Tokyo

Performing Arts

Modern Tokyo is host to the latest trends of global popular culture, and Tokyo Dome is the usual venue for performances by the likes of the Rolling Stones and Mariah Carey.

Of course, Japan has evolved many types of performance that are uniquely Japanese, and Tokyo is one of the best places to experience these. Noh drama, slow-paced and minimalist and rooted in Zen Buddhism, can be seen at the new National Noh Theater in Sendagaya. Noh is also performed at night by torchlight at places like Meiji Shrine. But the National Theater, across the moat from the Imperial Palace, is the major venue for traditional performance art in Tokyo. There one can experience traditional court music called gagaku, which dates back many centuries to the Heian period. The National Theater also holds performances of bunraku, dramas in which the "actors" are three-quarter-life-size puppets manipulated by men covered with black cloth. And performances of kabuiki, the marvelously stylized opera-like dramas as elaborate as any from the heart of Italy, are part of the program at the National Theater, though one can also see these at the Kabukiza in the Ginza and the Simbashi Embujo Theater.