Why the Danjūrō familyis called Ichikawa Sōke

Ichikawa Danjūrō I is held to have created aragoto, the bold acting style that came to symbolise Edo kabuki, in the Genroku era. Powerful kumadori make-up; the mie, in which movement stops and feeling reaches its peak; the striding roppō exit; and heroes whose strength exceeds the human. This vocabulary played a large part in the development of Edo kabuki.

The mie of aragoto is said to have come from Danjūrō I imitating the form of Fudō Myōō, the immovable Buddhist deity. From his prayers to the Fudō of Naritasan Shinshō-ji temple for a child came the house name Naritaya. Art, faith and a place name were bound together from the very beginning.

From the Genroku era onward, the family that carried the name Ichikawa Danjūrō led kabuki through aragoto, and came to be regarded as the leading house of Edo kabuki.

In 1832, when passing the name to his son, Ichikawa Danjūrō VII chose eighteen plays from those handed down in the family and distributed them as a printed list. Later, at the première of Kanjinchō, he named the set the Kabuki Jūhachiban — the Eighteen Best Plays — and the name gradually took hold.

This jūhachiban is believed to be the origin of the everyday Japanese word ohako, meaning one's speciality. Putting a family's art into a list left a mark on the language itself.

Most of the eighteen are aragoto pieces associated with Danjūrō I and II. By naming not merely an inheritance but a repertoire — this is one of the strongest grounds on which the name Ichikawa Sōke rests.

In the traditional Japanese arts, the house that transmits the orthodox line of an art is called the iemoto, and sometimes the sōke. Kabuki, however, has no iemoto: instead, the house of Danjūrō has been called the Ichikawa Sōke. The same idea — the house that carries the authentic line — is expressed in kabuki by that word.

In the Meiji era, Ichikawa Danjūrō IX is credited with raising the social standing of kabuki actors, through theatrical work attuned to the thinking of the new age and through his associations with the upper classes. With this, the standing of the Sōke is recorded as having been firmly established in both name and substance.

Its emblem was the tenran kabuki of April 1887, staged at the residence of Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru, where Danjūrō IX performed Benkei in Kanjinchō before the Meiji Emperor. That actors — long regarded as people of low standing — should perform before the Emperor is held to have changed the position of kabuki itself.

From that time, it is recorded, actors of other houses performing plays from the Kabuki Jūhachiban came to say that they did so 'with the permission of the Ichikawa Sōke.' The name is not merely honorific: it has been carried on as a concrete courtesy shown towards another family's art.

In November 2022, Ichikawa Ebizō XI took the name Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII, Hakuen. On the same stage his eldest son became Ichikawa Shinnosuke VIII, and the names passed on to the next generation as well.

What the Ichikawa Sōke inherits is more than the name Danjūrō. It is the forms of aragoto, the Kabuki Jūhachiban, the mimasu crest, the spirit of Naritaya — and the responsibility of carrying them into the next era.

Classical performance remains the centre, while the work extends into film and digital media, introducing kabuki abroad, and tree-planting. To keep, and to open. The Ichikawa Sōke of today takes on both at once.