It is often played at Shinto festivals of various sorts, Shinto being mostly a form of animism. It is also tied up heavily with the Japanese national identity, and I get the impression that most temple-goers go to the temples because it is the Japanese thing to do, not necessarily because they are actually animists. 90+ percent of Japanese identify themselves as atheists or agnostics.
Shinto is kind of strange though in the sense that they don't really care what else you are, what other religions you ascribe to or none at all. If you want to go through the motions at a Shinto temple, even if you are a hardcore atheist or fundamentalist Christian, you are totally allowed. Also it has a sort of symbiosis going on with Buddhism: Shinto takes care of births, Buddhism takes care of funerals. You can be an atheist materialist, register your newborn with the local Shinto temple and get your funeral rites with the Buddhists. Shinto doesn't do funerals except at considerable arms length, corpses being considered unclean and the family of the bereaved being considered ritually unclean for a set period of time, which means that neither are getting anywhere near a Shinto temple. If you are a dead Emperor, your bones can eventually find their way to a dedicated temple built specially for you but even then I think you have to rot somewhere else first. There is an entire island, Itsukushima, which is considered sacred ground, and the sick and elderly are whisked off it so that they don't accidentally die there. For most of its history, commoners were not allowed to go there at all. It is dedicated to the sea and sky deity Susano-o no Mikoto, the impetuous testosterone-laden bad boy of Shinto deities.
Gagaku with dance is called Bugaku, I like the dances too. This was performed at the shrine to the Emperor Meiji.
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