JAPAN
display of acrobatic feats. Popular patois, more retentive than history, applies the name Den-gaku to a rectangular slice of bean-curd having a skewer thrust through it from end to end, because a cake thus transfixed is supposed to resemble a Den-gaku gymnast mounted on a single stilt. By the Hōjō rulers in Kamakura, however, the Den-gaku, even before it had emerged from its acrobatic stage, was generously patronised. The Taiheiki, a celebrated work, part history, part romance, compiled in the fourteenth century, contains a unique but brief account of the Den-gaku as performed at Kamakura before the Buddhist priests had interfered to change it from a musical and spectacular display of gymnastic exercises to an artistic and dramatic representation:—
22