Kokubunji Renge-E Dance

Oki Kokubunji Renge-e-mai: Continental Court Dance on a Sea of Japan Island

On 21 April each year, a wooden stage goes up in front of the main hall of Oki Kokubun-ji, a temple on Dōgo, the largest of the Oki Islands off the Shimane coast. Dancers in foreign-looking masks and robes step onto it to perform Oki Kokubunji Renge-e-mai, a set of bugaku-style masked dances that the people of this remote island have kept alive for roughly twelve centuries.

The tradition was named an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in 1977. The seven dances performed today are thought to preserve something close to the court entertainments that reached Japan from the Asian mainland more than a thousand years ago.

From the mainland to a far-off temple

Bugaku, the solemn dance set to imported music, arrived in Japan during the Nara and Heian periods, along with silent masked plays, as part of the continental culture entering through the great temples and the imperial court. Major temples across the country staged these pieces as entertainment at their Buddhist services. Oki Kokubun-ji, founded as the provincial temple of Oki Province, was one of them, and its Renge-e-mai is said to hold the older forms more faithfully than most.

For centuries the dances accompanied the Renge-e, a Buddhist assembly held on the fifteenth day of the sixth lunar month. The anti-Buddhist campaigns of the early Meiji period broke the chain, and the dances stopped. Local residents revived them in 1884. Since then they have been offered at the Shōmieku, the memorial rite for the priest Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi), held here on 21 April.

The 2007 fire

Anyone who saw the dance before 2007 watched it performed with masks that specialists dated to the Heian or Kamakura period. Nine of them had been listed as a Shimane Prefecture Tangible Folk Cultural Property in 1974.

On 25 February 2007 a fire destroyed the temple's main hall and, with it, the masks, costumes and instruments — the whole kit of the dance. The loss could have ended the tradition. Instead, the preservation society and local institutions rebuilt every prop, and by November of the same year the dances could be staged again. The prefectural designation of the lost masks was formally rescinded that December.

Why it earns a national listing

What makes Renge-e-mai significant is less any single dance than what the whole performance reveals about the history of Japanese performing arts. In its movements and staging, specialists read the imprint of bugaku and of ennen, the temple entertainments of medieval Japan. Few places preserve that early character so clearly, and the island setting has given the dances local features found nowhere else.

The seven dances

The day begins inside the main hall with the Shōmieku. Afterwards a procession moves out to the stage in the precincts: a portable shrine carrying the Four Heavenly Kings, the chief celebrant, the dancers and the musicians. A prayer rite for the Four Heavenly Kings opens the program, and the seven dances follow.

Nemuri-botoke comes first. Two children in bodhisattva masks, eyelids carved nearly shut, sit cross-legged and begin to nod off. Ryūō, the dragon king, is its opposite in temper, with heavy foot-stamping and sudden comic leaps. Between them come Shishi, the lion; Mugiyaki, tied to the roasting of barley; the paired Sanjin and Kitoku; and Hotoke, the Buddha dance. Taiheiraku is the only one of the seven danced without a mask.

Three instruments carry the music: a drum, a flute and the nyōhachi, a pair of hand cymbals. Each dance has its own piece, with separate music for the entrances and exits. When the program closes, the performers dance a free finale and process back as cherry petals come down over the grounds.

Seeing it for yourself

The 21 April dedication is open to the public and free to watch from in front of the main hall. For visitors who cannot time a trip to the festival, the Renge-e no Yakata in the Ikeda district displays masks, costumes and related material, and the preservation society will stage a commissioned performance of part of the repertoire (currently 50,000 yen per show, with separate admission of 400 yen for adults and 200 yen for children to the temple and the hall).

Reaching the stage means reaching the islands. Oki lies in the Sea of Japan off the Shimane coast. Dōgo is served by ferries and jetfoils from Shichirui Port near Matsue and from Sakaiminato in Tottori, and by air to Oki Airport. The temple and the Renge-e no Yakata sit in Ikeda, about six minutes by car from Saigō Port, Dōgo's main harbour.

Around Dōgo

Dōgo rewards a longer stay. The island is part of the Oki Islands UNESCO Global Geopark, and its coastline includes Oki Shirashima, a national Place of Scenic Beauty and Natural Monument. Two old shrines built in the local Oki-zukuri style, Tamawakasu-mikoto and Mizuwakasu, lie within easy reach; in the grounds of the former stands the Yao-sugi, a cedar said to be well over a thousand years old and about thirty metres tall. The Kokubun-ji precincts themselves are a national Historic Site, remembered as the place where the exiled Emperor Go-Daigo was lodged in the fourteenth century.