The broad division of Noh plays into the two categories of mugen nō 夢幻能 "Phantasm Noh" and genzai nō 現在能 "Reality Noh" is a useful one, not least because "inventor of mugen nō, and therefore perfecter of the Classical form" is a handy nutshell summary of who Zeami was.

But Zeami and his contemporaries didn't actually use that terminology. In fact, according to Umehara Takeshi's Umehara Takeshi no jugyō: Nō o miru (梅原猛の授業 能を観る "An Umehara Takeshi course in watching nō"), the phrase mugen nō was coined in 1909 1926 by Sanari Kentarō 佐成謙太郎. Umehara claims that in a "Radio lecture on national literature" (国文学ラヂオ講座), Sanari said the following of the Noh play "Yorimasa" 頼政:

私はこのように、劇の主人公がワキの夢に現れてくるものを夢幻能と名づけ、従って『頼政』の如き脚色を複式夢幻能と申せばどうであろうかと思うのでございます

In this way I suppose that one might call those [plays] where the protagonist appears in the waki's dreams mugen nō, and therefore to refer to plays with a structure like "Yorimasa" as fukushiki mugen nō ["two-part phantasm Noh"]

... "Two-part phantasm Noh" being the classic, even stereotypical Noh structure: a first act where the waki encounters a rustic local who obligingly explains the details of some historical tragedy that took place nearby, and a second act where the rustic local returns in his true form: the ghost of said tragedy's principal figure. The name of this structure was also the inspiration for the John Lennon/Yoko Ono album title Double Fantasy. (Sadly, that last sentence may not be entirely true.)

So I was reading Ann Hutchison Guest's Dance Notation (1984) and found, as an example of an "avant-garde composer[...] indicat[ing] duration by length" an excerpt from "The Garden of Royan-gi by Louis Andriesson, 1967".

I found that title intriguing and suspicious, and indeed it appears to be a typo for The Garden of Ryoan-gi, i.e. Ryōan-ji. The work was apparently for three electronic organs, and 1967 is a decade and a half before Cage's famous take on the same theme.

There's no performance of The Garden of Ryoan-gi available online as far as I can tell (although Andriessen himself has a blog), but I did find a nice performance of Cage's piece by Liz Tonne (voice) and Tim Feeney (percussion). If you want to follow a score for the percussion part, you'll find one on the first page of this transcript of a 1983 conversation between Cage and Morton Feldman.

At the beginning of Miyamoto Yuriko 宮本百合子's 1933 novel Kokukoku (刻々, "By the hour"), a prison guard complains:

この一二年、めっきり留置場の客種も下ったなア ... もとは、滅多に留置場へなんか入って来る者もなかったが、その代り入って来る位の奴は、どいつも娑婆じゃ相当なことをやって来たもんだ。それがこの頃じゃどうだ！　ラジオだ、ナマコ一枚だ、で留置場は満員だものなア。きんたまのあるような奴が一人でもいるかね?!

We really been seeing a lower class of people in the jail here this past year or two... used to be that you'd hardly ever see a new face around, but those who did get locked up, they'd done something real serious on the outside. But now! The place is full of guys locked up for radio, a sheet of sea cucumber... ain't there anyone with any balls?!

Those are some pretty obscure crimes. To the dictionary!

Although, actually, we don't need a dictionary for "radio" (rajio) because the original text includes the explanation "無銭飲食" ("eating/drinking without paying") in parentheses. This is a pun: musen 無銭 meaning "without money", i.e. "without paying", is homophonous with musen 無線 meaning "without wires", i.e. "wireless."

"A sheet of sea cucumber" (namako ichimai) is tougher, at least for me. Umegaki Minoru 楳垣実's 1956 Ingo jiten (隠語辞典, "Dictionary of cant") says that namako "sea cucumber" was code for "cucumber", logically enough. (I use the past tense, but I suppose if people are still stealing cucumbers they might still be using this expression.) Meanwhile, "a sheet" (ichimai) means one standard unit of whatever's under discussion: one "sheet" of rice was 10 koku, one "sheet" of sugar was 100 bags, and so on.

(I think that here "sheet" refers to a sort of IOU-ish/share-ish "bill" or "ticket" to be exchanged for the goods, rather than a physical arrangement of the goods themselves, so "sheet of sea cucumber" is probably a misleading translation. So it goes.)

The July issue of Gendaishi techō (現代詩手帳, "Contemporary Poetry Notebook") is a Gary Synderfest, in a sort of belated tie-in with his 2011 visit to Japan. One of the essays, by fellow poet Koike Masayo 小池昌代, is entitled Watashitachi no karada (わたしたちのからだ, "Our bodies"), and begins with a comment on Snyder's "The Bath", from Turtle Island:

One phrase appears every stanza (and is set in italics in the original). At first it is is this our body?; after it has appeared like this twice an intermediate form this our body appears, and after this as the sentence this is our body, which is then repeated. That is, the initial interrogative changes, with one intermediate step, into a strong affirmative. I have read this poem many times over the years, and this is what remains with me.

In the Ainu kamuy yukar, there is a type of refrain known as a sakehe, a group of words the meaning of which is not well understood but which are retained for the importance of their sound and their function in the song). These words of Snyder's, too, strike me as a sort of modern sakehe, even though they do carry lingering meaning. (My translation)

More about sakehe from Sarah M. Strong's "The most revered of foxes: knowledge of animals and animal power in an Ainu Kamui Yukar" (2009):

As a native speaker of Ainu, Chiri Yukie knew orally the chants she had heard since childhood. For her, each kamui yukar was not a static, memorized "text" but rather a living oral tradition, and her written versions possess qualifies of oral performance. One feature of each chant that was clearly central to her experience of it was its refrain or sakehe. Because the refrain of each kamui yukar is unique to the particular chant it was traditionally used as a way of identifying the chant. Both in the earlier notebook versions and in the Ainu shin'yoshu text Chiri includes the sakehe as a defining title after first identifying the animal spiritual being who is singing its tale. Thus, in the case of the third chant of the Ainu shin'yoshu she names the chant as that "of the fox (chironnup) about itself" and further identifies it with its unique sakehe, haikunterke haikoshitemturi. Although the sakehe, with its long phrases, might seem puzzling for readers unfamiliar with the tradition, for those within Ainu oral tradition it serves as an easy way to distinguish this fox kamui yukar from others about the same animal spiritual being.

(The original title Strong is translating is "Chironnup yaieyukar, 'Haikunterke Haikoshitemturi'", and you can read it for yourself because the book is out of copyright and available at Aozora Bunko.)

Incidentally: <kamui> or <kamuy>? As I understand it, this just represents two different ways of transcribing diphthongs. My impression is that the <-y> form is standard nowadays, but I don't know the specific reasons for this. I suppose it has to do with reducing ambiguity by representing diphthongs explicitly rather than implicitly. (I wish I could dig better info up on this, but I don't anticipate seeing my Serious Books on Ainu again until I move...)

Here's a tanka by Ishikawa Takuboku:

売り売りて手垢きたなき独逸語の辞書のみ残る夏の床かな
With sale upon sale, only/ an overhandled German dictionary remains/ on the summer floor

The unthinkable grief of having sold all one's books except a grotty German dictionary! Leavened somewhat by how nice old-fashioned wooden floors are in summer.

The phrase I translate as "overhandled" is in the original teaka kitanaki, literally "dirty with hand-grime." It's a very vivid image.

Note that Takuboku wrote his infamous Romazi Nikki in a German-like Style with capitalized Nouns (although this is a bit irregular and in particular "formal nouns" like koto and so on tend to be lower case).

Yo wa Kodoku wo yorokobu Ningen da. Umare-nagara ni site Kozin-syugi no Ningen da. Hito to tomo ni sugosita Zikan wa iyasikumo, Tatakai de nai kagiri, Yo ni wa Kûkyo na Zikan no yô na Ki ga suru.

There was an interesting language-related squib in the Mainichi Shinbun last month: Ise Shrine ponders changing name to Ise Temple.

The idea to change the English-language name of Ise Jingu (Ise Grand Shrine) has been floated as a way to help foreigners better understand its centuries-old institution, spokesman Tatsumi Yoshikawa told an audience of some 130 people at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (FCCJ) on May 24.

No need to get too upset, though:

[A]fter his lecture, the spokesman said that Ise Shrine does not anticipate any specific development on the idea anytime soon. He also declined to speculate on how a change of a popular shrine's name to "temple" in English would affect other famous shrines such as Tokyo's Meiji Shrine.

There's a Japanese version of the story at Yahoo, too, complete with poll (74% of respondents are against a change from "shrine" to "temple" in the case of Shinto). The Japanese version also includes some background:

神宮司庁によると、神宮を表す英語には変遷がある。明治初期の外交官たちは、キリスト教以外の、神殿を意味する「ｔｅｍｐｌｅ」を当てた。だが、仏閣のイメージが強過ぎ、区別する意味で後に「ｓｈｒｉｎｅ」（祭壇、聖地）に改めた。

According to [the religious corporation responsible for managing the shrine]*, the English used to translate the word jingū 神宮 has changed before. The diplomats of the early Meiji period used the word "temple" for all all non-Christian temples [聖堂] and [Shinto] shrines [神殿]. However, the Buddhist connotations [of "temple"] were so strong that the latter usage was changed to "shrine" in order to differentiate between the two.

* Apparently the official English rendering of 神宮司庁 is just "jinguushichou", i.e. a transliteration. I figured that using this wouldn't be helpful. Incidentally, the official webpage of the shrine/temple in question uses jingū exclusively, but according to Yahoo! (and pace the Mainichi story above) they have been using "sanctuary" instead of "shrine" in their explanatory materials since 1993.

It's true that temple = Buddhism, shrine = Shinto wasn't always the rule. We don't have to take anyone's word for it; we can see the lack of consistency in easily available English-language works. For example, check out this passage from the 1727 History of Japan, translated into English from Kaempfer's original (unpublished) German Heutiges Japan by Johann Caspar Scheuchzer:

Chap. II.
Of the Sintos Temples, Belief and Worship

The Sinsju, that is, the adherents of the Sintos Religion, call their Temples, or Churches, Mia, which word, as I have observ'd, signifies dwelling places of immortal Souls. They come nearest to the Fana of the ancient Romans, as they are generally speaking so many lasting monuments erected to the memory of great men. They call them also Yasijro, and Sia, or Sinsja, which last takes in the whole Court of the Mia, with all other buildings and dependencies belonging to the same.

"Shrine" appears only a few times in the History, and only with a much more specific meaning, essentially involving the storage of "relicks", e.g.:

... Nor indeed do they keep any Images at all in their temples, unless they deserve it on a particular account, either for the reputation and holiness of the carver, or because of some extraordinary miracles wrought by them. In this case a particular box is contriv'd at the chief and upper end of the temple, opposed to its grated front, and it is call'd Fongu, which is as much as to say, the real, true Temple. In this box, which the worshippers bow to, the Idol is lock'd up, and never taken out, but upon the great festival day of the Kami, whom it represents, which is celebrated but once in a hundred years. In the same shrine are likewise lock'd up, what relicks they have, of the bones, habits, swords, or handy-works of the same God.

Moving forward, Lafcadio Hearn seemed to use both "temple" and "shrine" more or less indiscriminately when referring to places of worship (for want of a better term distinguishing such from butsudan, which he referred to as "household shrines" quite consistently). Here are some examples:

It is almost the sensation received when, after climbing through miles of silence to reach some Shinto shrine, you find voidness only and solitude,—an elfish, empty little wooden structure, mouldering in shadows a thousand years old.

---

When one compares the utterances which West and East have given to their dreams, their aspirations, their sensations,—a Gothic cathedral with a Shinto temple, an opera by Verdi or a trilogy by Wagner with a performance of geisha, a European epic with a Japanese poem,—how incalculable the difference in emotional volume, in imaginative power, in artistic synthesis! (Kokoro, 1895)

Of whatever dimension, the temples or shrines of pure Shinto are all built in the same archaic style. (Gleanings in Buddha Fields, 1897)

In the period of the Ashikaga Shōgunate the shrine of Ogawachi-Myōjin, at Minami-Isé, fell into decay; and the daimyō of the district, the Lord Kitahataké, found himself unable, by reason of war and other circumstances, to provide for the reparation of the building. Then the Shintō priest in charge, Matsumura Hyōgo, sought help at Kyōto from the great daimyō Hosokawa, who was known to have influence with the Shōgun. The Lord Hosokawa received the priest kindly, and promised to speak to the Shōgun about the condition of Ogawachi-Myōjin. But he said that, in any event, a grant for the restoration of the temple could not be made without due investigation and considerable delay; and he advised Matsumura to remain in the capital while the matter was being arranged. (The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies & Stories, 1905)

So the potential argument that calling a Shinto shrine a temple is just illogical and historically ill-informed is a non-starter. However, the argument that it will cause confusion, essentially undoing the attempt by the Meiji diplomats above to distinguish Buddhism and Shinto, does seem reasonable. And neither of these reports has much to say about what the corresponding upside would be — just some hints about "shrine" being inappropriate because (in the Christian tradition) it often refers to a place where bones and other relics are stored, which is apparently giving people the wrong impression about Shinto. I wonder if that connotation is really so strong for the average English speaker, though; for me, the secular, non-mortuary "shrine to Kurt Cobain in my bedroom"-type meaning is much stronger.

In summary, I don't have particularly strong feelings about whether the word "shrine" or "temple" is more suitable, but it will make my life more difficult if I can no longer explain to my parents that shrines are Shinto and temples Buddhist.