Assignment #3: Divide and Conquer: Building an Annotated Bibliography

Based on the group discussion, this is the contextual information that we feel is important for our audience (Will) to understand so we can have a fruitful discussion about Bunraku. First, we will give a brief overview of the origins of Bunraku — when puppetry, narrative storytelling and samisen music joined together to become one art form. We will also provide information on the terms used in Bunraku as well as the different elements involved, such as how the puppets are manned.

The political circumstances of the time were markedly different from previous eras. The consolidation of power in the Tokugawa family led to a time of peace and economic prosperity. Japan transitioned from a warring state to one of entertainment. Samurai with no wars to fight sought other ways to occupy their time. The mercenary class rose in wealth and disposable income. And wealthy patrons used their influence over the artists as an opportunity to spread their own ideologies and maintain the peace (Guth).

These changes in the social structure of Japan led to a burgeoning arts scene. Noh theater, kabuki, woodblock carving and painting all benefitted in addition to Bunraku. The typically lower class audiences of Bunraku aided the development of the form. Because they responded well to fantastical elements and theater tricks Bunraku theaters strove to outdo each other and show the audience something new. This was how the puppets gained arms, articulated fingers and the 3-man puppeteer system. Since this was what the audience clamored for, even Chikamatsu, with his emphasis on the text, had to build in a bit of spectacle from time to time (Keene, 34).

We will also need to provide information about Chikamatsu himself. The Great Edo Fire of 1657 forced many great Bunraku chanters to flee to Osaka, setting it up as the new center for puppet theater. Chikamatsu would soon follow after the huge financial success of one of his Bunraku plays. That and the fact that kabuki actors were altering his words led to Chikamatsu focusing solely on Bunraku plays. What other aspects of his personal life and philosophy may have contributed to the development of the art form? (Keene, 35)

One of the chief ideologies of the time was isolationism; Japan had closed its borders to most to keep out Christianity. This allowed the Japanese to flourish culturally "deriving wholly from their own experience, thought, and emotions," (Tokugawa, 70). Buddhism, now without Western competition, is also a key philosophy to understand as it relates to Bunraku.

Because we only have 20 minutes to present, we will likely not go into as much detail on the origins of Bunraku as large portions of it are highly speculative. And, while interesting, we will also probably condense the discussion of all the roles in Bunraku and the details of the puppet making process.

Assignment #2: Formatting Presentation

Our presentation will start off with a brief introduction to the birth of Bunraku theatre and the Edo period in Japan, during which Bunraku was created. We intend to format this as a collective and engaging discussion. Jamie, Rose and myself will take turns discussing main points and ask the audience (Will) questions as we go along. We will use visual elements such as short clips of videos as an example of what a traditional Bunraku performance looks like and how a puppet functions. After that we will move into a discussion about Chikamatsu and present our main argument and counterarguments about his work and how it related to the culture of seventeenth and eighteenth century Japan. Some things we thought would be useful during this part of the presentation are maps of Japan (from that era), crucial aspects of our argument and relationships outlined on an easel pad, and anything else that comes to us as we go along in our research and develop our ideas. To engage the audience we plan to include him (Will) in our conversation, asking questions about the argument to advance our main points and to allow for new ideas to develop from this conversation. We decided on this format for our presentation after a detailed discussion about the elements of an effective presentation, making sure we touched on how to engage the audience and taking examples from presentations we’ve seen in the past and elements of presentation’s from this class and other classes. We took notes on this, made bullet points, pooled our resources, weeded out a few ideas as ineffective (such as verbatim power points, physical puppetry, and dividing the presentation into timed segments) and decided that discussing topics as a group would be the best way to present.

Week 1 Entry

This week I have primarily worked on narrow down the scope of our group. When thought about topics about Bunraku for the first time, it remind me of a Japanese animation Puppet Master Sacon. This Animation is about a boy Sacon who was born in a family with a long history of perfoming Bunraku. He and his puppet travel together and solve mysteries. The most interesting thing is in this animation, the puppet is alive. He can speak and move by himself. I thought it might be interesting if we look at the adaptation of Bunraku in popular animation. How the understanding of the art form Bunraku changes in the contemporary world of Japan? How the puppet represents life and death? These are questions might be possible to further narrow down in a research. Therefore, I searched some articles about this topic. Jamie gave me a link of a useful article: From Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls:Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater. The article uses the animation film “Ghost in the Shell' and “The Empire of Signs” to analyze performative aspects of puppets. The puppets in these two films helps to refocus the audiences’ attention on anime’s particular mode of representation—distanced from real body and lives. This article helps me deeply think about the relations between anime and the Bunraku. They both are detached from real body and imitate the real life. That makes Puppet Master Sacon more interesting because the puppet is alive. What will happened and what is the meaning of some artificial objects gain the ability to think and control human? Is that terrible? What is the fear from contemporary society in japan (or anywhere) change the representation of Bunraku art?

In our second group meeting, we discussed everybody’s interest and finally decided to focus on  Chikamatsu. I found a book written by Shigetoshi Kawatake, The Development of Japanese Art. I found the English translation but cannot access it. So I use a Chinese translation instead. Hopefully I can found one English version soon. In this book, it introduced Chikamutsu is the first playwright of Bunraku. Before, the Bunraku was written only by actors themselves. His plays are much more dramatic than the earlier Bunraku works, and contain much more complicated stories. In another book I found Bunraku, the Puppet Theatre, it talked about the five-act play created by Chikamutsu. The first act is ceremonial setting, the second act is to give details about the situation, the third act is the action, the fourth act is road-going (an important change will happened at the destination, the fifth act is the ending, usually with a glorious triumph. (Ando 126-128) After reading the description of the functions of the five acts, I guess there are connections between this form and the characteristics of much more dramatic stories in the play. Before, there were usually 8-12 acts in one play. Five-act dramatic form is shorter, in which will make the writer concentrated in storytelling.  In addition, almost every action is in the third act, equals to one-act play, to some extend. That is another reason of why his plays are much more dramatic than the former Bunraku plays.

I read the introduction of Chikamatsu 5 late plays in order to find something important about his life and writing styles. He was born in edo-period, in an upper-class family. (Gerstle 8) I think this historical context is very important and I will dig into it and find other information of his childhood and the edo-period society. These will help me to understand why he has the ability and power to make such changes. In his history or period plays, he increasingly incorporated elements of complex character portrayal from the contemporary-life works. They are usually realistic. In his period plays there are multiple plots and supernatural elements. (Gerstle 2) From this description I know more about genres of his plays. It seems his period play is one of the most dramatic genres and with the concern of social issues. If we focused on the connection between society and his writing styles, I think it will be very good to choose one of his period plays as the example to analyze.

Bolton, Christopher A. From Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls:Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater. Positions. Winter 2002, Vol. 10, Issue 3.

Monzaemon,Gerstle, C. 5 Late Plays. New York : Columbia University Press, 2001. Print.

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

Stephanie's Week 1 Reflection

This week we started our research into our topic of Bunraku. Our group decided to start searches individually and to come together again to discuss our findings. My initial searches began with the databases where I found plenty of articles dealing with various topics related to Bunraku and Japanese theatre in general. One of the first articles I came across dealt with the aesthetics of Japanese theatre, including Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki. In it, the author, Alexander Alland Jr., discusses the roles of the actors and puppets in their genres and the traditions the actors follow while performing. He also goes on to compare the various styles and their relationships to religion and reality saying that Bunraku is more realistic than either Noh or Kabuki because the puppets are able to represent reality more than the actors on stage, “During battle scenes heads literally fly off bodies, sexual activity is sometimes rather vividly presented, and magical transformations such as a change from human to animal form are accomplished with relative ease,” (8).

A second intriguing source I came across deals with Modern Bunraku plays and the author’s experiences with Bunraku puppets and the theatre. The majority of the article focuses on the modern performances of the Otome Bunraku troupe which is comprised entirely of female puppeteers. I was fascinated by this article because she mentions that males were the only ones allowed to operate Bunraku puppets traditionally, but this changed in about 1900 when the proprietors of Bunraku theatres sought a larger audience. Unlike the men who use three people to operate a puppet, Otome Bunraku operators only use one person. Although men are a part of the Otome troupe, only women are allowed on stage. Her article features pictures and drawings of the traditional Bunraku puppet operators and the Otome operators and shows how their bodies are attached to the puppet in order to operate it. In her interview with Michiko Hirano of the Japan Society I noticed a similarity between how the puppeteers treat the puppets and how the Noh actors treated their masks, Hirano says of the puppeteers “…they try to feel and understand how the doll feels. And they move themselves according to what the puppet is feeling,” (18). Similarly, in Alland’s article he says “Just as the mask must come to life through the Noh actor who wears it, the Bunraku puppet must come to life through its chief operator,” (Alland, 8).

 I used these two articles as my primary examples when our group met on Friday night to discuss and come to a final decision about our topic. Our possible topics included things such as Bunraku puppets and the influence on modern Anime, the role of Bunraku in Japanese pop culture, older Bunraku plays being adapted in contemporary Japan, the connection of Bunraku to Buddhism, contemporary Bunraku troupes (including Otome), and the origins of Bunraku. We finally agreed to focus on one of the more famous Bunraku playwrights, Chikamatsu, primarily because his name popped up in most of the articles and books we read about Bunraku. In fact, every history book about Bunraku and Japanese theatre mentioned him somewhere. From what I recall from a source one of my group mates found, his repertoire includes over one hundred plays. From that point, we decided to focus mostly on his life as a playwright and to find one of his more popular plays to study as well. Overall, I feel that our research and reading from the first two thirds of class has helped me to practice focusing on specific areas of study and to find the discrepancies in one person’s “history” of a certain topic versus another person’s. While conducting my research this week I had an eye out for anything that seems contradictory or very different to another author’s account of Bunraku and the history of the art. I am still on the lookout for such an occurrence and I will continue to read my sources closely.

Alland, Alexander Jr. “The Construction of Reality and Unreality in Japanese Theatre.” The Drama Review, Performance Theory: Southeast Asia Issue. 23:2 (Jun. 1979) pp. 3-10. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.

Skipitares, Theodora. “The Tension of Modern Bunraku.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. 76:1 (2004) pp. 13-21. Web. 29 Oct 2014.