Shishimai

Two performers under a body-cloth, one of them working the great lacquered lion head with its hinged jaw — going door to door at New Year and at festivals.

The shishimai. The lion dance.

And the number attached to it is the thing that stopped me: it is Japan's most numerous folk performing art, with roughly eight thousand documented traditions.

Toyama prefecture alone maintains around 1,170 active sites.

Not eight thousand performances. Eight thousand separate local traditions, each with its own music, its own steps, its own head.

It bites children on the head

That's the beloved core of it.

The lion comes down the street, and the children are brought forward, and the lion bites them on the head with the wooden jaw.

Which takes away misfortune and grants health.

Every January, all over Japan, in photograph after photograph: a small child, somewhat uncertain, having their head placed inside a lion's mouth by a grinning adult.

Two completely different lions share the name

The record splits the family in half.

*Gigaku-kei — the two-person (or more) lion. This is the imported branch, descending from the continental performing arts that arrived in 612 CE.*

*Furyū-kei — the one-person form. Native. It includes the deer-dances* of the northeast, where the performer wears the head and dances alone, with a drum strapped to their body.

An imported beast and a homegrown one, sharing a name and a job.

Nobody involved had ever seen a lion

This is my favourite fact about it.

There are no lions in Japan. There never were.

And the record makes the consequence explicit: the lion is "typically represented as an imaginative creature rather than a realistic one."

Japanese lion dances also favour graceful movement with lighter percussion, against the more acrobatic Chinese variants — a different animal entirely, choreographically.

Which is the whole point and never was a problem. The shishimai isn't a representation of an animal. It's an animal-shaped office, and the office is: come to the door, take the year's bad luck, leave.

It's the same technology as everything else in this wing

Look at the masked-visitor complex in aggregate.

Straw coats and demon masks storming houses in Akita on New Year's Eve, shouting about crybabies.

Mud-covered figures in Okinawa, smearing everyone they pass.

A four-eyed exorcist leading the court's plague-expulsion.

And the shishimai.

Every one of them is the same technology: the community's own members, masked, performing the beneficial monster at the door.

The difference is scale. The others are single traditions, in specific places, under strain.

The shishimai is a format — adopted village by village, for thirteen centuries, until there were eight thousand versions of it.

And it completes the lion

Put it beside the stone lion-dogs on Okinawan roofs and mainland shrine gates, and you get both postures of the same imported animal.

The guardian stationed — stone, on the roof, permanent, silent.

The guardian visiting — cloth and lacquer, at the door, once a year, with drums.

Japan took one animal it had never seen and made it both architecture and choreography.

The oldest one still working

612 CE is the date the continental performance arts arrived.

Which makes the shishimai older than the monster catalogues, older than the setsuwa collections, older than nearly everything else in this collection — and it is the only one of them that has been continuously performed the entire time.

Not written down. Not revived. Performed, in an unbroken line, in thousands of places at once.

And still, every January, biting heads.