five schools into which the Nō is divided, their characteristics and
their differences—these are matters of interest to the initiated alone.
The Japanese are essentially a laughter-loving people. They are highly susceptible of tragic emotions, but they turn gladly to the brighter phases of life. Hence a need was soon felt of something to dispel the pessimism of the Nō, and that something took the form of comedies played in the interludes The Farce. of the Nō and called Kyōgen (mad words). The Kyōgen needs no elaborate description: it is a pure farce, never immodest or vulgar.
The classic drama Nō and its companion the Kyōgen had two children, the Jōruri and the Kabuki. They were born at the close of the 16th century and they owed their origin to the growing influence of the commercial class, who asserted The Theatre. a right to be amused but were excluded from enjoyment of the aristocratic Nō and the Kyōgen. The Jōruri is a dramatic ballad, sung or recited to the accompaniment of the samisen and in unison with the movements of puppets. It came into existence in Kiōto and was thence transferred to Yedo (Tōkyō), where the greatest of Japanese playwrights, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), and a musician of exceptional talent, Takemoto Gidayū, collaborated to render this puppet drama a highly popular entertainment. It flourished for nearly 200 years in Yedo, and is still occasionally performed in Osaka. Like the Nō the Jōruri dealt always with sombre themes, and was supplemented by the Kabuki (farce). This last owed its inception to a priestess who, having abandoned her holy vocation at the call of love, espoused dancing as a means of livelihood and trained a number of girls for the purpose. The law presently interdicted these female comedians (onna-kabuki) in the interests of public morality, and they were succeeded by “boy comedians” (wakashu-kabuki) who simulated women’s ways and were vetoed in their turn, giving place to yaro-kabuki (comedians with queues). Gradually the Kabuki developed the features of a genuine theatre; the actor and the playwright were discriminated, and, the performances taking the form of domestic drama (Wagoto and Sewamono) or historical drama (Aragoto or Jidaimono), actors of perpetual fame sprang up, as Sakata Tōjurō and Ichikawa Danjinrō (1660–1704). Mimetic posture-dances (Shosagoto) were always introduced as interludes; past and present indiscriminately contributed to the playwright’s subjects; realism was carried to extremes; a revolving stage and all mechanical accessories were supplied; female parts were invariably taken by males, who attained almost incredible skill in these simulations; a chorus—relic of the Nō—chanted expositions of profound sentiments or thrilling incidents; and histrionic talent of the very highest order was often displayed. But the Kabuki-za and its yakusha (actors) remained always a plebeian institution. No samurai frequented the former or associated with the latter. With the introduction of Western civilization in modern times, however, the theatre ceased to be tabooed by the aristocracy. Men and women of all ranks began to visit it; the emperor himself consented (1887) to witness a performance by the great stars of the stage at the private residence of Marquis Inouye; a dramatic reform association was organized by a number of prominent noblemen and scholars; drastic efforts were made to purge the old historical dramas of anachronisms and inconsistencies, and at length a theatre (the Yuraku-za) was built on purely European lines, where instead of sitting from morning to night witnessing one long-drawn-out drama with interludes of whole farces, a visitor may devote only a few evening-hours to the pastime. The Shosagoto has not been abolished, nor is there any reason why it should be. It has graces and beauties of its own. There remains to be noted the incursion of amateurs into the histrionic realm. In former times the actor’s profession was absolutely exclusive in Japan. Children were trained to wear their fathers’ mantles, and the idea that a non-professional could tread the hallowed ground of the stage did not enter any imagination. But with the advent of the new regimen in Meiji days there arose a desire for social plays depicting the life of the modern generation, and as these “croppy dramas” (zampatsu-mono)—so called in allusion to the European method of cutting the hair close—were not included in the repertoire of the orthodox theatre, amateur troupes (known as sōshi-yakusha) were organized to fill the void. Even Shakespeare has been played by these amateurs, and the abundant wit of the Japanese is on the way to enrich the stage with modern farces of unquestionable merit.
The Tokugawa era (1603–1867), which popularized the drama, had other memorable effects upon Japanese literature. Yedo, the shōgun’s capital, displaced Kiōto as the centre of literary activity. Its population of more than a million, including all sorts and conditions of men—notably wealthy Literature of the Tokugawa Era. merchants and mechanics—constituted a new audience to which authors had to address themselves; and an unparalleled development of mental activity necessitated wholesale drafts upon the Chinese vocabulary. To this may be attributed the appearance of a group of men known as kangakusha (Chinese scholars). The most celebrated among them were: Fujiwara Seikwa (1560–1619), who introduced his countrymen to the philosophy of Chu-Hi; Hayashi Rasan (1583–1657), who wrote 170 treatises on scholastic and moral subjects; Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714), teacher of a fine system of ethics; Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), historian, philosopher, statesman and financier: and Muro Kiusō, the second great exponent of Chu-Hi’s philosophy. “Japan owes a profound debt of gratitude to the kangakusha of that time. For their day and country they were emphatically the salt of earth.” But naturally not all were believers in the same philosophy. The fervour of the followers of Chu-Hi (the orthodox school) could not fail to provoke opposition. Thus some arose who declared allegiance to the idealistic intuitionalism of Wang Yang-ming, and others advocated direct study of the works of Confucius and Mencius. Connected with this rejection of Chu-Hi were such eminent names as those of Itō Junsai (1627–1718), Itō Tōgai (1617–1736), Ogyu Sōrai (1666–1728) and Dazai Shuntai (1679–1747). These Chinese scholars made no secret of their contempt for Buddhism, and in their turn they were held in aversion by the Buddhists and the Japanese scholars (wagakusha), so that the second half of the 18th century was a time of perpetual wrangling and controversy. The worshippers at the shrine of Chinese philosophy evoked a reactionary spirit of nationalism, just as the excessive worship of Occidental civilization was destined to do in the 19th century.
Apart from philosophical researches and the development of the drama, as above related, the Tokugawa era is remarkable for folk-lore, moral discourses, fiction and a peculiar form of poetry. This last does not demand much attention. Its principal variety is the haikai, which is nothing more than a tanka shorn of its concluding fourteen syllables, and therefore virtually identical with the hokku, already described. The name of Bashō is immemorially associated with this kind of lilliputian versicle, which reached the extreme of impressionism. A more important addition to Japanese literature was made in the 17th century in the form of children’s tales (Otogibanashi). They are charmingly simple and graceful, and they have been rendered into English again and again since the beginning of the Meiji era. But whether they are to be regarded as genuine folk-lore or merely as a branch of the fiction of the age when they first appeared in book form, remains uncertain. Of fiction proper there was an abundance. The pioneer of this kind of literature is considered to have been Saikaku (1641–1693), who wrote sketches of everyday life as he saw it, short tales of some merit and novels which deal with the most disreputable phases of human existence. His notable successors in the same line were two men of Kiōto, named Jishō (1675–1745) and Kiseki (1666–1716). They had their own publishing house, and its name Hachimonji-ya (figure-of-eight store) came to be indelibly associated with this kind of literature. But these men did little more than pave the way for the true romantic novel, which first took shape under the hand of Santō Kyōden (1761–1816), and culminated in the works of Bakin, Tanehiko, Samba, Ikku, Shunsui and their successors. Of nearly all the books in this class it may be said that they deal largely in sensationalism and pornography, though it does not follow that their language is either coarse or licentious. The life of the virtuous Japanese woman being essentially uneventful, these romancists not unnaturally sought their female types among dancing-girls and courtesans. The books were profusely illustrated with woodcuts and chromoxylographs from pictures of the ukiyoe masters, who, like the playwright, the actor and the romancer, ministered to the pleasure of the “man in the street.” Brief mention must also be made of two other kinds of books belonging to this epoch; namely, the Shingaku-sho (ethical essays) and the Jitsuroku-mono (true records). The latter were often little more than historical novels founded on facts; and the former, though nominally intended to engraft the doctrines of Buddhism and Shintō upon the philosophy of China, were really of rationalistic tendency.
Although the incursions made into Chinese philosophy and the revival of Japanese traditions during the Tokugawa Epoch contributed materially to the overthrow of feudalism and the restoration of the Throne’s administrative power, the immediate tendency of the last two events was to The Meiji Era. divert the nation’s attention wholly from the study of either Confucianism or the Record of Ancient Matters. A universal thirst set in for Occidental science and literature, so that students occupied themselves everywhere with readers and grammars modelled on European lines rather than with the Analects or the Kojiki. English at once became the language of learning. Thus the three colleges which formed the nucleus of the Imperial University of Tōkyō were presided over by a graduate of Michigan College (Professor Toyama), a member of the English bar (Professor Hōzumi) and a graduate of Cambridge (Baron Kikuchi). If Japan was eminently fortunate in the men who directed her political career at that time, she was equally favoured in those that presided over her literary culture. Fukuzawa Yukichi, founder of the Keiō Gijuku, now one of Japan’s four universities, did more than any of his contemporaries by writing and speaking to spread a knowledge of the West, its ways and its thoughts, and Nakamura Keiu laboured in the same cause by translating Smiles’s Self-help and Mill’s Representative Government. A universal geography (by Uchida Masao); a history of nations (by Mitsukuri Rinshō); a translation of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia by the department of education; Japanese renderings of Herbert Spencer and of Guizot and Buckle—all these made their appearance during the first fourteen years of the epoch. The influence of politics may be strongly traced in the literature of that time, for the first romances produced by the new school were all of a political character: Keikoku Bidan (Model for Statesmen, with Epaminondas for hero) by Yano Fumio;
