Tani Family Nohgaku Materials

A Noh Collection Handed Down in a Hyuga Merchant House

One hundred and one objects make up the Tani Family Noh Materials: nineteen masks, eighty costumes, and two instruments, gathered over roughly five centuries and now kept at the Kyushu National Museum in Dazaifu. The collection did not come from a great daimyo house or a hereditary line of Noh actors. It belonged to a merchant family.

The Tani prospered as traders in the Nobeoka domain of old Hyuga Province, today's Miyazaki Prefecture, late in the Edo period. They went by the shop name Fujiya. From the closing decades of the Tokugawa era they ran coastal cargo ships up to the Kamigata region around Kyoto and Osaka, dealing chiefly in mountain and sea produce, and the money flowed back. By the modern period the family ranked among the largest landowners in Miyazaki.

Wealth alone does not explain a collection like this. The Tani kept close company with leading Noh families in the Kansai region, and a branch of the household even produced professional Noh performers. Those friendships are the thread that runs through the masks, robes, and instruments assembled here.

Why It Is a Registered Art Object

The Tani Family Noh Materials carry an unusual legal status. They are not designated as an Important Cultural Property. Instead they were entered on December 17, 2014, as a Registered Art Object under a law enacted in 1998 to promote the public display of artworks in museums.

The system works like this. An owner keeps full ownership of a privately held work judged to be of National Treasure or Important Cultural Property calibre, but agrees to place it on long-term public display through a contracted museum. In return the owner gains certain inheritance-tax advantages, and the public gains access to objects that might otherwise stay locked away or leave the country. For this collection the contracted institution is the Kyushu National Museum.

What makes the holding worth registering is its completeness and its social origin. Comprehensive sets of Noh equipment usually survive through daimyo houses, the head families of the Noh schools, or temples and shrines. A set assembled and preserved by townspeople is far rarer, especially when Edo-period pieces sit alongside modern ones in good condition. The Tani collection is one of the few places where the patronage of Noh by a provincial commercial family can be studied as a whole.

What to Look For

Start with the masks. They span three eras: one reaching back to the medieval period, fifteen from the Edo period, and three made in modern times.

The oldest is a Yamamba, the mountain crone of the Noh stage, and it may go back as far as the Muromachi period. Look closely and you find small holes where horns were once fixed. The face was likely carved first as a demon and only later reworked, a quiet record of how a single piece of wood changed roles over the centuries.

Several Edo masks are signed in their own way. On the reverse of the Koomote, a young woman's face, and of the Kasshiki, a temple page, and the warrior mask Heita, the carvers branded their marks into the wood, and each turns out to be a sound work by the maker the brand names. A Rokujusan mask for the bandit Kumasaka stands out among them. The three modern masks are the work of named artists, including Nakamura Naohiko, well known as a twentieth-century mask carver, and Yano Takamichi, a sculptor of the late Edo and Meiji years who carved for the Hosho school. Even the storage boxes and mask bags repay attention: many bear ink inscriptions naming their makers or recording how a piece passed down.

The eighty costumes were woven and stitched between the later Edo period and the early Showa years. They cover the full working wardrobe of a Noh troupe: the brocade karaori for women's roles, the embroidered and foil-decorated nuihaku, the stiff atsuita worn by forceful male characters, the sheer choken dancing robe, the kariginu of nobles and deities, sobatsugi overvests, wide ohguchi and patterned hangiri trousers, sashes, a sumiboshi headcloth, even a rosary. The set was clearly built to dress almost any character a program might call for.

The two instruments are easy to overlook and reward a second glance. The small-drum body called Ryuko ume take maki-e kotsuzumi-do is an Edo-period piece worked in raised gold and silver lacquer with cut-gold inlay, its surface alive with a dragon, a tiger, bamboo, and plum, and it survives with its drumhead and a matching lacquered box. The Noh flute beside it was made in the twentieth century, yet it comes with its own finely lacquered flute case, a reminder that even a single reed deserved a fitting home.

Around the Museum in Dazaifu

The Kyushu National Museum sits on a wooded ridge above Dazaifu, a town that served as Kyushu's seat of government and its gateway to the Asian mainland more than a thousand years ago. The building itself is hard to miss: a long, glass-fronted hall under a sweeping curved roof, designed to read as a wave or a low hill against the trees.

An escalator tunnel links the museum directly to the grounds of Dazaifu Tenmangu, the shrine dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane and a place of pilgrimage for students before exams. The approach to the shrine is lined with shops selling umegae mochi, a grilled rice cake stamped with a plum crest, best eaten warm. With the shrine, its treasure hall, and the museum within a short walk of one another, half a day passes easily here.

The museum's permanent display is called the Cultural Exchange Exhibition, and it changes constantly, with dozens of objects rotated in and out every month to protect them from light and handling. Because of this, any single mask or robe from the Tani collection is shown only from time to time rather than on permanent view. Anyone making the trip specifically to see a particular piece should check the museum's current display list before setting out.