Kyoto, the birthplace of the popular theatre, was, when O-Kuni made her appearance, a city of half-a-million inhabitants. Murdoch says in his _History of Japan_: “It is well to remember that if Japan had no Free Cities, she had what Germany, or indeed any other European country, had not,—a single great city with a population of half-a-million. Such Kyoto was even at one of the lowest ebbs in its prosperity at the date of Xavier’s visit to it in 1551. In 1467 at the outbreak of the war of Odin, it contained 160,000 families, or, perhaps, 900,000 souls. Few cities in contemporary Europe could boast even a tenth of that population.” Captain Francis Brinkley also refers to the splendours of Kyoto palaces and fine residences in the fifteenth century, and says that even men who made medicine or fortune-telling their professions and petty officials such as secretaries had stately residences. Fenollosa in his _Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art_ writes about Kyoto civilians, and as to the patrons of the artists, he asks: “Who were Okio’s patrons? Why, the silk weavers, bronze casters, the embroiderers and fine lacquerers, the æsthetic priests of Kyoto temples, the great potters grouped at the foot of Arashiyama, the great merchants who sent their fine wares all over Japan even to the daimyo’s yashiki.” Such was Kyoto, the political as well as artistic centre of Japan, when O-Kuni gave the impetus that started the movement to establish Kabuki, the people’s stage, that to-day has inherited all the wealth of past materials and is turned resolutely toward the promise of the future. Her performances were of the simplest character. She has been described as wearing a priest’s robe of black silk, with a small metal Buddhist gong suspended from her neck by a vermilion silk cord, and as she struck the gong with a mallet, she danced and chanted a Buddhist sutra. Seiseiin Ihara, Kabuki’s leading historian and one of the prominent dramatic critics of Tokyo, who was born in the shadow of the Shrine of Izumo, has taken great pains to gather from the old records the story of O-Kuni. He says that it may seem incredible that a Buddhist dance should have been performed by the miko of Izumo Shrine, but he points out that it was the period when Shinto, or the “Way of the Gods”, the reverence and worship of the ancestors of the race and departed souls who were great in life, and Buddhism, the “Way of Buddha”, or the faith in a universal being and a future state of happiness, lived peacefully together. Buddhist priests were prominent at Izumo, and a bronze image of Buddha was placed in front of the Shrine where incense was burned, and the sutras were recited by eight females who performed to musical instruments used in Buddhist as well as Shinto ceremonies. To-day the combination seems hard to believe, since Shintoism and Buddhism are strictly separated.