 After the Heian period began was when Western modal theories became widely acknowledged by Japanese society, though it often stayed in its own category as it could not entirely explain Japanese music across all its different iterations.The most common version of the Japanese mode is a somewhat inaccurate term for a pentatonic musical scale which is used commonly in traditional Japanese music.The intervals of the scale are major second, minor third, major fifth, and minor sixth (for example, the notes A, B, C, E, F and up to A) - which is essentially a natural minor scale in Western music theory without the subdominant and subtonic, which is the same operation performed on the major scale to produce the pentatonic major scale.