It is difficult to establish what was the true origin of ikebana. It is generally said ikebana came to Japan as part of Buddhist practice. There is an alternative view?Ffrom pre-Buddhist times Japanese have used evergreen trees and flowers to call down the gods and it has been claimed that this practice is at the heart of secular ikebana.Whatever the truth of these theories, Japan's deep communion with nature in the form of flowers, wild plant and trees is evident even in the earliest of Japanese writings.
Ikebana, as we would recognize it, first appeared in the Muromachi Period(from the late fourteenth century to the mid sixteen century).It was during this period that much of "traditional" Japanese art and its canon of beauty was established. The shoin style of residential architecture, the tea ceremony, ikebana, noh, renga and garden design all have their beginnings in the Muromachi period. This was not, however, a spontaneous flowering of popular culture. The daimyo and shoguns feudal lords and generals gave the groups of artists, called doboshu, responsibility for aesthetics and techniques.Some doboshu concentrated on flower arrangement. They produced a style, tatebana, based on a standing branch in the center of the vase.From this point masters of flower arrangement appeared one after the other. Ikenobo Senko, a monk in the Rokkakudo in Kyoto remains the most influential. His style of tatebana, developed and taught by Ikenobo Senei and Ikenobu Senou, spread through the samurai class and aristocracy, side by side with a an increasingly austere way of tea ceremony. From the Azuchi Momoyama period through the Edo era, ikebana was a living art form and changed with the times in both major kinds of major and minor ways.In the late eighteenth century, for example, when people began cultivating western plants, Oshawa Usin popularized a style, moribana that was used for the new western flowers in ikebana arrangement.
In the Edo period, ikebana also underwent one of its most serious shifts. The Ikenobo style of tatebana, influenced by Senno Rikkyu's chabanna (simplified flower arrangements for tea rooms) jumped from samurai to townsman culture and changed its name to Rikka. Eventually, as Rikka's creative impulse faded its geometric effect was lost in decorative complications and a new highly symbolic style Seika (or Shoka) appeared. Seika was based a triangular framework, ten-chi-jin, jo-ha-kyu or sin-gyo-ku; all different ways of saying heaven-earth-man. Many new schools opened to teach the Seika style and the iemoto system began.
With Meiji era modernization ikebana went into eclipse. The Meiji government, however, had early committed itself to educating women and later decided that this could just as well be defined as training women to be "good wives and wise mothers". The government literally decreed that, as part of this character formation, Ikebana, once a male art form, was from now on to be a standard part of women's education. This decision established the basis for the revival of ikebana and also, in one generation, passed its practice from men's into women's hands Women were, though, forbidden almost by law to innovate in any major way.
With Meiji era modernization ikebana went into eclipse. The Meiji government, however, had early committed itself to educating women and later decided that this could just as well be defined as training women to be "good wives and wise mothers". The government literally decreed that, as part of this character formation, Ikebana, once a male art form, was from now on to be a standard part of women's education. This decision established the basis for the revival of ikebana and also, in one generation, passed its practice from men's into women's hands Women were, though, forbidden almost by law to innovate in any major way.
