In kabuki, the ie no gei, the art of the house, and the forms a parent performed weigh on the successor as a duty to carry on. A Waseda University scholar describes the heyako: a disciple or child actor judged to have talent and placed above a disciple but below a son.
The scholar concludes that what kabuki must pass on is the art, not the blood.
A zenza is an apprentice rakugo storyteller. On stage, the zenza turns the mekuri, the card that shows the name of the next performer. He folds the masters’ haori jackets and kimono.
He takes particular care over serving tea. One storyteller recalled for Gendai Business: Mazu shishōgata ga irasshattara ocha o dasu. Kimono ni kigae owattara ocha o dasu. Kōza ga owattara ocha o dasu. When the masters arrive, serve tea. When they have changed into kimono, serve tea. When they come off the stage, serve tea.
In 2017, the Daily Sports newspaper described daily life at the Takarazuka Music School. Classes began at 9 a.m., and before that came a thorough cleaning, so the students arrived at 6:30. They also had to bow to Hankyu trains, because a senior student might be on board.
In 2020, the Kobe Shimbun reported changes. The cleaning done by the first-year students, the yokasei, was divided among three groups, and the rule that first-year students may answer only hai or iie, yes or no, was being dropped.
Kata ga aru kara katayaburi, kata ga nakereba katanashi. Because there is a form, there can be form-breaking. Without a form, there is only formlessness. The saying plays on two words. Katayaburi, form-breaking, means unconventional. Katanashi, formless, means spoiled or ruined.
The saying is attributed to the kabuki actor Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII. Its wording varies. A school newsletter in Sapporo quotes the ending as tada no katanashi, mere formlessness. An original source for either version has not been found.
In rakugo, a master often teaches a story by sanben geiko, three-time lessons. The master performs the same story three times in front of the apprentice, and then the apprentice performs it.
The storyteller Gokaidō Kumosuke, named a Living National Treasure in 2023, received such a lesson from Kokontei Shinshō V. Shinshō performed the story differently all three times.
In the tea ceremony, the first stage of training is warigeiko, practice in parts. It covers the basic procedures for thin and thick tea, almost everything that people picture when they think of the tea ceremony.
A paper in the repository of Aichi University says that warigeiko is basically taught not by the master but by the master’s senior pupils. It calls this stage of learning a stage of watching.
Under Japan’s national curriculum, pupils learn shosha, writing practice, with a brush in every grade from the third year of elementary school, with about 30 class hours a year.
In calligraphy, the student copies an otehon, a model. The teacher writes corrections and advice on each sheet in vermilion, shuhitsu. A calligraphy correspondence course of the company U-CAN returns every submission this way and sends the student models of his or her own name.
In traditional arts such as music and dance, a student who has learned a certain level of skill may receive a professional name from the head of the school, the iemoto. This is called natori, taking a name.
The Nipponica encyclopedia says that the iemoto gives the disciple some characters of the school’s name. As a rule, the iemoto receives a substantial sum and issues a certificate and a name plate. A natori may then take disciples and teach them as the iemoto’s representative.
A rakugo storyteller’s career passes through the ranks of zenza, futatsume and shin’uchi. One guide to rakugo says that the zenza stage usually lasts four or five years. Another says that the step from futatsume to shin’uchi takes about ten years.
The first guide puts the whole path from entering the profession to becoming shin’uchi at ten to fifteen years, depending on talent and effort.
On October 31, 2022, at the Kabukiza in Tokyo, the actor Ichikawa Ebizō took the name Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII Hakuen. The great kabuki name Danjūrō returned for the first time in nine years, since his father, the twelfth Danjūrō, died in 2013.
He had carried other names before. In 1985, he took the name Ichikawa Shinnosuke VII.