Puppets of Nostalgia: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of the Japanese Awaji Ningyo Tradition
338
Puppets of Nostalgia: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of the Japanese Awaji Ningyo Tradition
338eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Puppets of Nostalgia is the first major work in any Western language to examine the ritual origins and religious dimensions of puppetry in Japan. In a lucid and engaging style accessible to the general reader, Jane Marie Law describes the "life, death, and rebirth" of awaji ningyo shibai, the unique form of puppet theater of Awaji Island that has existed since the sixteenth century. Puppetry rites on Awaji helped to maintain rigid ritual purity codes and to keep dangerous spiritual forces properly channeled and appeased. Law conducted fieldwork on Awaji, located in Japan's Inland Sea, over a ten-year period. In addition to being a detailed history and ethnography of this ritual tradition, Law's work is, at a theoretical level, a study of the process and meaning of tradition formation, reformation, invention, and revitalization. It will interest scholars in a number of fields, including the history of religions, anthropology, cultural studies, ritual and theater studies, Japanese studies, and social history.
Focusing on the puppetry tradition of Awaji Island, Puppets of Nostalgia describes the activities of the island's ritual puppeteers and includes the first English translation of their performance texts and detailed descriptions of their rites. Because the author has lived on Awaji during extended periods of research, the work includes fine attention to local detail and nuanced readings of religious currents in Japan that affect popular religious expression. Illustrated throughout with rare photographs, the book provides an in-depth view of a four-hundred-year-old tradition never so thoroughly revealed to Western readers.
Originally published in 1997.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400872954 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1728 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 338 |
| File size: | 51 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
Read an Excerpt
Puppets of Nostalgia
The Life, Death, and Rebirth of the Japanese Awaji Ninyo Tradition
By Jane Marie Law
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1997 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-02894-1
CHAPTER 1
In the Shape of a Person: The Varieties of Ritual Uses of Effigy in Japan
I first saw a performance of Awaji ningyo in the fall of 1978, when I happened into the dilapidated theater on the waterfront of Fukura Bay, in a small fishing village in the southern part of the island. The theater was in a large hall located over a souvenir shop. A few dozen folding chairs were set up in rows for the audience. Downstairs, one could buy seaweed from the nearby Inland Sea, and trinkets with a regional flair.
That day I saw the pilgrimage scene from Keisei Awa no Naruto, the story of a young girl who, separated from her parents since the age of three, goes looking for them wearing the garb of a pilgrim on the Saikoku Pilgrimage route. In the scene, she arrives at the home of a woman who quickly recognizes the child's story and realizes that she is her daughter. A heart-wrenching drama unfolds as we learn of the events that led to the separation of the parent and child. For political reasons, the woman is forced to conceal her identity as the girl's mother, and in the end sends her away to continue her search for her parents.
The manipulation of symbols imparted a tragic feeling to the performance. The audience became aware that at some level both mother and child know they have been reunited, but must experience their separation all over again as the child is thrown out the door and it is slammed shut behind her.
It was a powerful performance. Like the Bunraku theater for which Japan is famous, the puppets used in the performance were each manipulated by three people. The puppeteers were clothed in black and covered with hoods, called kuroko. Unlike the Bunraku puppets, the puppets used in this performance stood well over a meter high, giving them an eerie quality as they were moved through their paces by shadowy figures who controlled their destinies in this tragic drama. The large size of Awaji puppets, one of their distinguishing features, developed from their roots as rural drama presented in outdoor theaters and makeshift spaces. Bigger puppets are easier to see. The smaller, delicate dolls of the Bunraku theater were developed to suit the aesthetics of an indoor theater.
Concerning the large size of Awaji ningyo, the scholar of Japanese puppetry Nagata Kokichi commented, "You know that Awaji ningyo are a little larger than Bunraku puppets. The reason is that Awaji puppets aren't meant to be stage puppets primarily. They are puppets of the road, meant to be performed in people's entryways and courtyards, by the sides of roads, in shrines, wherever there is enough space and people to put on a show. Bunraku puppets are lovely, but those are puppets of the stage. If you take Awaji puppets and stick them only inside a theater, it is like putting a wild animal in a zoo. It loses all its wildness. I like Awaji puppets because as they have developed they have maintained their yaseimi [innate wild nature]."
The story of this girl and her mother was in the joruri ballad style. Because the action was presented with puppets, the text was recited by a single chanter, whose forceful interpretation was punctuated by the sharp notes of a shamisen, a three-stringed instrument played by an accompanist. Although the piece I saw had only two characters, there were eight performers on stage throughout, with of course the unseen crew backstage managing the backdrops. While the performance was undeniably lovely, there seemed to be something intentionally inconvenient about using puppets.
I was struck by a very basic question about this theatrical medium: Why go to all this trouble? Surely having three people manipulate one large doll with the characters' lines and even stage asides recited by a chanter is more costly and cumbersome than using human actors. (How much more cumbersome it must be when a performer is itinerant and has to haul these puppets around, as was the case in the purification rituals of the Awaji tradition!) What is it that a puppet can express that a human performer cannot?
This book is in part an exploration of that question. On the one hand, I have been interested in the general phenomenology of puppetry as a theatrical medium and in the discussions by theater specialists, puppeteers, and ritualists around the world who struggle with this same question: why puppets? On the other hand, I have tried to discover how these large figures made of paulownia wood and fabric are understood in Japan. Clearly a broader understanding of the power of effigies, dolls, and body substitutes in Japanese religion has contributed to the development of this ritual tradition.
In Japanese ningyo is written with two characters meaning "person" and "shape." I have chosen to translate this term as "puppet" although in other contexts it could as easily be translated as "doll" or even "effigy." My decision to translate this term this way was uncomplicated: In the first place, most scholars writing in western languages about Japanese ningyo shibai (drama using ningyo) translate the term this way, or see an affinity between this type of performance and other puppetry forms around the world. Second, I maintain that the abstract idea of the puppet as a descriptive category goes the furthest toward helping us understand the decision to use these nearly life-size beings in rituals of appeasement and purification, and eventually dramatic theater. Throughout the world, the decisions to use effigies rather than human actors in ritual share some common religious concerns.
In this chapter I want to set Awaji ningyo in its larger context. First, I explore what a comparative study of puppetry can do for our understanding of this particular case. Second, I survey other ritual uses of ningyo that inform the rise of ningyo shibai, particularly on Awaji, in the mid-sixteenth century. Inherent in the following discussion is an abstraction: in different effigies of the human form in a variety of cultural contexts around the world, there is a category we have come to regard as "puppet." Although in this book I present materials concerning the realities of puppets in one region, I must begin by talking about "puppets" in general. By looking at the category of puppet "bracketed" (as phenomenologists say) out of its context, I feel it is possible to become sensitized to the deeper meanings inherent in specific cultural cases. While I am not looking for the "essential puppet," I think a preliminary phenomenological approach lays the groundwork for a descriptive understanding of the specific Awaji materials of later chapters. This methodology, though unable to account for specific meanings of one cultural context, can train our eyes to see important aspects of the data.
Studying ritual puppetry in Japan, I am continually amazed by the provincialism of American theater audiences and even scholars when it comes to the issue of puppets. Because in our own culture puppets have been relegated to the playroom and because gifted puppeteers must ply their trade presenting poorly developed skits for children (who, one can only assume, must be partly offended by adult assumptions about their tastes), it is often difficult for Americans to realize that in other cultures puppets are used to stage serious dramas for mature audiences. I cannot count the times I have had to defend the legitimate right of a historian of religions to take Japanese puppets seriously. A large part of studying puppetry is spent apologizing, justifying and continually explaining this choice to otherwise broad-minded and intelligent people.
Most scholars of puppetry are forced to mention this problem at the outset. Confronting this bias as I studied Japanese puppetry, I found my-self in a strange sort of kinship with the sentiments of the flamboyant early twentieth-century British playwright and director E. Gordon Craig. He considered the puppet an example of true and total theater (while suggesting actors could be done away with). In his famous essay "The Actor and the Ubermarionette" he expressed this most vehemently:
To speak of a puppet with most men and women is to cause them to giggle. They think at once of the wires; they think of the stiff hands and the jerky movements; they tell me it is "a funny little doll." But let me tell them a few things about these Puppets. Let me repeat again that they are the descendants of a great and noble family of Images, Images which were made in the likeness of God; and that many centuries ago these figures had a rhythmical movement and not a jerky one; had no need for wires to support them, nor did they speak through the nose of the hidden manipulator. (Poor Punch, I mean no slight to you! You stand alone, dignified in your despair, as you look back across the centuries with painted tears still wet upon your ancient cheeks, and you seem to cry out appealingly to your dog, "Sister Anne, Sister Anne, is nobody coming?" And then with that superb bravado of yours, you turn the force of your laughter [and my tears] upon yourself with the heartrending shriek of "Oh my nose! Oh my nose! Oh my nose!") Did you think, ladies and gentlemen, that those puppets were always little things of but a foot high? ... If we should laugh at and insult the memory of the Puppet, we should be laughing at the fall that we have brought about in ourselves, laughing at the Beliefs and Images we have broken.
Overwrought though his prose may be, Craig's comments point to an important element of puppetry traditions around the world. Not infrequently puppets have been used in religious rites to represent and embody what are seen as divine forces. The discussion that follows — of puppetry as it is viewed around the world and of the wide range of ritual and dramatic uses of puppets in Japan — will properly contextualize the unfortunate cultural bias of recent American audiences and scholars, which reduces puppets to pathetic comedians in a second-rate theater.
What Is a Puppet?
In common usage, the word English word "puppet" has a wide variety of referents. Webster's Third International Dictionary provides the following information:
[ME popet, fr. MF poupette,] la. little doll, dim. of assumed poupee, doll, fr. assumed VL puppa, alter scale figure of a human or other living being often constructed with jointed limbs appropriately painted and costumed and usually moved on a small stage by a rod or hand from below, or by strings or wires from above — see marionette, lb. an actor in a play or a pantomime, 2. archaic: IDOL, 3. archaic: a vain, gaudily dressed person, 4. one who acts or is controlled by an outside force or agent and is no longer the arbiter of his own situation.
While this dictionary definition gives us the common uses of the word, it provides no criteria to justify grouping the many kinds of puppetlike objects under one heading. In Japan, what in English we would translate as "puppets" can be nearly life-size dolls, with elegantly carved and carefully lacquered heads having moving eyes, mouths, and even eyebrows, exquisitely costumed and realistically manipulated by as many as three persons. In the Tohoku district, small heads of horses or women are attached to the ends of sticks and manipulated by shamans. On Sado Island tiny dolls act out comical skits between more serious pieces, always peeing on someone in the audience and drawing a few laughs before the performance returns to the stuffier highbrow drama. Or puppets may be small jointed dolls said to be entered by deities in a sacred sumo match conducted to appease malevolent spirits.
In Indonesia, Turkey, Southeast Asia, and China, words commonly translated as "puppet" refer to flat pieces of leather cut and painted in the likeness of any number of characters, held up in front of a lamp to cast shadows on a cloth screen. A "puppet" can also be a doll held by a rod or moved by hand. The word also refers to the marionette, a doll manipulated by a complicated series of strings or wires. A glove with a face painted on it is also a puppet. In theaters in the Soviet Union during the 1960s, the word referred to the chairs and tables moved about by actors as part of a performance. In West Germany's experimental theater in the late 1960s, the word was given to a series of geometric shapes which danced to music, joined in the final act by the cello — also a puppet. Theater directors in the Soviet Union and West Germany consciously intended these examples as deconstructions of the common assumptions the audience had about puppetry as representations of the human. They thereby hoped to move the theatrical medium to a new level of vitality.
Each of these examples has a special name in its own cultural context, yet we have come to call them all puppets in English. Likewise, scholars in Japanese performance would consider them all of ningyo shibai, the puppetry tradition. Our unconscious categories are divorced from the issue of mechanical complexity. How have we come to take this step? What is common to all these examples?
The American puppeteer Bil Baird had an answer: "A puppet," he wrote, "is an inanimate figure that is made to move by human effort before an audience." According to this definition, a puppet is not merely a doll. If a child begins to move a doll and give it speech, the doll is still not a puppet. But if this child moves the doll to animate it and presents the performance before an audience of parents or friends, he or she is participating in a basic form of puppetry. In this same vein, a puppet is not the mechanized man or bird that pops out of a clock at the strike of an hour. Such animation lacks the element of human effort behind the movement. Puppetry, according to Baird's widely accepted definition, must simultaneously contain an inanimate object, a human effort, and an audience. According to this helpful definition, the context of performance is an essential element in what constitutes puppetry.
Although Baird's definition does provide limiting criteria for the category, it is still inadequate. If one waves a pencil in the face of a spectator, does the pencil then become a puppet? Such action conforms to his definition. Two more ingredients are necessary: the intention to communicate something meaningful (even if that meaning is the meaninglessness of life) and some idea of representation. Our linguistic usage of the word puppet in such a wide variety of contexts indicates a general awareness of this schema. What is fascinating about the ritual use of puppetry in the Awaji case is how this tradition's formulation of each of these points — inanimate object, human effort, audience, intentionality, and representation — challenges many of our assumptions about ritual and theater.
The Appeal of Puppets: Five Perspectives
I have always been interested in how people who have seen serious puppet theater feel about the medium. Responses tend to be polarized: people either love or hate puppets. Among those who hate them, the reason most commonly given is that puppets give people the creeps. There is something unsettling about imagining that inanimate humanlike figures are actually human and then being brought back to the awareness that these effigies are in fact nothing more than wood and paint. For others, this is precisely what is powerfully appealing about puppetry. Seeing a good puppetry performance is like watching magic at work. A puppet theater presents an apprehension of the boundaries between reality and illusion, body and soul, human and nonhuman, the living and the dead, and the material and immaterial worlds. Puppets, I argue, elicit an intensity of response in an audience precisely because the use of an inanimate object allows for an exploration of the hidden processes of the imagination, and in the case of ritual puppetry, the inner workings of the spiritual life.
Below, I present five different perspectives describing the appeal of puppets as a ritual or theatrical medium, drawn primarily from Western language sources. Each reveals something of the experience that people have of puppets as a theatrical medium. (1) Puppets have allowed for a particular freedom of expression not possible with human actors (until the advent of special effects in film). (2) The use of puppets enables human beings to imagine an escape from a seemingly inescapable fate, and to create beyond the constraints of the human condition. A person can assume the role of the creator and controller of beings. (3) The transformation of an innate, material object into a living and breathing character satisfies a creative spiritual and psychological need. (4) Puppets are more convincing because they remain what they are — they do not "represent" their part and then revert to someone else when they walk off stage. Through the intentional inconvenience of having to "represent" the human being, puppets metaphorically figure the human condition. (5) Puppets represent an awareness of the relationship between the material and spiritual realms and are able to become vessels for visiting spiritual forces.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Puppets of Nostalgia by Jane Marie Law. Copyright © 1997 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Of Stories and Fragments 3
1 In the Shape of a Person: The Varieties of Ritual Uses of Effigy in Japan 17
2 Kadozuke: The Outsider at the Gates 49
3 A Crippled Deity, a Priest, and a Puppet: Kugutsu and Ebisu-kaki of the Nishinomiya Shrine 89
4 A Dead Priest, an Angry Deity, a Fisherman, and a Puppet: The Narrative Origins of Awaji Ningyo 137
5 Puppets of the Road, Puppets of the Field: Shiki Sanbaso, Ebisu-mai, and Puppetry Festivals on Awaji 164
6 Puppets and Whirlpools: Icons, Nostalgia, Regionalism, and Identity in the Revival of Awaji Ningyo 204
Epilogue 265
Notes 267
Bibliography 301
Index 313
What People are Saying About This
"A major contribution to the fields of ritual studies, history of religions, theater, and the anthropology of modern Japanese society. The author writes in a lively, captivating style without sacrificing scholarly rigor. The 'transcendent' quality of this work stems from Jane Marie Law's synthesis of sound historiography and ethnographic fieldwork."—Avron Boretz, Hobart and William Smith Colleges"This is a sophisticated, post-modern, cross-disciplinary study. It breaks new ground in its examination of non-ecclesiastical religious experience and the role of ritual specialist/popular entertainers and serves as an example of how to address the issue of the meaning and creation of 'traditions.' Jane Marie Law has asked, and answered splendidly, all the right, most interesting questions about tradition formation, reformation, and revival."—Susan Matisoff, Stanford University