Over the many decades of his career Honda Yasuji (1906–2001), a leading scholar of minzoku geinō, the Japanese Folk Performing Arts, developed and refined a highly influential classification system. This system has dominated indigenous and foreign approaches to the study of Japan's folk performing arts. It continues to form the backbone of encyclopaedic and dictionary definitions of the Folk Performing Arts and is the system underpinning minzoku geinō classification in the bunkazai hogo hō, the national Cultural Properties Protection Law. While politicians in the Ministry of Culture continue to champion Honda's system, it has long been recognized in Japanese academic circles that there are problems with the system and its terminology, and the death of Honda Yasuji has liberated debate, paving the way for new conceptual approaches to minzoku geinō. The opening chapter of Lancashire's timely volume captures this debate, tracing developments that have taken place since Barbara Thornbury's seminal 1997 English introduction to minzoku geinō, The Folk Performing Arts: Traditional Culture in Contemporary Japan. Lancashire's text opens with an overview of Honda's system and introduces some of the new approaches that are emerging, such as the classification systems developed by Misumi Haruo and Arai Tsuneyasu. Honda's classification system groups the folk performing arts into five main types: kagura (ritual dance, music and drama in shrines); dengaku (music of the field); furyū (ornamentally dressed dance groups); katarimono/shufukugei (oral narratives and entertainments of celebrations); and entertainment of foreign derivation/stage entertainments. In the opening chapter, Lancashire considers the shortcomings of Honda's system, particularly those relating to the kagura (“plays for the gods”), his area of research expertise. Honda's system operates by selecting “what he considers to be the central characteristic of a given kagura [use of hand-held objects; boiling water rites; lion dances etc], making it the diagnostic feature”. However, as many kagura share more than one type of these characteristics and some of the historical distinctions that Honda makes between categories of kagura have no real basis, Honda's system does not work for many forms of kagura.

Herein lies a difficulty with this opening theory chapter and with the chapters that follow. Having rightly raised the issue of the problems that dominate the research and funding of minzoku geinō, namely the weaknesses in Honda's classification system, the text continues to follow this system. Subsequent chapters are structured around Honda's system and the author does not provide a convincing argument as to what could be a better system. It is a complex problem but answers are beginning to emerge from cross-disciplinary research. With regard to kagura, for example, recent ritual and literary research by scholars such as Iwata Masaru and, more recently, Yamamoto Hiroko and Saitō Hideki, recognizes the centrality of the ritual, text and the practitioners to kagura, and by resituating the kagura within its ritual context have developed an approach which provides a far more satisfactory way in to this sacred performance than scholarship driven by Honda, which concentrates on the external aspects of its performance. By covering all the folk performing arts in this one volume, however, Lancashire is unable to go in to much depth about the classification and development of any one tradition and the result is a somewhat unsatisfactory overview that raises important questions for scholars of minzoku geinō without really directing us towards the research that could hold the answers.

The second half of the volume contains a directory of important folk performing arts and also an introduction to Japan's cultural property law. It is a useful directory, which includes dates and location of performance and a brief guide to and analysis of each event; it would serve as a helpful guide for those interested in viewing a live performance.