Week 2 Entry

This week I paid close attention to the change of fine arts in Edo Japan. My goal was to find possible reasons why Bunraku, as one of the art form, was undergoing radical changes back to that time. This series of changes include fewer acts in one play, story became important, a climatic and dramatic form, current social incident became one of the major theme and so on. Though reading extensively in the book Arts of Edo Japan: The Artist and the city 1615-1868, I believe I found one clue: urbanization.

At the beginning, I only considered Edo period as strong and powerful centralized society. In my mind, a centralized government always gave the artists less freedom. However, Guth offered me new perspective to think about the centralization. The Tokugawa shogun government created an official hierarchy to foster stability. “With the samurai at the top, followed in defending order by farmers, artisans, and merchants.” (Guth 12) Though this rule, the Tokugawa government guaranteed the production of rice and other kinds of food. Along with the development of agriculture, social stability and peace reduced the cost of wars. All above created the conditions for urbanization and the blossoming of urban culture. Cities and rural areas became wealthy and affluent, which was the beginning of self-consciousness.

At that time, government controlled the artists’ choice mostly through the way of patronage. It was impossible for artists to refuse the official taste of choice if the city’s economy was very bad. Due to the economical developments of cities during urbanization, people had the ability to pay for theatre and performances, which gave the artists the opportunity to make their own choice and get rid of the government’s control. Arts were not only for the privileged few any more. The basic facts for the artistic survival in local areas is finding and keeping audiences. One of the best way to keep the audience is to entertain them.

Before Chikamatsu, Bunraku always include 10-12 acts. The story and plot is not important in the play. The process of seeing a play could take a long time. Bunraku, so as most of the other arts forms are performed for the privileged few, a group of people not had so much to do everyday. For people in lower class, their lives were much busier. That’s why the play need to be shorter with a climatic form.  And for the goal of keeping and entertaining the audience, story became important, especially the story happened in current time. 

Besides the analysis of change, I also looked into the Bunraku art form. I think it might be very dangerous to consider Bunraku as same as western drama or other Japan theatres. For the goal of understanding Chikamatsu’s writing style of the specific Bunraku, I think it is very important to understand the history and functions of this art form. Therefore, I read two books Bunraku: The Puppet Theatre and Backstage at Bunraku: A behind- the -scenes look at Japan’s Traditional Puppets Theatre. The first one is written by a Japanese while the second one is written though a Japan-American.  

According to Ando in Bunraku: The Puppet Theatre, it is highly possible that the puppets were solutions for performing in a small space. It also might be the pursue of idealized features caused the use of puppets. Puppets in performance are served as the tool to express feelings and emotions of the chanters. Since the chanters in Bunraku are less emotional than other forms of performances in Japan. So, we should look into Chikamatsu’s writing style with the relevance to the art form of Bunraku. For example, if his play seems very calm and cool, no character had strong emotion, that might have something to do with Bunraku art itself. In Backstage at Bunraku: A behind- the -scenes look at Japan’s Traditional Puppets Theatre. Adachi observed that Bunraku was more frightening than Kabuki, in both the stories and the characters.  So we ‘d better be careful about this aspect in Chikamatsu’s writing style.

And something frustrated: spending a lot of time on the anthology of Chikamatsu’s five late plays and found out finally that they are plays of Kabuki! So angry!

Guth, Christine. Arts of Edo Japan: The Artist and the city 1615-1868. New York: A Time Mirror Company, 1996. Print.

Ando, Tsuruo. Bunraku: The Puppet Theater. New York: Walker/Weatherhill, 1970. Print.

Adachi, Barbara C. Backstage at Bunraku: A behind- the -scenes look at Japan’s Traditional Puppets Theatre. New York: Weatherhill, 1985. Print.