About Essay Topic

I'm planning to write about protection of Japanese traditional arts.

Today, many traditional arts and music are disappearing because there are few successors. Especially, there are very few young people who want to be a successor of traditional arts. As a result, the creators are getting older and older, and many traditional arts are no more able to exist. Once they disappeared, it is almost impossible to recreate such arts. In order to save these for next generation, we have to protect them.

Moreover, I feel that there are very few opportunities to see or learn traditional arts. In elementary school, we study much about Western arts and music. However, we don’t study Japanese arts and music so much. If we study those, it is not in the art or music class but in history class. I think this is one of the reasons why young people don’t want to be successor of traditional arts. They aren’t interested in them because don’t know them.

I’m interested in this theme because of my high school friend. I have a friend who was interested in Japanese traditional dying very much. She always said that she want to study that dying. After graduation from high school, she went Kyoto alone, and now she is learning that dying in Kyoto. It is easy to say such thing, but it is very hard to act. I was moved and from then I’m interested in this problem.

I have 7 questions about this.

1. How to protect Japanese disappearing traditional Arts?

2. Why we learn Japanese traditional arts less than western arts?

3. Why the number of successors is decreasing?

4. What kinds of arts are actually disappearing?

5. How to learn traditional arts effectively?

6. What is done in order to protect traditional arts by now?

7. Does the students in other countries study about their traditional arts in elementary school?

English sources;

“Research on art and music in Japan: a colloquy with foreign scholars resident in Japan”

Edited by Patricia Fister and Hosokawa Shuhei

“International handbook of Research in arts education 1”

Edited by Liora Bresler

“Lecture 5: The training of successors for the traditional performing arts oh the National Theatre”

Written by Takase Hiroko

http://www.accu.or.jp/ich/en/training/curriculum/pdf/ppt/lecture5_ppt.pdf