Illumination | Fall 2007

Holman is qualified to perform all these roles, thanks to his years of work with the 150-year-old Tonda Traditional Puppet Troupe, one of Japan's most prominent regional Bunraku ensembles. For a Westerner to approach the artistry of the hara is unusual, to say the least. But Holman is not your usual Japanese studies professor.

The boatman whose comic antics spark a character's demonic rage in the play Hidakagawa Iriaizakura.

Holman grew up with puppets in Kentucky and Indiana. Even now he fondly recalls staging shows with his sister using marionettes from the Sears catalog and a plywood theater constructed by his dad. Later, as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, a puppetry class taught by children's theater heavyweight Harold R. Oaks made a lasting impression. The class, he recalls, included Bunraku on film -- his first exposure to the genre.

After his junior year at BYU, Holman dutifully signed on to Mormon missionary service. Working in the environs of Kyoto, Japan, he soon found himself smitten with Japanese language and culture. There wasn't much time for puppets, but the experience did yield the sort of youthful epiphany one might imagine occurring on the Bunraku stage.

"It was November, kind of chilly and drizzling rain, but not so much that you'd really need your umbrella," Holman says of that late afternoon in the northern precincts of Kyoto. Thanks to a transportation mix-up, he had missed an appointment to meet an acquaintance at Doshisha University. He took advantage of the unexpected free time to explore the magnificent walled gardens of Kyoto's old imperial palace, now a public park.

"As I walked inside, the sound of the city fell away," he says. "I looked around at the stunning shades of green, at the trees, the bark and the stones glistening with moisture. I thought, 'This is the coolest place I've ever been. When I get back to BYU, I'm changing my major to Japanese.'"

And so he did, pursuing his new-found passion for Japan into graduate school. As a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, Holman researched modern Japanese literature -- work that led to his publication of the first English language translation of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata's The Old Capital. In 1989, he landed a faculty job teaching Japanese and Korean literature at Wakayama University near Osaka. Four years later he was named director of the Japan Center for Michigan Universities in Hikone, Japan -- a town that just happened to be within shouting distance of the Tonda Traditional Puppet Troupe.

Members of the 300-year-old Imada Puppet Troupe bring to life a warrior puppet at MU's Jesse Wrench Auditorium. More than 40 MU students have been trained by the Imada Troupe during summer programs at the troupe's home theater in Iida, Japan.

When a Japanese colleague mentioned the troupe rehearsed on weekend evenings, Holman was more than a little intrigued. He knew of the troupe from an earlier academic fellowship he'd completed, one in which he had hitchhiked around Japan creating a registry of traditional puppet theaters. But he had never seen them perform.

A phone call to the theater went unanswered. Holman turned up anyway. "It was a nice new theater located in the middle of some rice fields," he recalls with a smile. "I drove out there, the lights were on, and so I just opened the front door and came on in. They were rehearsing. Then they look up and here's this big white guy from Kentucky."

The Tonda puppeteers greeted him politely, and agreed to let him sit in on their rehearsal. After it was finished, they gave him a tour. They showed him their stage and painted sets. They brought out prized puppet heads, some more than 200 years old. They patiently answered his questions. As things wound down, troupe members asked him, "Is there anything else we can do for you?"

Published by the Office of Research.