ABSTRACT
Local practitioners of the performing arts are keen to publicize their performances and theories of folklorists to enhance the status of their art. In fact, many of the folk performing arts such as, for example, the dengaku in Aichi prefecture, could similarly be labelled multi-entertainments. As a wide variety of performance pieces are incorporated within a sequence of events which, somewhere along perhaps not a very deep historical line, came to be known as dengaku. With some form of music, dance and theatre being the criteria, roughly 80 per cent of intangible properties are folk performing arts and these make up the body of this directory. Honda Yasuji, under the collective editorial name of the Nihon Nashyonaru Torasuto, headed a team of researchers who provided the details for the former publication. In Japanese folkloric studies, hana matsuri refers to the shimotsuki kagura performed today in 18 sites centring on the borders between Nagano, Shizuoka and Aichi prefectures.
