Okina is the visible remnant of the ritual soil from which Japanese theatre grew. Before Noh existed, troupes attached to shrines and temples performed sarugaku at festivals, and among their offerings was okina sarugaku, in which performers embodied divine old men, smiling elders whose age itself signified blessing, dancing for the peace of the realm and the fertility of the fields. Medieval sources describe a fuller form with three old men, and the deity involved was identified variously, with shrine traditions connecting the okina to local and national kami and Buddhist interpreters reading the three figures as manifestations of buddhas, the kind of layered identification typical of premodern Japanese religion.
When the Kanze line of performers, Kan'ami and his son Zeami, transformed sarugaku into the refined art of Noh under shogunal patronage in the fourteenth century, the okina rite came with them as the art's sacred anchor, performed first on formal programmes, its role sustained even as the new drama developed the poetics of ghosts and memory that made it famous. The transmission has remained jealously guarded: performing Okina is a milestone of seniority in the Noh schools, surrounded by initiation and secrecy, and the piece is still danced at the Imperial court's ceremonial occasions and at the great shrines. Scholars of Japanese performance treat Okina as a rare case of a living ritual predating and outliving the theatre built around it, a stage on which, once or twice a year, the art remembers that it began as an offering.