Word: tokugawas
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...Japanese have been known in the past for being able to turn their civilization on a dime. After 215 years of deliberate feudal isolation during the Tokugawa period, Japan threw itself open in 1854. It was, wrote Arthur Koestler, like breaking the window of a pressurized cabin: the Japanese crashed out into the world devouring everything that had been done or thought in the rest of the planet during their long encapsulation (the late Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution). Rarely has there been an ingestion of foreign influence so smoothly accomplished. The Japanese did something of the same thing...
...unlikely. The exhibition, 145 robes, masks and accessories made for the classical Nō theater by 17th and 18th century Japanese craftsmen, comes from the collection of a family which, next to the Emperor's, was for more than 250 years the most exalted in Japan-the Tokugawa. The shogun, or warlord, leyasu Tokugawa unified Japan at the beginning of the 17th century, welding its scattered feudal clans into a military ruling class with himself at the top; from then until the capsule of Japanese self-containment was ruptured by Admiral Perry, the country was run by an unbroken...
...family had a deeper effect, as patrons, on all the institutions of. Japanese culture from swordmaking to the tea ceremony. And the Nō theater, that elaborate and (to most non-Japanese) incomprehensibly subtle combination of masked mime, costume, song and dance, received its classical form under the Tokugawa aegis. The family collection, housed in the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya, is generally acknowledged to be the greatest private hoard of Japanese art in the world. In the area of Nō costumes, it is unsurpassable. The Japan Society show, which opened at Washington's National Gallery...
...both costume and set. Its stiff, voluminous folds, bulked out with padding and under-robes, suggest architecture. The actors move slowly-Nō acting is more remarkable for stateliness than agility -and the audience has time to inspect the details of a costume. (Nevertheless, the work represented in the Tokugawa collection can hardly have been fully appreciated onstage, any more than the craftsmanship of a medieval chasuble can be discerned from the church pews.) It follows that in Nō, costume has a different relationship to role and character from its usual one in the more "realist" forms of Western...
...traditional Japanese performing art," remarks the Tokugawa Museum's curator, Sadao Okochi, in the catalogue, "has been purified and transformed by the dignity of its costumes." The motifs of a robe's design establish the mood, the period and the place of the action. Thus-to a Japanese theatergoer who knew the rules-a costume like the karaori robe in russet silk (see color] would at once suggest a Heian-period court, somewhere between A.D. 800 and 1200. The balls, woven with exquisite precision in raised white silk, refer to a Heian court game called kemari, an aristocratic...