The Sakurama house's practice stage sits in a corner of Fujimi, Chiyoda City, Tokyo. The family once served as Noh performers to the Hosokawa, lords of the Kumamoto domain, and kept their stage in Kumamoto through the years of domain rule — until the upheaval of the early Meiji era carried them to Tokyo, where they have continued to pass down their art ever since. The practice hall stands at the foot of a modern high-rise. A flight of stairs climbs past a small shrine, and beyond the door waits the cypress stage, a space whose stillness seems to draw in even the footsteps of those who enter it. On this stage sat Sakurama Ujin, 21st-generation head of the Sakurama house and a shite-kata — principal-actor — performer of the Konparu school, quietly in place. A small Shinto altar was visible from where he sat, lending the room a distinct, sacred air. Something of how this house has lived with time seemed already present in the quiet greetings exchanged with each arrival and departure.
In this interview, we traced the roughly 700-year history of Noh back to its origins, followed the Sakurama house's own path within the Konparu school, and heard about Sakurama Banma — later known as Sajin, one of the "three great masters of the Meiji era" — as well as Ujin's relationship as disciple to his grandfather, the Living National Treasure Sakurama Michio. The conversation also turned to the house's approach to the spoken-and-sung text of Noh, its relationship to masks and costumes, the daily rhythm of practice and the pre-performance run-through, the experience offered on the cypress stage, and what it means to carry Noh abroad. It was, in its way, a chance to retrace in words a form of art passed from grandfather to teacher, and from teacher to self.
Toguri: To start, could you tell us your name and this title you hold?
Sakurama: I am Sakurama Ujin. I serve as the 21st-generation head of the Sakurama house, a shite-kata performer of the Konparu school.
The weight carried by the words in that title — "the Konparu school," "21st generation of the Sakurama house" — cannot be measured without first understanding how Noh itself came to be.
Toguri: For those who know nothing at all about Noh, could you explain from the most basic level?
Sakurama: Noh is said to be one of the oldest classical performing arts in the world. It took shape roughly 700 years ago as an art built on song and dance, and in genre terms it sits closest to today's musical theater or opera.
Of Kan'ami and Zeami, the two credited as founders, it is Zeami who left behind the greater body of writing. In his texts, he records that Noh's origins trace to the time of Prince Shōtoku, around the year 600, when a figure named Hata no Kawakatsu, acting on the prince's order, performed arts for the enjoyment of the common people. It is this Hata no Kawakatsu whom the Konparu school — the school to which the Sakurama house belongs — claims as its founding figure.
Sakurama: The Konparu school is said to retain something of the old style. That said, all five schools of Noh — Konparu included — share the same origin: Yamato Sarugaku, the performing-arts guilds that arose centered on what is now Nara Prefecture.
In the fourteenth century, Kan'ami and Zeami drew on sangaku, a form of performance said to have arrived from the continent, fused it with the kusemai and dengaku popular in their day, and added spoken dialogue to create the theatrical form known as nōgaku, or sarugaku. The sangaku behind it is said to trace back to the 66 performances of revelry that Prince Shōtoku ordered Hata no Kawakatsu to carry out — entertainments meant, in part, for the peace of the realm and for the enjoyment of all people. It was the addition of language to what would otherwise have remained pure dance, Sakurama says, that made Noh what it is. Protected afterward by the warrior class under the patronage of the Ashikaga shogun Yoshimitsu, Noh walked alongside samurai culture and continued to flourish even through the age of civil war. By the Edo period, it had become fully institutionalized.
The five schools of Noh branched out from these Yamato Sarugaku guilds. The Konparu school was originally called Enmai-za, named for its locality, and took the Konparu name only after the emergence of a reputed restorer of the line, Konparu Gonnokami. It was the Yūzaki-za — the guild that produced Kan'ami and Zeami — that shaped Noh itself, and from it branched the four guilds of Kanze, Konparu, Hōshō, and Kongō, joined later by the Kita school, which split off from Kongō. Because of its lineage traced back to Hata no Kawakatsu, Sakurama says, Konparu was given a rank in the Edo period second only to Kanze.
Sakurama: In the Edo period, Noh became ceremonial performing art of the warrior class — an indispensable part of formal occasions. Some elements, the chanted text among them, still had many ordinary enthusiasts, but in a society built on strict class distinctions, it gradually became something the common people could no longer approach so freely. From there, it turned into an art reserved for people of high standing — one with a forbiddingly high threshold.
The turning point came with the Meiji Restoration.
Toguri: What impact did the Meiji Restoration have on the world of Noh?
Sakurama: Performers who had received a stipend from the shogunate were, naturally, put out of work. Those who had received a stipend from a daimyo house lost their livelihood in the same way, once the stipends themselves disappeared. Several schools went extinct in the years after the Restoration as a result. With the system itself gone, Noh met, for a time, with something close to complete collapse.
As performers employed by daimyo and the shogunate alike found their livelihoods cut off all at once, it was the Meiji government — eager to show the world that Japan, too, possessed a magnificent artistic culture — that chose to encourage Noh, allowing it to survive.
Sakurama: In 2001, UNESCO named Noh one of the Masterpieces in its first Proclamation of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. That was, officially, a declaration that this is an artistic culture cultivated by humanity and worth preserving for the future. In a sense, it proved — some 130 years on — that the policy the Meiji government had taken was the right one. And that brings us to the present. That, broadly, is how I'd like you to understand the history.
Yet even as 700 years of oral transmission — passed down by word of mouth from master to disciple, across generations, without relying on written codification — have been preserved in this way, the path each of the five schools has walked has not been uniform. Within the Konparu school itself, one family carried its art forward along an independent line, far from the head house in Nara: the Sakurama house. Its history — the same Konparu name, yet a different repertoire, a different path — shows that within the larger framework of the five schools lives another lineage: smaller, but every bit as certain.
The Sakurama name first appears clearly in the historical record around the time of Katō Kiyomasa.
Sakurama: When Katō Kiyomasa restored a guild that had fallen into disrepair during the age of civil war, it's believed that the Sakurama house was the one already presiding over it. Whether the house called itself Konparu at that time is actually difficult to say — but Kiyomasa brought in a reasonably capable Konparu instructor to serve his domain, and it may have been through that connection that the house entered the school and became Konparu.
As evidence, the repertoire record the Sakurama house has passed down — its nayose, a list of plays — reportedly includes a number of unusual pieces that don't overlap with those of the Konparu head house in Nara. The working theory is that a guild originally of a different lineage came to be counted among the Konparu in the time of the Katō house. When the Edo period began, Higo passed from the Katō to the Hosokawa.
Sakurama: The Hosokawa were regarded as a distinguished house with roots going back to the Muromachi period — but from the perspective of the Tokugawa, who founded the Edo shogunate, they were tozama, an outside lord, not originally part of the Tokugawa's own retainer line. They moved from Kokura into Kumamoto after the Katō house was stripped of its domain, and became a great lord ruling over the Higo region. Partly because of that political position, they were a house that invested heavily in culture — tea, flower arrangement, and Noh as well, all of which they valued a great deal.
From then until the Meiji Restoration, the Sakurama house continued to serve the Hosokawa in Kumamoto, active as performers of the Konparu school. For many years, the house had no particularly deep exchange with the Konparu head house in Nara, and instead developed along its own course in Higo.
Toguri: What differences were there between the Konparu school in Higo and the head house in Nara?
Sakurama: With kata — the codified units of movement and expression handed down and taught in Noh, rather than personally invented — individual character and physical build still come through, so the same form can look different from one performer to the next. That's a very Japanese kind of individuality — the more precisely you try to copy the same stance, the more your own self shows through. But one clear difference was the nayose, the number of plays in the repertoire. Nara kept to just under 100; Higo Konparu, in Kumamoto, is said to have had as many as 165 — a striking difference in range.
After the Meiji era, when the school merged back into a single Konparu line, the repertoire was standardized at 150 plays. Despite the long years without direct contact, when the two lines compared their kata in the Meiji period, they were found to be nearly identical — proof, Sakurama says, of nothing less than how faithfully oral transmission had carried the art forward.
The figure central to that achievement was Sakurama Banma, later known as Sajin, three generations before the current Sakurama. He is counted as one of the "three great masters of the Meiji era," who supported and guided the Konparu head house through the disarray of the Meiji period.
Sakurama: Noh performers were, as a rule, forbidden from taking on other work — they had to be ready to perform for their lord or the shogun at any time. And yet Banma, the last head of the house in the Edo period, gave an extraordinary number of regional performances. Exactly why this was permitted isn't clear, but he is said to have performed somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 times over his life, holding Noh performances regularly even in the Hosokawa's outlying domains and in Bungo and Taketa, near present-day Ōita.
An anecdote survives that speaks to his skill. When the Empress Dowager praised Banma's performance of Shunkan after seeing it, His Majesty, hearing of her praise, is said to have asked to see it himself — and the program for that day was changed on the spot to Shunkan.
In principle, Noh performers were barred from other work because they received a stipend — but in practice, the situation differed depending on rank.
Sakurama: Officially, side work was forbidden, but it seems there were Noh performers taking it up even in the Edo period. For the most part, though, this meant performers below tayū rank — the senior performer status — with smaller stipends, teaching Noh to supplement their income. The fact that Noh became popular enough in the Edo period for ordinary people to learn chanting at the local terakoya schools has its roots in that same background.
At the time, performers directly employed by the shogunate in Edo reportedly tended to look down on performers employed by regional daimyo as "country Noh performers."
Sakurama: Performers in Edo took pride in serving the shogunate directly, seeing themselves as first-rank and regarding those employed by daimyo houses as mere "country Noh performers." But after the Meiji Restoration, when Banma — who had come up to Tokyo through his lord's connections — performed, that view changed; it became clear that this was simply not the case. Why the number of plays in a repertoire grew or shrank is something we genuinely still don't know. There was a system called the repertoire petition — a formal report submitted to a lord or the shogunate declaring which plays a house was prepared to perform — and the more plays a house kept in its repertoire, the more study that required, while keeping fewer made things easier in a way. Why Kumamoto diligently kept as many as 165 plays, and why Nara narrowed its repertoire to under 100, remains unknown.
In connection with this episode of recognition beyond Edo, the Sakurama house continues to this day to treat plays such as Tōru, Kantan, Dōjōji, and Shunkan — its signature pieces — as especially important works. The site of the Sakurama house's present-day practice stage was itself originally a Noh hall built by the Hosokawa for the Sakurama family. Even after the Meiji Restoration, the Hosokawa are said to have continued offering the Sakurama house generous support for its Noh practice.
Sakurama Ujin began his training at the age of four, under his grandfather, the Living National Treasure Sakurama Michio. His first time standing on a Noh stage, dressed in costume to perform a role, came that same year, at age four.
Sakurama: Zeami himself writes that if you're too strict with children, they come to hate Noh — so you should praise them and let them grow. My grandfather used to say he disliked Zeami, but his method of teaching was exactly the same. When I did something well, I'd get sweets as a reward. With a child's heart, that was enough to keep me coming back to practice.
Even without such rewards, practice became simply a matter of habit. There was a period when he wondered why he alone had to head to the practice hall while all his elementary school friends played, but it was the place he always went, so he kept on with his training.
His grandfather told the young Ujin that while he himself would teach him the dance, he should learn the chanted text from his own nephew, Sakurama Kintarō II, formerly known as Ryōma. On the surface, the two men seemed to do nothing but bicker — but out of anyone else's earshot, Michio would tell the boy, "He has real skill — watch him closely and copy him."
Sakurama: As a child, practice was pure imitation of my teachers. I used a chant book written entirely in hiragana in a notebook, and I think I actually learned to read through practice before I learned it properly at school. Zeami himself says that the word manabu — "to learn" — derives from maneru, "to imitate." As you grow old enough to form your own thoughts, you start to imitate your teacher's dance while also thinking about what form a given Noh piece ought to take, given what kind of play it is.
At fourteen, it was announced that he would become his grandfather's adopted son and heir, the one to inherit headship of the house. Even when it came time for him to enter university at eighteen, his grandfather told him only, "If you want to do Noh, I'll support you as much as you need." Michio covered all of his tuition and let him focus on his schoolwork first. As he was nearing graduation, Sakurama recalls, his grandfather said the following.
Sakurama: The women of my family told me, "Someone has to carry Noh forward." "Looking around, isn't it most efficient for you to be the one to take it on?" "You've already trained this much — you could take over right away. If someone else were to start now, it would take them that many more years. It's inefficient any other way." I'd always liked mathematics — in junior high, I even started my own math club — so when someone told me it was "efficient," I simply accepted it.
After his grandfather's death, Ujin continued his training under the previous head of the main house — Kintarō himself, who had guided his chanting since childhood. But Kintarō, too, soon fell ill. A senior fellow disciple who had been named the house's heir in the art also fell ill and died young. When it became clear the end was near, Ujin — who still went by his childhood name, Makoto — was called to Kintarō's sickroom, and there, alone with him, was entrusted with the words: "Makoto, I'm counting on you for what comes after." On the spot, he resolved himself and made a vow to carry the succession forward properly. He was later adopted by Kintarō's widow, and was formally named the 21st-generation head of the Sakurama house.
The teachings of his grandfather Michio and his teacher Kintarō were, in many ways, as different as oil and water.
Sakurama: One of them would say you can't act a role without becoming it completely. The other would say that even if you think you've become the role, that kind of acting doesn't actually work — you have to study how you should carry yourself in order to appear that way, and act from that study instead. Kintarō held that dance is the body moving the moment it hears the chant, and deliberately left undecided which kata should fall on which word; Michio held that if you do it carelessly, the dance turns shoddy, and so he fixed, precisely, which kata belonged to which syllable. Looking back now, having been taught by two teachers with such completely opposite ways of thinking has become an enormous asset to me.
In the world of Noh, it's often said to be preferable to learn from the generation of one's grandfather rather than one's father.
Sakurama: If a father teaches, he tends to be too strict, and the child ends up hating Noh. If a grandfather teaches, he can't help but go easy on his grandchild. That's why people sometimes say you turn out better if you learn from your grandfather. Of course, it can't be all leniency — the father's generation needs to step in with some severity now and then, too.
Being taught by two generations back — his grandfather, and his grandfather's nephew and teacher, Kintarō — may have produced, in the end, an exquisite balance. That doesn't mean, however, that the young Ujin, caught in the middle of it at the time, was free of doubt.
Sakurama: When I was studying under my grandfather, my grandfather was right. Once I began training under my teacher, my teacher was right. Well, this may hold true in other fields too, but learning means letting go, for a time, of all the knowledge you've built up until then — starting from a blank slate, accepting the teaching of whoever you've newly come to study under, and letting yourself be dyed in their color. I think that's simply what a classical art is.
When the teacher changes, the kata, too, are entirely replaced. Today, what Sakurama performs is unified around the kata of his teacher Kintarō, not those of his grandfather Michio. But because no one else remains who performs Michio's kata, he said that now, marking his sixtieth anniversary on stage, he intends to unseal them once more — and that he hopes, eventually, to pass on both sets of kata to someone capable of discerning between them.
His grandfather Michio was born into a branch of the Sakurama house, and during his training years in Tokyo, he set practice aside for a time — three years, by what he once told me personally, though in at least one interview he gave the number as seven — to study oil painting under the Western-style painter Kishida Ryūsei.
Sakurama: That way of seeing painting seems to have shaped my grandfather's own view of Noh later on. He always said himself that those seven years were never wasted.
Michio questioned anew whether the kata passed down through the generations actually matched what the chanted text was meant to express. He suspected that kata had been attached even to wordplay carrying no real meaning, and went back to reexamine the kata in such passages. His approach was never flatly rejected by the Noh world — if anything, it earned high praise from scholars, and in later years, the recognition that he had accurately interpreted the text and set precisely matching kata became the core reason for his designation as a Living National Treasure.
Sakurama: Not simply accepting something because your teacher taught it to you, but thinking it through once more. My grandfather still teaches me that lesson, even now, and I must never forget it whenever I perform. He is my master, my grandfather, and in a sense my father as well. He's a complicated presence to hold in one person.
One thing the Sakurama house has especially prized is a commitment, in its chanting, to never damage the Japanese language itself.
Sakurama: Banma, one of the three great masters of the Meiji era, reportedly told his own son never to learn the instrumental accompaniment, hayashi — because doing so would turn your chanting into something shaped to fit the music. When you set a text written in the 7-5 syllabic meter against an 8-beat rhythm, you come up several syllables short. To fill that gap, you have to stretch certain sounds out — but depending on how you stretch them, the word can turn into an entirely different piece of Japanese. Stretch the word ku into kū, for instance, and depending on which vowel you draw out, it can become either "pain" or "sky." Choose the stretch that fits the music most easily, and the meaning of the Japanese collapses.
This stance — prioritizing the Japanese language over a perfect fit with the music — is not, Sakurama says himself, the mainstream approach in today's Noh world. Even so, he regards this single commitment, to chant in a way that honors the Japanese language, as one of the responsibilities the Sakurama house must carry.
For a Noh performer, it is said, tools and equipment are equal to one's own life.
Sakurama: People often say, "Life matters most, and tools come second" — but for a Noh performer, the tools themselves are life. As a child, I'd be made to take off my costume the moment a performance ended, and that wasn't because it was heavy, hot, or uncomfortable. It was so the costume itself wouldn't be damaged — you take it off quickly to protect it.
Even when an overseas audience calls for an encore, he never returns to the stage still in costume. Underlying this is the belief that the costume, even while in his own hands, actually belongs to the generations of performers who will wear it after him — that he has simply been entrusted with its care for a time. When he does answer an encore, he first removes the costume and changes into a montsuki, a formal kimono bearing the family crest, before stepping back out.
The same attitude carries through to Noh masks. Among the masks passed down in the Sakurama house, the two Ujin treasures most are the zō-onna his grandfather favored, and a ko-omote with its own history of transmission.
Sakurama: My grandfather used to call one particular ko-omote — carved by Demmei, whose birth year is unknown but who died in 1705 — "the new one," while he'd call the zō-onna he favored "the old one." As a child, I simply took that at face value, but when I later looked into the mask carver's name, I found that he died in 1705. To my grandfather, anything up through the early Edo period was old, and anything after that counted as new — a sense of time that was entirely his own. He had no notion that old automatically meant good and new meant bad. If a mask that was normally used for a given role didn't suit the Noh he wanted to express, he wouldn't use it even if it was the work of a celebrated master — he'd deliberately choose a different mask instead.
As a rule, Noh masks are not put on public display. Once, when the previous head agreed to a request to exhibit one, the gofun — a white pigment made from crushed shell, applied to the mask's surface — cracked. Since then, Sakurama says, the house has made a practice of declining ordinary exhibition requests.
Sakurama: Noh masks, and the wooden body of a hand drum, are in a sense possessions for life — things meant to be handed down forever. Costumes and drumheads, on the other hand, are consumables; as a rough guide, they last around 150 years, or at most two or three hundred. Noh's history runs close to 700 years now, and I believe it's the responsibility of those of us living today to care for these things well enough to carry them into the next 700.
With Noh masks, the relationship is less one of maintenance than of simply "looking at them." Made of lacquer, animal glue, and moisture-absorbent hinoki wood, a mask will dry out if left unused for too long. That's precisely why it matters to take it out from time to time and gaze at it closely, near enough to feel one's own breath on it — a lesson Sakurama learned from the previous head. He recalls being handed a mask once by his teacher, the work of a carver not especially well regarded, and told simply, "Try using it." He was puzzled at first, but after enough time had passed and he looked at it again, the expression seemed to have changed entirely.
This same way of relating to one's tools shows up in how practice itself proceeds. Before beginning, even for material he should already know, he first opens the katatsuke — the notated kata script, a written record of a role's movement instructions, kept separate from the sung text — just to be sure memory hasn't slipped. Only then does he chant, and once the voice is working, he begins to move. Running through a piece start to finish is rare; instead, a single passage is taken out and practiced repeatedly, and only as a performance approaches does the training gradually build toward a full run-through.
What stands in for a pre-performance rehearsal is a gathering called the moshiawase — the pre-performance run-through. Its density is nothing like a rehearsal in other forms of theater.
Sakurama: Sometimes, for reasons of time or cost, an organizer will ask us not to hold a moshiawase at all. Even so, we can't have nothing — so sometimes we'll take just a few minutes and confirm things verbally: "let's do it as usual," or "here, we'll change it this way, for a special staging called a kogaki." Having performed the same plays for centuries, each performer's sense of their role is already so aligned with everyone else's that a single phrase — "as usual" — is enough to make it work.
The experience offered on this stage aims to let visitors feel, directly, the very way Noh has been handed down — through oral transmission itself.
Sakurama: You listen to my voice as I chant, and try to imitate it. You watch hakobi, the basic gliding walk of Noh, and try to imitate that. A lot of people overthink it, but once you actually try, it turns out anyone can do it. Just stepping onto the cypress stage and walking the hakobi in white tabi socks is often enough, on its own, to bring people real joy.
Sitting in seiza, or recreating the posture from the waist up while seated in a chair, and producing sound through abdominal breathing, is also an exercise said to be good for the body. During the experience, visitors imitate the movements of Hagoromo — well known enough to appear in Japanese school textbooks, it depicts a heavenly maiden who dances for joy at having her robe returned to her before ascending back to the heavens — or sometimes watch Yashima, which depicts the warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune making his name at the Battle of Yashima.
There have also been periods of taking on new experiments rather than simply preserving tradition as it stands. "Creation — Tenchi Sōzō," performed in late May, was an attempt to set a single theme with a group of musicians and build dance and music together simultaneously, through repeated rehearsal. Its roots lie partly in an earlier experience of being asked to dance in the costume of Aoi no Ue to a guitarist's performance, and partly in having once taken the stage in the lead role of the opera Curlew River — a role his teacher, Kintarō, had also once performed.
Sakurama: Creating a new Noh work is also a way of looking at Noh itself anew. Having had the chance to do a good deal of it, I was able to rediscover what makes Noh itself so good. These days, I place more importance on digging deeper into the existing repertoire and performing it in a more complete form — but I think that period was a necessary rite of passage.
Creating new Noh is by no means a common activity for a performer — in some schools, it isn't permitted to just anyone. More than twenty years ago, Ujin was told by the iemoto of the time, the head of the school, "I won't place any restrictions on your artistic activity — do as you like."
Sakurama: Being told that, oddly enough, makes it harder to do anything too unconventional. If someone tells you "no," you think, "well then, I'll do it anyway" — but once you're told "it's fine," you end up restraining yourself, staying within the bounds of good sense. Noh is already a complete, finished art, so rather than attempting something new for its own sake, what matters to me is using Noh's existing techniques to tell a new subject as a story.
Even so, he has built up collaborations over the years with longtime stage partners — creating dances, for instance, together with waki-kata performers, the supporting-actor role, who carry much of the chanting. When creating a new Noh work, he says, the natural approach is to team up with someone who holds the standing to be permitted such a thing, or with the iemoto — the one who grants that permission — himself.
The Sakurama house has also put real effort into carrying Noh abroad. Yumikawa, the head two generations before Ujin, appeared in a Noh film commissioned by the Ministry of Communications, producing Aoi no Ue in English, German, and Italian versions for audiences overseas. The previous head, too, gave a run of 40 performances over two months across the United States and Canada. Ujin himself has received more invitations since UNESCO's 2001 recognition, and continued performing abroad until the pandemic forced the cancellation of a planned 2020 tour.
Sakurama: Greece, in particular, is a connection I'd like to deepen. I've received invitations from a society devoted to Japan-Greece friendship, and have taken part in events such as the embassy's National Day ceremonies. Pre-Christian Greek views of death — the idea that the soul travels to another world and goes on living there — share a good deal with the Japanese view of death and the afterlife found in Noh. I'd like to perform Noh someday in a place that once held the same kind of feeling, and I'm building relationships with people connected to Greece now, with an eye toward three years from now.
Noh is often said to carry a forbiddingly high threshold, but Ujin returns to its origins. One purpose behind the 66 performances Prince Shōtoku commissioned from Hata no Kawakatsu was, after all, for the enjoyment of all people — simple, wholehearted pleasure for the many.
Sakurama: Over time, it turned into something with that high threshold. If people can actually experience it themselves, and genuinely enjoy it with an open heart, I hope that can lead them to understand the true essence of Noh.
For Sakurama Ujin, Noh is a complicated thing to hold — at once his livelihood, a source of hardship, and a seed of joy. There are years in that history of moving forward, uncertain, between opposites: his grandfather's teaching and his teacher's, Nara and Higo, the old kata and new experiments. Perhaps what lies at the core of the art Sakurama now carries is riken no ken — Zeami's principle of watching one's own performance from a detached, external vantage point. An art carried forward for 700 years is, in this way, passed once again to the next generation. Just as his practice hall and his home share the same grounds, Noh occupies a place in Ujin's life that cannot be separated from his life itself. Each time he steps onto the stage, a sense of accomplishment contends within him — and yet, once he comes back down, he can return to practice again. That back-and-forth may be, itself, the one answer the Sakurama house continues to hold onto, even now.