Next month, a taste of one of Japan's oldest folk arts comes to Tokyo's National Theater -- a two-day program of Shiiba Kagura, a colorful and profoundly religious dance that hails from a remote region of Kyushu.
Shiiba is a sparsely populated village, encircled by peaks and steeped in history and legend. Residents still cherish the tale that surviving warriors of the Heike clan took refuge there after their defeat by the Genji clan in the Battle of Dannoura in 1185.
The village's rich traditional culture is said to have inspired Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962), who visited Shiiba in 1909 as an official of the Department of Agriculture, to make a midcareer switch to ethnology and folklore, establishing himself as Japan's first and foremost folklore expert. The gem of Shiiba's rural heritage is kagura, performed by villagers on freezing winter nights during November and December.