Time and Space
In studying Japan, it has become conventional to refer to most of Japan's important premodern historical eras by the name of a geographical site from which political power was exercised. In some cases the geographical sites are cities, in others they are as small as neighborhoods. There are certain inconsistencies and inaccuracies in this scheme, but they are not of much significance for our purposes here. Below you see a composite map of Japan with the relevant sites and dates indicated. A more detailed explanation of each site and the historical period it relates to follows below. (Note that Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaidô, is irrelevant to this periodization, and it has been left incomplete on the map.
The Asuka period takes its name from a place toward the south of the Yamato plain in west central Japan. In the days when Japan was first emerging as a centralized political culture, the site of government was moved frequently, but several of its earliest capitals were located somewhere near Asuka.
In 710, a splendid new and "permanent" capital was completed toward the north of the Yamato plain, based on Chinese urban planning models. That capital was called Nara and it gave its name to the period of Japanese history from 710 to 794 during which Japan undertook a major reorganization of its political structure and looked increasingly toward continental (primarily Chinese) models throughout its culture.
The "permanent" capital Nara was abandoned in 784 for a temporary location in a place called Nagaoka, and then for a much more permanent capital called Heian-kyô. Heian-kyô eventually came to be called Kyoto, and was Japan's official capital from 794 to 1869. It gives its name to a period of brilliant cultural achievement from 794 to 1192, the Heian period.
In the late twelfth century, although the emperor and much of the imperial political establishment remained in Heian (i.e., Kyoto), a rival power centered on the military figure of the shôgun, grew up in the east, based in the coastal town of Kamakura. The period from 1192 to 1338 is known, therefore, as the Kamakura period. During the Kamakura period, noh and kyôgen began to put down roots in the preliminary form of sarugaku. The play Okina is most plausibly a product of the Kamakura period.
After long struggles between political forces in Kyoto and Kamakura, the Kamakura Shogunate was eventually displaced by a new shogunate which returned to Kyoto and settled its first headquarters in a neigborhood of the city called Muromachi. That neighborhood has given its name to the period of Japanese history from 1338 to 1568. It is a time of much political upset, but extraordinary cultural richness and diversity. Late in the 1300s, noh emerged with a distinct identity from its origins in sarugaku, and began to differentiate itself from kyôgen. Most of the noh plays which remain in the current repertory were first written and performed in the Muromachi period, although many of the performance conventions used in noh today cannot be traced back any further than the early Edo period. Kyôgen also began to develop an independent identity during the Muromachi period.
Japan descended into a period of wide-ranging civil war and political disorder in the late fifteenth century. In the end of the sixteenth century, however, three warriors managed to destroy the political power of the Muromachi shoguns completely and to centralize Japan in largely new and tighter ways. The period during which this centralization took place is often called the Momoyama period after the Momoyama Castle of the second of the three figures, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. (The castle was located just south of Kyoto.) The Momoyama period was the first time during which Japan was exposed to European culture in an extensive way, and it was as well a time of remarkable commercial development. Kyoto, which had been laid waste during the late fifteenth century, grew up again around a new class of merchants and artisans. Momoyama was an important time for all four genres of drama we are studying. Noh and kyôgen were popular throughout urban society, in provincial centers, and at shrines and temples. Meanwhile, a three-stringed instrument which was to become the shamisen was introduced from the continent through Okinawa; shamisen instrumental music and varieties of narrative performance which had been popular for a long while laid the ground for the development of jôruri. Heterogenous performances along the Kamo River began to attract crowds in Kyoto. These would lead to kabuki.
The Edo period begins in (shall we say) 1600. It marks the completion of the process of centralization begun during the Momoyama, and takes its name from the shogunal capital of Edo (present day Tokyo) where the third of Japan's Momoyama unifiers eventually settled his capital. That third figure was named Tokugawa Ieyasu, and the Edo period is also known as the Tokugawa period after his surname. The Edo period was the most stable and politically ordered in Japan's history since the Heian period, and it lasted a comparably long time, until the revolution of 1868 and the formal transfer of the imperial capital from Kyoto to Edo (which then became "Tokyo") in 1869. But Edo as a city didn't become culturally preeminent until the latter half of the Edo period. In the early Edo period, Kyoto was still the cultural and intellectual heart of Japan. Nearby, however, Osaka began to emerge as an important center of the rice trade and of merchant class culture.
In the Edo period, the noh and kyôgen eventually became the exclusive province of the samurai class. Meanwhile, jôruri flowered in Osaka in the form of Gidayu-bushi, the music of the bunraku theater. Kabuki developed rapidly in Kyoto and spread to both Osaka and, more significantly, to Edo. In the eighteenth century, the cultural balance began to sway toward the east and Edo, and with it, new forms of jôruri, Tokiwazu-bushi, Kiyomoto-bushi, and Shinnai-bushi were born.
The four genres of theater we focus on have developed further and continue to be performed in the modern period. The modern period no longer takes its terms from place names, but rather from the official names of imperial eras. Those names are Meiji (1868-1912), Taishô (1912-1926), Shôwa (1926-1989) and Heisei (1989-present).
Basics