Illumination | Fall 2007

Bunraku Bay Troupe members enact a scene from Keisei Awa no Naruto, one of the most popular plays in traditional Japanese puppet theater. Oyumi, the wife of a rogue samurai, combs the hair of Otsuru, the daughter she was forced to abandon years ago. Otsuru has encountered Oyumi by chance and never learns that the kind stranger is her mother.

"I thought, 'Well, this is my chance...' So I said, 'I'd like to be trained as a puppeteer.' I expected they would go: 'Oh yeah, right -- that or you can fly to the moon!' But instead they said, 'You start tomorrow. Come back at 7 o'clock.'"

By the time Holman had learned enough to perform live, the "big white guy from Kentucky" had become something of a sensation. No one from outside Japan had ever appeared as a puppeteer in their traditional theater, reporters assured him. The Japan Broadcasting Corporation interviewed him on national television.

Holman, now a youthful-looking 50 years old, has since used his ties to the Tonda and other traditional puppet troupes to help dozens of American students experience similar, if abbreviated, puppetry apprenticeships. He has taken students to Japan from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Berea College in Kentucky, Huron University College in Ontario and many others. As coordinator of Japanese studies at MU, a program administered by the University's Department of German and Russian Studies, Holman has lead MU students on their own summer puppetry trips. More remarkably, Holman has used a personal collection of Bunraku puppets to bring Japanese puppet theater home to America.

The MU-based Bunraku Bay Puppet Troupe is the only Bunraku troupe in the United States, Holman says. The troupe has performed at venues across the United States, among them the Smithsonian Institution and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. They have also performed on numerous occasions in Japan, which, for Holman, is much the point.

"I don't have any delusions that my students are going to be professional puppeteers," Holman says. "Maybe a couple are skilled enough, but I mean, how much room is there in the United States for professional puppeteers?" The real goal, he says, is giving students a meaningful entrée into a foreign language and culture. "A lot of times I ask students in study abroad programs, 'What are you going to Japan for? Or Korea or Hungary?' And they'll say, 'I'm going to learn the language.' Well, yes, but what are you going to do while you're there?"

Learning puppetry, and the discipline that goes with it, Holman continues, provides a perfect antidote to more mundane, and less productive, learning experiences. "If someone grabs your hand and says, 'migi! migi!' and moves your hand to the right, you're gonna think, 'Gee, migi must mean right. I'm supposed to move to the right.'

"It's really all about doing something shoulder to shoulder with the Japanese people. In our case it's puppets, but it could have been something else, anything that requires negotiation in the language, addressing problems, resolving issues, and figuring out how the Japanese relate to one another. Because I do puppets and I've got the puppet theater connections, that's where I can put students. But it works. And if students avail themselves of all the opportunities Bunraku theater offers, they'll learn."

Published by the Office of Research.