Sanbasō

Sanbasō, produced by Kimura Shōhachi in 1938, depicts the ceremonial Nō and kabuki dance Sanbasō, one of the three sections of the auspicious Okina ritual performance that traditionally opens the New Year theatrical season and other ceremonial programs. Sanbasō, danced by a figure in distinctive yellow robes and a peaked black hat carrying suzu bells, embodies a stylized agricultural blessing — the figure scattering invisible seed across the stage in the suzu-no-dan section — and has been performed continuously in both the Nō and kabuki traditions since the medieval period. Kimura, a lifelong kabuki enthusiast and theater critic whose 1928 Eighteen Best Kabuki Plays series remains a benchmark of modern Japanese theatrical illustration, returned repeatedly through the 1930s and 1940s to dance and ceremonial subjects of this kind. The 1938 Sanbasō captures the dancer in the midst of the suzu-no-dan, his peaked hat and saffron robes rendered with the bold linear drawing and saturated color that had become his signature for theatrical subjects, the bells held aloft in a moment of arrested motion. The work belongs to the larger body of Kimura's mature theatrical art that documented kabuki and its associated traditions at a moment when Tokyo's old performance culture was under increasing wartime pressure, and it remains an important example of his contribution to the visual record of early-Shōwa classical theater.