Hi Herb and all,
I'd like to clarify what I said in an earlier letter about the Domon
Kai. Fuji Jidou wanted to separate from the Domon Kai and make his own
iemoto, but to my understanding, his group couldn't be considered as an
iemoto until he had made stylistic changes to the whole repertoire of
honkyoku pieces, while keeping the spirit and the basic melodies of the
originals. I'm not totally clear on this and perhaps Riley Lee or another
authority on shakuhachi lineages will be able to explain the workings of
iemoto in more detail and with more understanding but I'll just talk about
my own experience with the iemoto system briefly as that may give some
helpful information. As Riley Lee may have implied, the answer to all your
queries would take a dissertation, and they are not necessarily questions
that one can answer without some thought but I'll try answer to several of
them, though perhaps not all.
Why have it? I assume that the iemoto system is the way the
shakuhachi music has been passed down since the demise of the Fuke sect at
the beginning of the Meiji Period. At that time or perhaps a little later,
the Kyoto komuso created the Meian school, the teachers in the Tokyo area
and their students came to be called the Kinko school or schools and later
in the Meiji period another school developed in the Osaka area, which was
named after its founder, Nakao? Tozan, who brought more of an influence
from Western music to the shakuhachi (and that is a simplification as there
have been other, later branches -- Ueda, Chikuho ryu, Watazumi Do's style
etc.) Teachers have passed down their teachings to small groups of
disciples, and those students, after learning the same repertoire of
pieces, in turn pass the teachings they have received to new students.
Perhaps the iemoto system is comparable to some guild systems which were
common in the Middle Ages in Europe. Groups, including mine, have split
off from each other because of internal controversy just as one frequently
sees martial arts schools splitting off from each other. Most of the
traditional Japanese arts, including many martial arts, in Japan are passed
on by way of an iemoto system, whether it tea ceremony, ikebana, Noh drama,
shodo (calligraphy), bunraku, iaido, or Japanese rock painting. It's the
way things have been for a hundred years or longer and though Japan has at
times made rapid change in some areas, especially after dramatic historical
events like the Meiji restoration or WWII, the traditional arts system
seems to be a place where things have continued on at a very gradual pace
(one might say ossified if one wanted to be unkind), though today one can
learn shakuhachi at a music college or through a company sponsored music
school's education program rather than through the traditional iemoto
system. When I first started playing the shakuhachi I knew nothing about
the iemoto system, I simply wanted to find a teacher for the flute, having
heard and seen the instrument in Kyoto for the first time in the fall of
1986. I had little awareness of the iemoto system in the beginning but
after several years with a teacher I was introduced to, named Ikezoe Kyodo,
I joined the local Kinko Kenkyurai (Kinko ryu study group) along with my
sensei and began to become more aware of the different guilds; first of
all, as the music notation was slightly different for several of the
different Kinko iemotos -- for example, Domon Kai uses a notation called
shiro fu (written on white paper) and the Chikuyusha, or Kawase Junsunke's
school uses a notation called ao fu (written on a greenish paper) for the
gaikyoku pieces. But more than just a difference in the music notation
there are, as Herb noted, certain assumptions and expectations in regard to
students who are with a particular iemoto, though things may be changing in
some regard depending on the group. In the case of our guild, as I
eventually began to understand more of the Japanese language, I began to
see that my teacher had a definite prejudice in favor of the way his guild
did things and how they played the music ... perhaps that is a common
pattern...if one is in a certain group one will develop certain prejudices
-- for our group, for example, Tozan was once considered anathema -- though
I'm happy to be able to say now that several years ago my teacher joined in
a group with several Tozan players and we did yearly concerts with them --
everyone became good friends, and my sensei lost his predujices against
Tozan. The development of cliques seems to be endemic, a byproduct of the
iemoto system perhaps, with groups being very centered on their own way of
doing things, being very loyal to the iemoto, for example, in our guild's
case, one would not be able to quit our guild and then take up with another
iemoto locally without causing some sort of minor scandal. A teacher of
another school in Kochi would not accept me as a student if he knew was a
student of Ikezoe Kyodo's (unless he had permission from my sensei, and
they were on good terms). Even today, if I want to play in an event with
players from another iemoto I'm supposed to tell my sensei beforehand about
it -- of course this kind of thing wouldn't be accepted in the West -- we
consider ourselves to be free agents -- but in Japan being a member of the
group and being loyal to that group is considered more important. One may
be criticized for using techniques one has not picked up from the teacher;
a number of years ago another foreign student in our group played a
honkyoku piece at a recital (Hi Fu Mi Hachigaeshi) using some techniques he
had picked up from watching or listening to a Yamaguchi Goro tape and the
way he played was criticized, probably because he was using techniques that
he had not been taught. My sensei is very old school -- for him, the
shakuhachi is a Japanese thing, the music is a unique product of the
"Japanese soul," and at one time he implied in his statements to myself and
another foreign player, that foreigners would never be able to fully
understand or even play the shakuhachi well. That was before he met Riley
Lee. Lee came to Kochi almost five years ago and did a concert with a
local koto and shakuhachi group at the Kochi Art Museum Hall that included
my teacher. My sensei was greatly impressed with Lee as a person and with
his abilities as a shakuhachi player, and learned some honkyoku techniques
from Riley and from then on his attitudes and feelings about shakuhachi
underwent something of a change -- his hard position seemed to soften,
though he does still retain his basically rather conservative stance
regarding the instrument and shakuhachi music. Actually, his teacher, Teido
Suzuki, based in Yokohama, held a more modern image of the shakuhachi; once
he told me that while Ikezoe sensei viewed it as a uniquely Japanese
instrument, he saw it as an instrument in the orchestra of instruments and
wished it to gain in popularity around the world as one instrument among
many. My teacher originally had the attitude that only gaikyoku and
honkyoku were shakuhachi music; other stuff was not to be played or was not
really shakuhachi music...that has also changed in the last few years,
though he only teaches the gaikyoku and the honkyoku -- no shinkyoku or
modern pieces. I have had my own reservations about the iemoto system and
at one point some years ago would have dropped out of it if it had not been
for the good advice of a player with much wider experience than my own.
Other players had left because of personal conflicts with the sensei's
teaching style, but in my case things were brought out into the open and
the conflict was resolved. The advantages of the iemoto system is that it
has preserved the music and the different styles of shakuhachi playing over
the years. Of course there are disadvantages as well, the high costs of
lessons and shakuhachis (now Monty has come to the rescue in terms of
selling reasonably priced instruments) -- but shakuhachi making is labor
intensive and it must be hard to make a living as a shakuhachi player or a
maker so one can probably expect high fees if one is a member of an iemoto
as some of the money one pays, for example,for passing the various levels,
goes to the iemoto head, the man at the top of the pyramid, and that is the
same as it is in other arts such as tea ceremony or calligraphy; we are
lucky with our sensei in that he is a komuin (government employee) in the
Japanese Self-Defense Forces, and so cannot legally make money through
another activity so we pay for the weekly tea which makes for cheaper
lessons than what he plans to charge after he retires from the military --
otherwise I would never have initially been able to afford to take
shakuhachi lessons: other disadvantages are the cliques, as I mentioned,
the high cost of putting on concerts in Japan, where one's group has to pay
a large sum for each piece performed at a public hall, and where often one
seems to be putting on recitals for one's group rather than for the public
-- the dangers of fossilization -- but looking at it from the point of view
of the head of the iemoto, he is trying to make his living from shakuhachi
and that's not an easy thing to do in a country that hasn't given much
support to its native music traditions over the last century (compared to
Korea, for example) and where for the most part, only Western music is
transmitted in the public schools (though that may also change a bit in the
future as Japanese schools are supposed to give some instruction in
traditional music). If it wasn't for the iemotos the shakuhachi music
possibly would have already died a natural death as they have been the main
vehicle for transmission of the tradition. The expectation of the iemoto
is that one's students will carry on the tradition, that it won't be lost,
that it will remain distinct. In Kochi the members of the various Kinko
groups are on quite close terms as there aren't that many of us, and we
learn some of each others techniques -- though there are personal conflicts
as with any organization. Now I take the occasional workshop over in
Bisei-cho; when I first started studying with my sensei that wouldn't have
been permitted, and I've heard from Tozan players attending the workshops
at Bisei that if their iemoto master knew about their visits they'd be in
trouble. So things change but they also stay the same. I was going to try
and give a brief reply but this turned out to be fairly long...hope its not
too much of things you already know...
Dan
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