ORIGIN OF KABUKI
CHAPTER VII
O-KUNI OF IZUMO
To a woman, O-Kuni, a ritual dancer attached to the great Shinto Shrine of Izumo, in the “Province of the Gods”, belongs the credit of founding the popular theatre, some time in the year 1596, on the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto.
According to Izumo O-Kuni Den, or The Biography of O-Kuni of Izumo, in the possession of the late Baron Senge, from whose family come the hereditary ritualists of the Shrine, O-Kuni was a miko, or sacred dancer. Her father was called Nakamura Sanyemon, and served the Shrine in the capacity of an artisan. The family name of Nakamura was derived from the district of Nakamura in Kitsuki, where O-Kuni’s family lived, the site of the great Shrine of Izumo then as now.
O-Kuni left Kitsuki on a pilgrimage, so the story goes, wandering through several provinces, performing her dance, and asking for contributions for the repair of the Shrine, and at last reached Kyoto. Evidently the gay capital exerted such a powerful fascination over her, that she felt no inclination to return to her duties in connection with the Shrine. There is no record that tells of O-Kuni’s change of heart, or what eventually prompted her to set up a platform on the banks of the Kamo, where were to be found all the motley train of entertainers who flourished at that time.
Kyoto, the birthplace of the popular theatre, was, when O-Kuni made her appearance, a city of half-a-million inhabitants. Murdoch says in his History of Japan: “It is well to remember that if Japan had no Free Cities, she had what Germany, or indeed any other European country, had not,—a single great city with a population of half-a-million. Such Kyoto was even at one of the lowest ebbs in its prosperity at the date of Xavier’s visit to it in 1551. In 1467 at the outbreak of the war of Odin, it contained 160,000 families, or, perhaps, 900,000 souls. Few cities in contemporary Europe could boast even a tenth of that population.” Captain Francis Brinkley also refers to the splendours of Kyoto palaces and fine residences in the fifteenth century, and says that even men who made medicine or fortune-telling their professions and petty officials such as secretaries had stately residences.
Fenollosa in his Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art writes about Kyoto civilians, and as to the patrons of the artists, he asks: “Who were Okio’s patrons? Why, the silk weavers, bronze casters, the embroiderers and fine lacquerers, the æsthetic priests of Kyoto temples, the great potters grouped at the foot of Arashiyama, the great merchants who sent their fine wares all over Japan even to the daimyo’s yashiki.”
Such was Kyoto, the political as well as artistic centre of Japan, when O-Kuni gave the impetus that started the movement to establish Kabuki, the people’s stage, that to-day has inherited all the wealth of past materials and is turned resolutely toward the promise of the future.
Her performances were of the simplest character. She has been described as wearing a priest’s robe of black silk, with a small metal Buddhist gong suspended from her neck by a vermilion silk cord, and as she struck the gong with a mallet, she danced and chanted a Buddhist sutra.
Seiseiin Ihara, Kabuki’s leading historian and one of the prominent dramatic critics of Tokyo, who was born in the shadow of the Shrine of Izumo, has taken great pains to gather from the old records the story of O-Kuni. He says that it may seem incredible that a Buddhist dance should have been performed by the miko of Izumo Shrine, but he points out that it was the period when Shinto, or the “Way of the Gods”, the reverence and worship of the ancestors of the race and departed souls who were great in life, and Buddhism, the “Way of Buddha”, or the faith in a universal being and a future state of happiness, lived peacefully together. Buddhist priests were prominent at Izumo, and a bronze image of Buddha was placed in front of the Shrine where incense was burned, and the sutras were recited by eight females who performed to musical instruments used in Buddhist as well as Shinto ceremonies. To-day the combination seems hard to believe, since Shintoism and Buddhism are strictly separated.