Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/249

 Japan were pantomimic. The Japanese seem to have possessed, from the dawn of their national existence, a profound appreciation of the beauty and grace of cadence and emphasis in modulated muscular efforts, but the great majority of their dances had some mimetic import, and were not suggested solely by the pleasure of rhythmic and measured movement. That is the chief reason why these dances seldom produce in a foreign observer the sense of exquisite delight that they excite in the Japanese. The uninitiated stranger feels, when he sees them, like one watching a drama where an unknown plot is acted in an unintelligible language. In its origin the Japanese dance was an invocation addressed, as has been already explained, to the Sun Goddess to lure her from her cave. It was accompanied by a formula altogether subordinate to the dance, and serving chiefly to mark the cadence and the measure. Thereafter every offering made to the gods had to be supplemented by some music of motion, and gradually the dance and its accompaniment of metrical chant came to be prolonged after the conclusion of the offering, so that they ultimately constituted an important part of the ceremony of worship, as well as a prominent feature of the subsequent feast. Then followed their division into "chants of the worship-dance" (tori-mono-uta) and "chants of the fête-dance" (mayebari), both being included in the term Kagura, which mime may still be seen by any one visiting the shrine