shogunate. After the "Seikyu Rebellion" (1221), the imperial power declined and the nobility became more corrupt. The powerful Kamakura Shogunate strengthened its control over the samurai by enacting the Gosei no Shimei (1232), a code of law for the samurai society, which established ethical concepts, moral norms, and codes of conduct that were different from those of the previous generation of nobles, and consolidated the system of the "goshogun," a system of decrees defining the relationship of masters and subordinates between the shoguns and the samurai. The relationship between the shogun and the samurai was defined in the form of a decree. This marked the establishment of the Middle Ages culture.

●But the transformation of culture was a gradual process, the Kamakura period was still dominated by the corrupt and rotten culture of the Ministers of State, and it was impossible for the Bukiya, who were very deficient in education and learning, to create a new culture with the characteristics of the Bukiya in a short period of time, and the so-called "Bukiya culture" at this time actually had two sides, one was the inheritance of the Heian nobility, and the other was the inheritance of the Heian nobility. The so-called "Bukiya culture" at this time actually had two sides, one inherited from the Heian aristocracy and the other was born within the samurai society. The leaders of the samurai groups in the late Heian period, if we trace their origins, such as the Minamoto clan and the Taira clan, both came from the imperial family, and they served as retainers of the emperor's nobility for a long time. Even after the opening of Kamakura, a large number of samurai stayed in Kyoto and were gradually influenced by the culture of the nobility. It can be said that the samurai brought the local culture to Kyoto and spread the aristocratic culture to various places, playing the role of cultural communication. However, with the development of the times, the traditional culture of the aristocrats gradually declined, and the new culture centered on the samurai gradually became dominant, and at the same time, took the first step towards populist. After the collapse of the aristocracy and the rise of the local samurai, the phenomenon of "the lower class over the upper class" gradually became a common phenomenon, and the alternating development of the various classes led to a constant change in the composition of the audience for the arts. As a result, artistic exchanges developed among artists from various regions. One of the performing arts of this period that had a great influence on the creation of Noh music in later times was Yanni and Tengaku.

●Ennin, also known as Yorai Ennin or Ennin Maiko, is a feast after a great puja in a temple, and is performed as an entertainment at a banquet after a festival at a shrine. It began in the middle of the Heian period, flourished in the Kamakura period, and declined after the middle of the Muromachi period, when Noh music flourished. This art form is of great significance as a link between the development of Sagaku and Nogaku. The repertoire of noh is diverse, independent and unrelated. It includes the elegant music of the court nobles, including mairaku, kagura, shimaraku, and ronryu, as well as miscellaneous performances from the Heian period onward and imitative performances popularized in the Middle Ages. It can be seen that the yanen reflected the transitional nature of the cultural transition period of this era, maintaining the cultural characteristics of the court nobles, and reflecting the trend of popularization of performing arts to the people.

●The instrumentation of the Yanni was made up of drums in addition to the yagura, and there was a form of accompaniment in the form of "jihyo," which is a song. The stage was built on the lawn of the temple (Shishio), from which the word "Shiju" was derived, meaning the theater or the play itself. At the back of the stage, a backstage (Rakuya) was built, with a "V" shaped entrance for the actors to enter and exit. People watched the performances in the courtyard across the stage.

●Benin, which synthesized and absorbed yaku, sarugaku, dengaku, furyu, and other Kamakura-era performing arts, had a great influence on later generations of Noh music. However, because the yanen itself was dependent on the temple for its survival, after the military chaos of the Northern and Southern Dynasties and the warring states of the Muromachi period, the economy of the estates on which the temples depended collapsed, and it was no longer possible to sustain the yanen, causing it to go into decline. Only some powerful temple societies still maintain this form of performance, such as the Kasuga Wakamiya Gosai Festival at Kofuku-ji Temple in Nara, which still maintains this traditional play.

●Tanraku, on the other hand, is derived from the ancient musical dance "tamai," which was originally a ritual for praying for a good harvest, and then introduced to the court as an imperial musical dance, but was quickly suppressed by other musical dances and declined, and then some of them were accepted by the common people as tamai, and developed, and then became popular as the court abolished "shaku-ado," or "scattered musical households," which was a traditional form. The court abolished the "scattered music household" so that the scattered music spread to the folk, some scattered music artists scattered music and field music this folk arts combined to perform with acrobatic nature of the performance, such as "a foot", "high foot", "knife and foot", "a foot", "a foot", "a foot", "a foot", "a foot", "a foot", "a foot", "a foot" and "a foot". The combination of some loose music artists and this folk art ability of Tianle, performing performances with acrobatic nature, such as "One Foot", "High Foot", "Knife Jade" and so on, transformed Tianle from a kind of folk rituals into an art form. It was in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods that dengaku really became a professional performing art. The songs and dances in dengaku developed into dengaku noh, with repertoires such as "Kikusui," "Hapu," "Nisei," "Hokono Bokujo no Noh," "Shakuhachi noh," "Hiran Shangren noh," "Shijo Geki noh," "Genshi noh," and so on, and the madrigal portion of the repertoire, with which there are many noh madrigals, such as the "Yamayuki," "Sōtsuki," "Peko," and "Peko," is a ****** common one. The basic structure of these plays already had the system of sequence, break, and rush, in terms of dramatic components, in which there were storylines, dialogues, songs and dances, as well as stage movements, and singing and accompaniment by song teams and orchestras. In its heyday, it had a great influence on the development of Sarugaku-no, and when Sarugaku-no flourished with the support of the Shogun, it completed its historical mission and declined, and once again, it became a folkloric custom and has been preserved to this day.

●After the Eito Rebellion, the weakening of the shogunate system and the decline of the temple societies dealt a great blow to the development of noh. Only Hattori Kojiro Nobumitsu, his son Nagatoshi, and Kanashun Zenho gained popularity among the general audience through the creation of magnificent and dramatically varied repertoire. At this time, the Tanaka and Omi Sarugaku had almost died out, and in the second half of the 16th century, most of the Noh performers gradually turned to the powerful daimyo for support and protection.

● Nobunaga's love of noh play was **** well known. The subsequent Hideyoshi was an even more avid lover of Nogaku, and in addition to viewing it himself, he even performed it himself regularly, and financially supported the Yamato Sarugaku Shikata, enabling it to survive in the chaotic world. From then on, the noh performers gradually left the temples and shrines and turned to the samurai, and were put at the disposal of the martial arts family. As a result of this change, except for a few remaining small performing groups (Rakuzas) and the Yamato Sarugaku Shikiza, which had defected to the Bukka, all other Rakuzas basically disappeared in this era.

● During this period, with the splendid Momoyama culture as a backdrop, the luxurious and splendid style of the noh stage was established, the attire of the actors became more extravagant, and there were many famous artists in noh mask making, and the masks used in noh performances were basically all produced by this period. Scripts also developed, and famous artists of madrigals appeared frequently in this era. It can be said that the Warring States period was a period of transition and revival of Noh music.

●After Hideyoshi's death, Ieyasu, who had become Shogun of the Imperial Army, followed Hideyoshi's system. Noh performers were given the status of intellectuals and officials in order to protect the performers' ability to perform. The newly emerged Kita-ryu was also fostered as a first-class school, and became one of the five major schools along with the Yamato Shiza. With the transfer of these artists to Edo, the center of Noh, the artists were able to settle down after a long period of upheaval. At the same time, the local clans hired disciples of the five schools to perform and study in their own domains.

●But the Shogunate and the clans were both the protectors and the strict supervisors of nogaku, and by the frequent issuance of stern notices requiring the performers to practice their performance skills and to inherit the traditional techniques, the nogaku became more and more dignified, and the duration of a song became longer, and it became a severe technique that consumed energy and physical strength. At the same time, the small parts of nogaku, accompaniment, and kyogen, etc., split up independently to form many schools, and the system of guardianship of the main seat, centered on the "Daifu," was established in this era, and this was the result of the closure of the free development of nogaku in the flow of history.