檜舞台

A hinoki-butai is a stage floored with hinoki cypress. Cypress has long been prized as the finest of timbers, and in the Edo period only stages of recognized standing—the noh stage, the licensed grand playhouses—are said to have been permitted floors of hinoki. The word thus became a byname for the great, prestigious stage.

In everyday Japanese one "treads the hinoki-butai"—steps onto the grand stage where one's ability is put before the world. Used of athletes at the great tournament and scholars at the podium alike, it still conveys the thrill of rising onto a higher floor.

In present-day usage: "to stand on the hinoki-butai of Kōshien"; "to tread the hinoki-butai of an international conference for the first time." The very verb—to tread the cypress stage—preserves the bodily sense of setting foot, step by step, on those cypress boards; few words convey so concretely the tension and pride of standing in the place of honour.

Hinoki-butai is a word about the dignity of theatres themselves. To stand on the cypress floor of a great playhouse has always signified an arrival—and there, generation after generation, the art of kabuki's actors, the Ichikawa Sōke among them, has been polished.