Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/130

 times in dancing or music. In Tōkyō alone there are a hundred and eighty yose. The law gives itself little concern about them, except to interdict any displays injurious to public morals, and to post a supervising constable in each hall. They accommodate a total of about forty thousand people, and if each had a full audience, the aggregate expenditure of the whole one hundred and eighty on account of entrance fees, cushion hire, brazier borrowing, and tea-drinking, would be some twelve hundred American dollars a night. So cheaply do the citizens of the Japanese capital take their pleasure.

Out of the mimetic dances so popular in Japan it may be supposed that the histrionic art would have grown at an early era, and that its development would have been rapid. Facts do not endorse such an inference. The drama proper was, indeed, born of the mimetic dance, but its nativity was curiously belated, and that it was born at all seems to have been, in great part, the result of accident. Many writers have been content to dismiss the subject with the curt remark that the Japanese theatre is of Chinese origin, and that the passage of the institution from one country to the other must be classed among the fortuitous incidents of neighbourly intercourse. But there are obstacles to the acceptance of that superficial view. In the days when the Ashikaga Shogunate was at the zenith of its power, the theatre had not yet made its appearance in Japan despite