1 Wedding and funeral ritual

Analysing a moving target

Robert J.Smith

I am by no means the first, and surely will not be the last to try to make
some sense of the Japanese scene as it flashes by. Perhaps it would be
more fitting to say as it appears to be flashing by the necessarily fixed
vantage point on which any observer must stand. In that effort, I find
myself in numerous, if not always the best of company. Among the more
illustrious of that number is Arnold Toynbee who, it has been pointed out
(Gibney 1985:107), in The Study of History noted that Japan was a classic
instance of cultural conflict between two contending factions which he
identified as the Herodians and Zealots. It is highly likely that Toynbee
assumed initially that one of them was destined to win out in the end, the
other to be vanquished. The Herodians, named after Herod Agrippa, who
ruled Galilee, pursued a policy of assimilating foreign culture as
thoroughly as possible. The Zealots, who take their name from the
Maccabees and the early Jewish zealots, championed traditional culture.
In the course of his analysis of the Japanese case, it appears that Toynbee
had second thoughts about the aptness of his scheme for Japan, for he
concludes that the Meiji Restoration represented a pursuit of Zealot ends
by Herodian means. Marius Jansen (1970:111) was making what I take to
be the same point when he wrote of the policies pursued by the Meiji
oligarchs: ‘Seeking revolution, they preached restoration’. And only thirty
years after that revolutionary restoration, Basil Hall Chamberlain (1898:2,
3, 8) commented on one of its salient outcomes:

Whatever you do, don’t expatiate, in the presence of Japanese of the new
school, on those old, quaint, and beautiful things Japanese which arouse
your most genuine admiration…. [For] all this is [today regarded as]
merely a backwater. Speaking generally, the educated Japanese have done
with their past. They want to be somebody else than what they have been
and still partly are…. [Yet] it is abundantly clear to those who have dived

25
26 Ceremony and Ritual in Japan

beneath the surface of the modern Japanese upheaval that more of the
past has been retained than has been let go.

The impatient reader of this kind of thing is bound to protest and ask,
‘Well, which is it?’ And so we may recommend that the question be
directed to the editors of a volume that has attracted a great deal of
attention in the past few years, for there appears to be the beginnings of an
answer in Hobsbawm’s comment towards the end of The Invention of
Tradition (1983:266):

A ‘modernization’ which maintained the old ordering of social

subordination (possibly with some well-judged invention of tradition)
was not theoretically inconceivable, but apart from Japan, it is difficult to
think of an example of practical success.

Indeed it is difficult to think of another example, and so we must regret

that there is no answer to our question, for not a single contributor to the
book makes so much as a passing reference to Japan. But we are used to
such snubs from our Eurocentric colleagues and until they give up
marginalizing the rest of the world there is nothing for it but to get on with
the job of analysing that singular society ourselves.
Although it leaves much to be desired I now realize, I was much taken
with a distinction drawn by Hobsbawm between custom (which he
defines as ‘mere usages’) and tradition, which combines ritual and
symbol. Imagine my astonishment when I came across the following
passage in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
(1989:195). Wittman Ah Sing, the Chinese-American anti-hero of this
curious work, takes his new wife to meet his family. When he discovers
that his grandmother’s room is empty, he suspects that his mother has put
her in an old folks’ home without letting him know. As Wittman Ah Sing
and his Caucasian bride set out to look for the old lady, he says:
‘See how neglectful of her family my mother is? I wouldn’t put it past her
to give Grandma the old heave-ho.’
‘You have the same custom as the Eskimo?’ asked Taña.
‘I don’t know. How many times does something have to be done for it
to be a tradition? There has to be ceremony. You can’t just toss a
grandmother on an iceberg and run.’
He might have added another question or two. How long does it take for
something to become a tradition? Must customs or traditions necessarily
reflect established cultural predispositions and constructs? Is it possible
simply to make them up out of whole cloth?
 Robert J.Smith 27

My topic is Japanese weddings and funerals. Rather it is, on the one

hand, the style of weddings in which most people are married these
days—the typical and without a doubt what will come to be commonly
viewed as the traditional wedding ceremony. On the other hand, and in
sharp contrast, I propose to consider only one kind of funeral—the kind
represented by that of the Showa Emperor. The contemporary ordinary
wedding and the recent extraordinary imperial funeral reveal something
of the nature of Japanese culture, why I have called it a moving target, and
what forces appear to cause it never to reach stasis even while giving
every appearance of being highly conservative in character.
Let me hasten to add that I do not think Japan is at all unique in this
respect, but it does seem to me a particularly striking instance of that
seemingly boundless capacity for invention and malleability which can
easily be represented as cultural conservatism. In stressing the flexibility
of culture, I follow Edmund Leach (1989:138, 141):

Ever since the days of Herodotus…ethnographers have written as if

customs were normally static. When change occurs it has to be explained
as if it were an anomaly. But historical records everywhere suggest that
what would need to be explained is an ethnography that did not change.
Why should anthropologists take it for granted that history never repeats
itself but persuade themselves that cultures never do anything else? The
answer is that it is often convenient so to believe. Malinowski believed
that the Trobriand kula, as he observed it, had been working like that for
hundreds of years. He mentions this belief only in a footnote. The evidence
is that it had in fact been in existence for less than 50 years and was
changing rapidly all the time.

Would it have made any difference had Malinowski realized that the kula
trade had been in existence for only fifty years—or ten—or five hundred?
I rather doubt that functionalism would have assumed a different form,
but knowing how deep or shallow the history of this particular cultural
practice might well have had a profound impact on the anthropological
study of system change.
And so we come to my metaphor of the moving target. As I have argued
elsewhere, we begin with the realization that we have lost our anchor in
time (Smith 1989a:718). Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, culture
has never depended on genuine antiquity to lay legitimate claim to
authenticity. I would argue that the proper study of culture requires us to
slip our moorings in history and accept that all points once thought fixed in
fact are in constant motion. Sally Falk Moore (1978:6) has put it with
28 Ceremony and Ritual in Japan

characteristic eloquence in a discussion of law as process, in which she

takes the view that existing social and symbolic orders are being made and
reiterated continuously. They are made, unmade, remade, and transformed
endlessly, and even when they are only ‘maintaining and reproducing
themselves, staying as they are, [that too] should be seen as a process’. It is
that process that I wish to consider in the Japanese context.
Were you to ask a young Japanese to describe a typical wedding, I have
no doubt that you would be given an account of one version or another of
a ceremony of no great antiquity. Indeed, its major components assumed
their present relationship only a generation or two ago. This in no way
means that the ceremony is somehow ‘less Japanese’, for it has no real
parallel in any other society. Does it, then, mean that because it is a recent
invention it is not traditional? It is not old, but it is rife with ritual and
symbol, some appropriated from the Japanese past, some from the pasts
of other peoples, and some inventions as new as yesterday. We know how
all this came about, for the history of wedding ceremonies is well
documented (Edwards 1989; Ema 1971; Emori 1986). A salient theme of
most of these surveys of changes since the 1870s is how the old
commoner classes attempted to emulate the customs of the warrior class.
There can be no doubt that this was the case in many matters of etiquette
and ceremony.
It is clear, however, that the Japanese wedding ceremony of today owes
less to the traditions of the old warrior class than to a far more august
inspiration—the wedding of the Crown Prince (later the Taisho Emperor)
in 1900, which was the first to be held at a Shinto shrine. When I asked
them, virtually none of my Japanese acquaintances turned out to know
this, nor is there any reason why they should. It came as a surprise, of
course, because today by far the majority of weddings have two major
components. One is a ‘religious’ ceremony specifically Shinto- in
character; the other the highly secular reception that follows it. It is fair to
say that the contemporary ritual has only the shallowest of roots in this
century, for when weddings by custom were held in the home, the only
specifically religious observance in the domestic rites was the
presentation of the bride (or in-marrying groom) to the ancestors of the
household. The memorial tablets were displayed in a Buddhist altar
(butsudan) or on an ancestor-shelf (senzodana) and no priest’s services
were required. The marriage being a domestic matter, those who
officiated at the ceremony were members of the household.
By now, however, it has become the almost universal practice to hold
weddings in a commercial wedding hall, hotel, or Shinto- shrine. The first
act in the ritual drama is a very contemporary Shinto- ceremony (Edwards
 Robert J.Smith 29

1989:15–19). As an illustration, we may take the establishment described

by Edwards, which has a standard shrine-room in which a Shinto- priest
officiates. He is trained and certified by a shrine, but need not necessarily
be of a priestly family.1 He is assisted by two ‘shrine-maidens’ (maiko),
wedding-hall office workers who receive no training other than that given
them by the management of the firm. Most of the rites performed by these
people in this shrine-room are indeed drawn directly from Japan’s past,
but the ways they are combined and the manner in which they are meshed
with new elements are quite striking. An example or two will suffice. It is
the groom alone who reads the wedding vows, which have no precedent in
the past. For her part, the bride is required only to acquiesce to them
silently, surely a tribute to the persistence of strong cultural
predispositions concerning gender-linked propriety. Today the occasion is
likely to close with a double-ring ceremony; the rings are brought to the
couple by one of the aforementioned shrine-maidens clad in full Shinto-
regalia. Nowadays the typical wedding party moves on through the
photographer’s studio into the banquet hall. There, inventiveness has
made of the secular half of the ceremony what has been aptly termed a
production of which the couple are the stars.
Yet for all the mélange of elements, there can be little doubt that the
rituals performed at weddings and funerals today contain many of the
core symbols—and are designed to embody some of the most deeply held
convictions—of the members of any society. It is a commonplace among
us, as among those who know little else about the country, to say that
Japan is unusual in that things so basic—so fundamental—appear to
change with such ease and without causing much concern among the
populace. I suggest we set aside the question as to whether they really do
change more rapidly in Japan than elsewhere, and note only that it is not
foreigners alone who think so. When Edwards (1989:145) mentioned to a
Japanese sociologist that he proposed to study weddings by working in an
urban wedding hall, the sociologist advised him to find instead a remote
village where, he suggested, it was just possible that they still held real
wedding ceremonies.
Such advice is unambiguous; if you want to find the real Japan, you must
look to the past or in places where remnants of the past may yet survive.
What you see all around you, in this view, is dismissed either as less
Japanese or more Western than it once was, or—harshest judgment of all—
spurious. But it seems to me obvious that the observer is too easily
distracted by what appear to be glaring inconsistencies. Is it that the
Japanese are particularly prone to them, or that they leap more readily to the
eye in Japan than elsewhere? I confess that it is hard to ignore such apparent
30 Ceremony and Ritual in Japan

anomalies as the double-ring ceremony presided over by the Shinto shrine-

maiden, the young Buddhist nun with her hula hoop, or (swallowing hard)
the Nichigeki chorus line in spangled tights kicking its way through a
routine before the great image of Dainichi nyorai at Nara’s Todaiji—in
celebration of the 1200th anniversary of the construction of the temple!
But all this is mere fluff, borne past our fixed vantage point on winds
so powerful and currents so deep that we find it difficult to find a means
to focus on them. The wedding ceremony, carefully observed, remains
as it always has been a great deal more than the mere product of
commercial invention and capitalizing on a desire for novelty. It is true
that it no longer centres on the household, nor is it any longer held in the
home, near the hearth and in the presence of the ancestors. 2 The
ceremony has instead come to centre on the couple who, as is repeatedly
affirmed during the rites, are destined to found a family, become
parents, and thus take their place as fully fledged members of society.
All this is expressed in the Shinto idiom and elaborated by
entrepreneurs who have devised ingenious ways to make their services
ever more costly. But imbedded in it, as in all other superseded forms of
the Japanese wedding of the recent past, are principles and cultural
values that represent a remarkably consistent and essentially
conservative view of what marriage entails. Some of what it entails is
affirmation of gender inequality; almost total interdependence of
husband and wife; and a host of indicators—symbolic, structural,
rhetorical—that deny autonomy to the individual and stress the
ultimately social nature of the person (Edwards 1989:143).
Hobsbawm observed that Japan’s modernization may represent a
uniquely successful blend of what he called old orderings and judicious
invention of tradition. The death of the Showa Emperor provides an
opportunity to explore some consequences of that blend for the study of
contemporary Japanese society and culture. As we all know, that event
precipitated heated debate over plans for the first imperial funeral to be
held in sixty-two years. The central issues, both constitutional and
political, were two in number. The first was the central one: Should it be
what generally was termed a ‘traditional Shinto funeral’ in accordance
with what are assumed to be the ancient practices of the imperial family?
The second followed directly on the first: Whatever the decision on the
style of funeral, who was to pay for it—the government or the family?
After considerable and often heated debate, the government cut the
Gordian knot by announcing that it had devised a plan that would
conform to the requirements of immemorial tradition, preserve the
constitution, and honour the late emperor. Thus, some segments of the
 Robert J.Smith 31

day-long rite were designated as private, conducted by and for members

of the family, and some were to be considered public—defined as the state
funeral. As a consequence, the Japan Communist Party boycotted the
entire affair; the Japan Socialist Party boycotted the rites designated as
private; the Liberal Democrats attended them all. Despite all the politics
and posturing, the day ended with the entombment of the emperor at
night, as has often been the ancient custom, near the mausoleums of his
parents at Hachioji.
During the interval between the emperor’s final long hospitalization
and the government’s announcement of the plans for the funeral, I found
it remarkable that none of the parties to the debate had much to say about
imperial funerals of Japan’s recent past.3 There had been three: those of
the Komei Emperor in 1867, Meiji in 1912, and Taisho in 1926. The last
of these is the first that I think may be called an official ‘Shinto’ imperial
funeral, for it took place soon after the Imperial Mortuary Rites Law
(koshitsu sogi rei) had been promulgated with the explicit aim of reviving
the ancient rites of a pre-Buddhist past. It is worth noting that it thus
transpired that the first member of the imperial family to be married in the
newly created Shinto wedding ceremony became the first emperor to be
interred in the newly created rite, and that near the new capital of Tokyo
rather than Kyoto, where his father is buried.4 I heard little discussion of
any of this by my Japanese friends and acquaintances, nor did I see much
reference to the issues of cremation versus interment or the style of the
imperial tombs at Hachioji and the one being constructed for the Showa
Emperor—all of which are in a style revived for the Komei Emperor’s
tomb only a little over a century ago. Wittman Ah Sing asked how many
times does something have to be done for it to be a tradition. The answer
appears to be—at least once, possibly twice.
I have dealt elsewhere with the general issue of the policy of the
separation of Buddhism and Shinto (shinbutsu bunri) as it affected the
imperial household (Smith 1974:26–33; 1989b). Clearing Buddhist
objects from shrines and palaces; converting the imperial ancestors into
kami; cataloguing the tombs of past emperors, even the mythological
ones; establishing Shinto rites where it suited their purpose—all these and
many other steps could be taken by the government with relative ease
compared to the problem posed by the imperial obsequies. That problem,
put as simply as possible, is that at the most fundamental level, a Shinto
funeral is a contradiction in terms. Shinto abhors pollution in any form—
that being virtually its only tenet. Along with blood and excreta, the
corpse is held to be the most ritually polluting object in nature. The point
was not lost on the Shinto revivalists of the early Meiji period, who were
32 Ceremony and Ritual in Japan

faced with the question of how the newly Shintoized imperial household
was to deal with death and its attendant pollution.
They found a partial answer in the not too distant past. During the
period of government-supported Buddhist dominance, even the priests
who served shrines had been given Buddhist funerals. Over the years,
however, many Shinto priestly families and some high-ranking warriors
had petitioned for the right to choose their own ritual. So it came about
that by the early nineteenth century, many such households observed what
they regarded as purely Shinto rites, shorn of the trappings of the alien
religion. But their mortuary rites were almost pure invention in every
particular, modelled closely on their Buddhist prototype. The numerology
is different, but the patterns are quite similar (Macé 1989:35). Thus, from
the 1870s on, the funerals of members of the imperial family were
conducted in a remarkable syncretic fusion of diverse practices that were
called Shinto. The 1895 funeral of Prince Arisugawa, described as ‘pure
Shinto’ by the Baroness Sannomiya, for example, is a blend of ancient
court practice that had been revived after a lapse of centuries, substantial
Buddhist elements, and what was known of European royal usage of the
late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, interment took place in the
(Buddhist) Gokoku-ji, grave site of princes of the blood.
Turning now to the funeral of the Showa Emperor, let me point out one
outstanding feature of the rites conducted at the Shinjuku-gyoen that has
not been much commented on. In the cortège and at the altar before the
coffin were several officiants, dressed in Shinto priestly robes of
surprisingly sombre hue. The chief ritualist, similarly clad, presided over
the placement of the offerings, read a brief eulogy in archaic Japanese,
and assisted members of the family as they passed through the torii to pay
their last respects. What is noteworthy is that so great is the Shinto
abhorrence of the pollution of death that not one of these men was a
priest; all were surrogates, albeit of an interesting sort. The rites at the
altar before the coffin were conducted by palace chamberlains (jiju) and
the coffin was borne by members of the Imperial Guard. Watching the
proceedings on television, it occurred to me that the last rites for the
Japanese emperor are conducted almost exclusively by those who served
him directly in life. Viewed in that light, the proceedings are entirely
consistent with a wide range of ritual occasions in Japan that involve kin,
but dispense with the services of religious specialists, just as weddings
once did.
In summary, then, much of the pomp and paraphernalia of Showa’s
funeral does come directly from the earliest periods of Japanese court
ritual, well attested in archival sources. Most had not been used for
 Robert J.Smith 33

centuries before the Shintoization of the court in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, and of course many of them are of Chinese
origin. Other elements of the imperial funeral, like those of the popular
wedding ceremony, are quite new and some are outright borrowings from
other societies made in recent decades.
And so I come to the metaphor of the moving target. How can we
possibly think about Japanese culture as anything but a process? Given
what we know about them, shall we dismiss ordinary weddings and
extraordinary funerals as spurious because they are not old or because
their content is not completely indigenous? Surely not. As I have already
noted, neither occurs in any other society, so without doubt they are
Japanese, and therefore they must be understood to embody and reflect
particular Japanese cultural constructs and predispositions.
But those of us long engaged in the study of Japan can almost hear the
objections now. ‘Real’ weddings, some city folk and many folklorists tell
us, are to be found in the remote countryside, if at all. Perhaps it is so, but
forty years ago the Shikoku villagers among whom I lived assured me that
the country weddings to which they invited me were very different from
the ceremonies of pre-war days. John and Ella Embree were told the same
thing by the Kyushu villagers they knew in the mid-1930s. It is entirely
likely that similar claims stretch back as far in time as we might be able to
push research into the question.5 The documentation on funerals reveals
that they, too, have a chequered history. Like weddings, they exhibit no
marked tendency to stasis of form, but it is clear that powerful cultural
understandings still profoundly affect substance.
These two instances of fluidity suggest that we must avoid the trap of
thinking of ‘a culture* as an immutable set of practices, beliefs and
meanings. In an earlier anthropological discourse, it was common to
speak of ‘Zande culture’, ‘Iroquois culture’, and even ‘Chinese culture’,
in the comfortable assumption that they were relatively self-contained
entities that might occasionally ‘come into contact’ with others. It was
also generally assumed, as Leach has reminded us, that they had persisted
over long periods of time, for the most part changing only in response to
the incursions of the West in one guise or another.
I have always had difficulty in seeing how the student of Japanese
society and culture could ever have adopted that point of view. In the late
1950s I was invited by a colleague, devoted to teaching Americans about
the traditional culture of Japan, to lecture on Japanese music to his class in
the arts. I selected several discs from my collection of pre-war records and
after necessarily brief introductory remarks started off with what he and
the class incorrectly assumed to be an ancient piece. In fact, it was a
thoroughly hybrid performance of Kimi ga yo on gagaku instruments that
34 Ceremony and Ritual in Japan

merely sounded as though it must be old. 6 I proceeded through a

reasonably standard unilinear review of Japanese musical forms and
ended with a spirited late-1930s rendition of Osaka bugi-ugi. I thought it
obviously Japanese, too; my host never invited me back.
Which leads me to my final point. Like Chamberlain, we all know that
the culture of contemporary Japan in some ways is like that of a century
ago, but clearly different in others. Whether the elements of the culture of
the Japanese today are, or in 1890 were, newly acquired items, traditions
of long standing, or hybrids of highly diverse origins is of considerable
interest, but of little moment to my larger purpose. In recent years it has
become a tradition in Japan to schedule performances of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony to usher in the New Year. For contemporary Japanese, it
is as much a part of routine seasonal observances as are glutinous rice
cakes (kagami mochi), Buddhist temple bells pealing 108 times to ring out
the old year (joya no kane), and all the rest. ‘But Beethoven’s Ninth is not
JAPANESE!’ my students protest. Quite right, but then neither were
glutinous rice cakes or Buddhist temple bells, once upon a time. They are
not Japanese in exactly the same sense that those seemingly permanent
fixtures of the American Christmas—Christmas trees, Dickens’s A
Christmas Carol, and the Nutcracker—are not American.
I do not mean to argue that there are no continuities, for it is clear that
there is a feature of the moving target I have chosen to call Japanese
culture that commands our attention. At any given moment, it represents
the current state of assumptions, attitudes, meanings and ideas (including
ideology in the non-pejorative sense) of the members of that society.
What each generation thinks of as its culture is made up in important
ways of what it has been taught and learned. For all the slippage and
fluidity, then, there necessarily will be overlap and continuity at some
basic levels. That continuity gives the lie to those who charge that the
Japanese are abandoning their culture. What Japanese culture are they
abandoning? The one in place at the end of the Heian period? The culture
of the warrior-class hegemons of the various shogunates? The culture of
the 1920s or 1930s or of wartime Japan? They are not abandoning their
culture; they could not do so if they wished. They are constantly remaking
and redefining it, and not only responding to the ideologies being
imposed upon them, as Hobsbawm would have it.
I have known actors of the no theatre, dedicated to the perfection of
their art who, off-stage, delight in pipe and tweeds, pizza and jazz. Who is
to say that the combination of interests is specious or that one of its terms
is more genuine, the other spuriously not Japanese? In his great book
Houses and People of Japan Bruno Taut (1958) saw the issue very clearly.
There you will find the Bauhaus sensibility applied to Japanese use of
 Robert J.Smith 35

materials, definition of interior space, and all those aspects of Japanese

architecture that so bedazzled the Europeans in the inter-war period. But
there is also a marvellous chapter on kitsch, for Taut saw that the
sophistication of the Katsura rikyu and the ornamental excesses of
country inns were equally expressions of Japanese taste.
Is Japanese culture today more or less authentic than it was at some
time in the past? I remind you of the admonition by Chamberlain with
which I opened, for it forces us to remember that for each successive
senior generation in all societies, the pace at which the target moves will
seem to accelerate, and its very shape to change as it passes out of our
control and into the hands of younger members of society. They may or
may not be sensitive to the character of the changes they will surely work
upon it, but it is unlikely that they will be much concerned with the
problem of authenticity until they begin to notice that their definition of
Japanese culture is being challenged in turn.

NOTES

1 As it happens, I know one such wedding-hall priest. After he retired, his wife
found his unrelieved presence in the house too much to bear, so persuaded him
to take a training course at the local shrine. He rather enjoys the work, has little
idle time on his hands, and makes a nice income to supplement his retirement
pay. His only previous close association with Shinto ritual before his retirement
had been in the course of discharging his duties as mayor of a small town.
2 In 1975, however, I was told by a resident of a rural community in Kagawa
prefecture that if the groom is the eldest son, the bride is brought from the
wedding hall in the nearby town to pay her respects to the ancestors of his
house. It is the only break in the otherwise carefully crafted programme of
events scheduled by wedding-hall management.
3 Among the many publications dealing with the complexities of that history
which appeared after the funeral was held are Macé 1989; Mayer 1989; and
Smith 1989b.
4 But, be it remarked, he was not the first member of the imperial family whose
obsequies were specifically not Buddhist. See the account of the funeral of
Prince Arisugawa by the Baroness Sannomiya (1896). The British wife of the
Vice-Grand-Master of Ceremonies of the time, she remarks in passing that the
anti-Chinese feeling in Japan at the time would have made it entirely
inappropriate to observe what she calls Buddhist rites!
5 In the early fourteenth century, Yoshida Kenko lamented the recent disappearance
in the capital of the custom of paying respects to the souls of the deceased, who
were thought to return to their homes on the night of the last day of the year. He
was cheered, however, upon learning that the rites were still performed elsewhere
in the country (Keene 1967:20–1). On the other hand, in modern Japan, rather
than fading away, some religous customs and practices of long standing are
becoming increasingly popular (Nakamaki 1984:87–8).
36 Ceremony and Ritual in Japan

6 Kimi ga yo is widely regarded as the Japanese national anthem, although it has

no official status. On the record in question, this late nineteenth-century
composition is played on instruments whose prototypes were incorporated into
the imperial court’s ceremonial music (gagaku) more than a millennium ago.

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Connected with Japan for the Use of Travellers and Others, third edition, revised,
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Crowley, J.B. (ed.) (1970) Modern East Asia: Essays in Interpretation, New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World.
Edwards, W. (1989) Modern Japan Through Its Weddings: Gender, Person, and
Society in Ritual Portrayal, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ema T. (1971) Kekkon no rekishi (A history of marriage), Tokyo: Yuzankaku.
Emori I. (1986) Nihon no kon’in: sono rekishi to minzoku (The history and folklore
of Japanese marriage), Tokyo: Kobundo.
Gibney, F.B. (1985) ‘Meiji: a cultural revolution’, in Nagai M. and M.Urrutia (eds)
Meiji Ishin: Restoration and Revolution, Tokyo: United Nations University.
Hobsbawm, E. (1983) ‘Mass-producing traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in E.
Hobsbawm and T.Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge:
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——and T.Ranger (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge
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Jansen, M.B. (1970) ‘The Meiji state: 1868–1912’, in J.B.Crowley (ed.) Modern
East Asia: Essays in Interpretation, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Keene, D. (1967) Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, New York:
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Kingston, M.H. (1989) Tripmaster Monkey, His Fake Book, New York: Knopf.
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