Puppet masters

For Martin Holman and his students, Bunraku is a passport to all things Japan.

By Charles E. Reineke. Photography by Nicholas Benner.

Because of its association with childhood entertainments, puppet theater seldom warrants more than a footnote in the history of Western drama. Things are different in Japan, where many of that nation's most sublime theatrical compositions were, in fact, written for puppets.

Works by Japanese literary giants such as Monzaemon Chikamatsu and Sensuke Suga used articulated wooden figures to enact poignant, often tragic, human dramas set among the merchants and tradesmen of 18th century Japanese cities. Such content was a daring departure from the historical, religious and mythic themes that dominated earlier forms of Japanese theater. Audiences couldn't get enough, and puppet theater became all the rage.

Even in today's age of anime and iPods, ningyo joruri -- a uniquely Japanese form of puppetry using teams of on-stage puppeteers, a narrator and samisen (a banjo-like stringed instrument) players -- continues to attract passionate devotees. Count MU's Martin Holman among them.

"It's just good theater -- it's good theater whether the audience is Japanese or not," Holman says. "The Sanbaso piece, for example. It's funny, has good music, great spectacle, and it's fun. I've never had an audience that didn't love it."

These days, Holman says, ningyo joruri is routinely referred to as Bunraku, a moniker reflecting the influence of Uemura Bunrakuken, a legendary 19th-century performer. Its puppets are large, usually around four-feet tall, and are manipulated using a system of rods and levers by teams of three puppeteers called ningyo-zukai. The chief puppeteer, called the omo-zukai, operates the puppet's right arm and head, including the eyes, mouth and eyebrows. The second puppeteer controls the puppet's left arm and hand, while the third, the junior member of the team, is responsible for moving the legs of male characters or, in the case of female puppets, using his fingers to create the illusion of leg movement beneath the dolls' kimonos.

It takes years to perfect these movements, at least to the standards of Bunraku purists. The goal, according to a master puppeteer quoted by scholar Barbara Adachi in her 1978 book, Backstage at Bunraku, is more than simply making mechanical characters "come to life." Puppeteers must, like all successful dramatic artists, use their own skill and stagecraft to help the little wooden actors reveal greater truths.

"The puppet has no words, but shoulders can be moved in bravado or resignation, arms raised in horror or threat, hands clenched in determination or opened in insult. A puppet's gait can express weariness or joyous expectation, the innocence of youth or the despair of old age. It is the artistry of the hara -- the inner center of emotion and spirit -- that the chief puppeteer wants to attain as he works with the left arm operator and the leg operator."

Unlike puppeteers in most Western theaters, the ningyo-zukai are plainly visible to the audience. Dressed in stark, black cotton robes, they move in graceful counterpoise to puppet characters gliding along a waist-high wall. In traditional performances, the puppeteers often remain anonymous behind black hoods, or zukin.

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.

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.

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?"

"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."