Courtesy of Mike Caveney’s Egyptian Hall Museum.
The Kuma Family—K. T. Kuma, Tora Kuma and their daughter, Hatsu
G ere ··· i b e c i` > Journal of The Conjuring Arts Research Center ?
VTCVMQVE NEW YORK MMXII
The Conjuring Arts Research Center Board of Directors William Kalush Dr. David Singmaster Steve Cuiffo Philip Varricchio David Blaine
This issue sponsored by Bella Mondo Gourmet Food available from Whole Foods Market and fine grocers nation-wide. www.bellamondo.biz
Š 2012 Printed in China. ISSN 1558-8149 Gibecière is published semi-annually by The Conjuring Arts Research Center 11 West 30th, 5th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10001 212-594-1033 www.conjuringarts.org
Contents Pocket Notes—Stephen Minch 7 An Investigation into Magic in Japan after the Opening of the Country: Part IX— Mitsunobu Matsuyama 11 The Antidote or Counterpoison against the Knights of Industry 53 A Cheat for Two— Thierry Depaulis 55 The Antidote or Counterpoison against the Knights of Industry— A Venetian 60 Furthermore... 179 Contributors 195 Volume 7 ‹› Number 2 • 5
Pocket Notes This issue opens with the ninth installment of Mitsunobu Matsuyama’s study of Japanese magic and magicians when Japan opened its borders after centuries of having forbidden entrance or exit from the country. This chapter focuses on a Japanese magician who left Japan for the United States at an early age and never returned. He was Yen Soo Kim, better known as K. T. Kuma, popularizer of the production apparatus we in the west call Kuma Tubes. There is little known about the history and long career of Kuma. Mr. Matsuyama, with his usual persistence and intelligence, has uncovered much fresh information that adds, corrects and clarifies what can be known of this fine magician. The article has the flavor of a detective story, as Matsuyama leads us through clues and his struggles with various obstructions to his research. He also explores the history of the Kuma Tubes, which are far older than K. T. Kuma, although his routining of them was highly distinctive. His choice to revive this trick for American audiences proved an antidote to being just another Japanese magician performing the same handful of familiar tricks from his homeland. Mr. Kuma’s antidote to uniformity brings us to our other topic in this issue, a book purportedly from Venice and very old, titled L’antidote ou le contrepoison des chevaliers d’industrie, ou joueurs de profession (The antidote or counterpoison against the knights of industry, or professional gamblers). (Yes, that transition is strained, but it got us here.) Its anonymous author sat down in 1768 to write a treatise on the deceptions of card, dice and billiard cheats of the eighteenth century. He chose a charming epistolary format for his exposé, and in twenty-five letters he lays bare in some detail a surprising number of cheating methods, ranging from crude to ingenious. The largest part of his work is devoted to Volume 7 ‹› Number 2 • 7
Gibecière the swindles used in the game of Faro. Immensely popular for over two centuries, Faro fell out of favor shortly after the 1800s, and now all most magicians know about it is the weave shuffle that preserves its name. The antidote was written when Giacomo Casanova, a Venetian (as the author of this work represents himself to be), was forty-three years old, with a long addiction to Faro. Anyone having read his History of my life will find The antidote a sort of CliffsNotes to the many descriptions Casanova gives of winning and losing fortunes at the game. He was well aware of the swindles widely practiced, but even this highly intelligent and educated gentleman would have fared better having known all the contents of The antidote. It is possible he read the book; if so, it came too late to save him from many gambling misadventures. A number of the cheating methods explained in The antidote are to be expected, but the appearance of others this early is surprising. Among those surprises are details on rough-and-smooth work, trimmed cards designed to keep pairs together (presaging Mene Tekel and Svengali Decks), the use of paper-grain bias to distinguish certain cards (pace Tan Hock Chuan and Bob Fillman), very early descriptions of second dealing, the palm, the pass and lapping, and magicians’ methods for transforming cards being set to less honorable though more profitable purposes. It is tempting to suspect the author of padding his treatise with tales of these intriguing changing cards, pinched from the gibecière of the conjurer. However, his descriptions of their preparation and their use at the gaming table seems too detailed to be bald fabrication, and if accepted, leads us to wonder who came first, the conjurer or the cheat? By the record, as we currently know it, conjurers seem first across the line with these cards. In explaining the ins and outs of Berlan (or Brelan)—a vying or bluffing game and a direct ancestor of poker—the author, along with giving cheating strategies, offers a crash course in bluffing psychology that could 8 • Gibecière ‹› Summer 2012
Gibecière be used today as a primer for poker playing. And his explanation of the insidious methods used by skilled billiards players to fleece even the most cautious reads like a primer in modern pool hustling. When encountering a work such as this, the old adage from Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun,” becomes more compelling. Gibecière’s prized translator, Dr. Lori Pieper, has brought the whole of this rare work for the first time into English, and we think you will be fascinated by it. To give you a deeper understanding of the book and its history, we’ve prevailed on Thierry Depaulis, a games expert and an authority on The antidote, to introduce it. Jean Hugard’s letters to Orville Meyer, published in the previous issue, drew particular interest, and comments sent to us by P. G. Varola, Max Maven and David Ben about the letters, joined by Mitsunobu Matsuyama and Bill Mullins, who continue to make discoveries concerning the history of the Japanese Butterfly Trick, have made the “Furthermore...” column a robust one. In all, we are very pleased with this issue, and hope the feeling is mutual. • Stephen Minch editor
Volume 7 ‹› Number 2 • 9
• An Investigation into
Magic in Japan after the Opening of the Country•
K. T. Kuma
AN INVESTIGATION INTO MAGIC IN JAPAN AFTER THE OPENING OF THE COUNTRY • Part IX: K. T. Kuma and His Astonishing Tubes Mitsunobu Matsuyama
I
t is widely recognized that the best-known magician in Japan from the Taisho Era (1912–1926) to the prewar period of the Showa Era (1926–1944) is Tenkatsu Shokyokusai (1886–1944), a prominent pupil of Ten-ichi. Despite her popularity in Japan, her name is unfamiliar to most magicians in the west. This is in great part due to the brevity of her troupe’s performance tour in America (short of a year), and to her repertoire, which featured Japanese dancing, the Water Fountain Act and other magical feats Ten-ichi had performed in the west twenty years earlier. Conversely, K. T. Kuma was a magician whose name has never appeared in the study of Japanese magic history, yet he performed in America during the same period Tenkatsu ruled the magic scene in Japan, a span of more than a half century. Such a lengthy professional career abroad, unrivaled by any Japanese magician before him, deserves recognition. In the absence of any serious study of his life and achievements, I will try here to construct such a record. Volume 7 ‹› Number 2 • 13