Bun'ya Togo Bun'ya Style Puppet Theater

A Puppet Theater Older Than Bunraku

Only four communities in Japan still keep a puppet theater set to bunya-bushi, a style of narration that predates the bunraku familiar to most visitors today. One of them is Onobuchi, a quiet farming district along the Sendai River in Satsumasendai, in the northwestern corner of Kagoshima Prefecture. There the Tōgō Bunya-bushi Ningyō Jōruri has been performed since the early Edo period, and in March 2008 it was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property by the national government.

Locals have long called it by plainer names: ningyō odori, the puppet dance, or simply the Onobuchi puppet dance. The phrasing is apt. The puppeteer does not stand still behind the figure but moves with it, so the performer dances as much as the puppet does.

The Sound of an Older Joruri

Bunya-bushi takes its name from Okamoto Bunya, a chanter who worked at the Itō Dewanojō theater in Osaka during the Enpō and Genroku years, roughly 1673 to 1704. His style was famous for its sentimental, high-pitched melodies, and audiences of the time called it the weeping style. It spread across the country for a while before gidayū-bushi, the narration that still underpins bunraku, gradually pushed it aside from the eighteenth century onward.

How the older style reached this part of Satsuma is not settled. One account holds that villagers learned it from a puppet troupe in a neighboring district. Another credits a gōshi who, traveling to and from Edo on the domain's alternate-attendance duty in the late seventeenth century, brought a bunya-bushi teacher home with him. Either way, the tradition was carried forward by the gōshi, a class of low-ranking samurai who also farmed the land. After the autumn harvest they built a stage on the dry riverbed or in the road and performed for the farming families, partly as thanks for the season's work.

Why the Designation Matters

Most traditional Japanese puppet theater uses gidayū-bushi accompaniment and figures worked by three operators. Tōgō's form is different on both counts. Its music is the older bunya-bushi, and its puppets are handled by one or two people rather than three. That places it at an earlier stage in the development of the art, before the three-operator method became standard.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated it under two criteria: that it shows the process by which a performing art changed over time, and that it reflects the character of a particular region. Three other bunya-bushi puppet traditions survive elsewhere, in Sado in Niigata, at Oguchi in Ishikawa, and at Yamanouchi in Miyazaki. Tōgō stands alongside them as a rare window onto a stage of puppetry that has otherwise vanished.

What to Watch For

The puppets themselves repay close attention. Each has a carved head about 15 centimeters tall, dressed in costume, with the full figure standing roughly one meter. The operator reaches in from the back of the collar, grips the central rod, works a cord that tilts the face up and down, and moves the puppet's right hand. This is the detail that separates the two types of figure. A male warrior puppet has no left hand and is worked by a single person. A female puppet does have a left hand, and a second operator joins to manage it.

That second operator is easy to miss. Because the left-hand handler must stand behind the main puppeteer, the staging itself keeps the second person out of the audience's sightline. The handlers wear black, and in earlier times covered their faces with black cloths so as to recede behind the figures.

The music carries four parts: a chanting tayū, a shamisen player, a small drum, and wooden clappers. The chant favors a high register and the plaintive phrasing that earned bunya-bushi its old nickname. Between passages of narration the shamisen plays set patterns, and a livelier section called dangi, marked by busy drum and clapper work, sets the puppets dancing. Performers also distinguish a section they call iroha, similar in melody to dangi but played more slowly and with greater feeling.

The repertoire is a single play, Genji Eboshi-ori, which follows episodes from the youth of the warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune. Three acts are performed today: the first, "Sotoba-hiki"; the second, "Tokiwa Gozen Yuki no Dan," the snow scene of Lady Tokiwa; and the third, "Kurama-kudari no Dan." The stage is simple. A frame is raised at the front and a waist curtain about 120 centimeters high is hung across it; the top edge of that curtain serves as the ground on which the puppets stand. There are no wings or doorways, so a puppet appears by being lifted into view above the curtain and leaves by being lowered out of sight.

Around Onobuchi

Performances are not held on a fixed schedule. The preservation society stages the puppets several times a year at local events, and a regular winter performance is usually given at the Tōgō Public Hall, often alongside the community's Onobu festival. Anyone hoping to see it should contact the preservation society or the Satsumasendai city education board in advance to check the dates, since the program changes from year to year.

The wider Tōgō district rewards a visit on its own. A few kilometers away in Fujikawa stands Fujikawa Tenjin, a shrine to Sugawara no Michizane, the deity of learning, where local tradition says the scholar spent his final years. Its grounds hold a plum grove of around 300 trees, and 55 of them, their trunks bent low to the ground in a shape said to resemble a resting dragon, were designated a National Natural Monument in 1941 as the Garyūbai. The grove draws crowds when the plums bloom in late winter. Closer to the puppet stage, the Suwa Shrine of Onobuchi has stood for more than six centuries and is connected to the medieval Tōgō clan who once held this country.

The area sits inland, roughly 15 kilometers up the Sendai River from the coast. JR Sendai Station on the Kagoshima Main Line is the usual gateway, about 30 minutes away by car.