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PERFORMING COMMUNITY
Osaka, 1700 Osaka is a classic commercial city that seemed to grow organically almost from its beginning in the sixth century. Inventive and agile, Osaka merchant houses established Japan’s first credit system. Osaka’s banks dominated Japanese commercial life to such an extent that, as early as the 1670s, they developed complex credit mechanisms and methods of exchange. The city’s immense Tennōji market sold rice, sake, salt, dyed textiles, straw matting, salted fish, paper, castmetal goods, bamboo and various woods to be transshipped to villages around the Inland Sea. Over time, Osaka came to dominate the emerging national rice market and cornered the market on cotton, both raw and ginned, and cottonseed oil, which lit lamps all across Japan. Osaka’s financiers and tradesmen busily made their town “the kitchen of the country.” Osaka’s townspeople (chōnin), merchants, artisans, retailers and small-scale producers all jumbled together, and their families seemed coarse, crude, vulgar, greedy and increasingly prosperous by the standards of Kyoto court and Edo political life. They were notoriously direct and cultivated a most unrefined taste for a sort of “gaudy excess.” This distinctive approach to living is reflected in Osaka’s unique tradition of puppetry, in its distinctive local humor, and in its local dialect with an accent that brands an Osaka native even today.
Master storyteller Takemoto Gadyū joined with enterprising Osaka puppeteers intent on cashing in on the genre’s wildly lucrative popularity. In 1684, Gadyū set up a new theater in Osaka bringing together puppets, Jōruri storytelling and shamisen accompaniment. Jōruri tales date back to Princess Jōruri, a lover of an illustrious fifteenth-century general. Stories of her exploits became widely popular as they combined the eternal subjects of military glory, love, sex, betrayal and conflicting loyalties. By adapting Jōruri tales to the puppet stage, Gadyū’s company won passionate fans, garnering box office revenues that attracted some of the finest musicians and narrators of the day. Gidayū’s distinctive style of chanting, which involved reciting the lines in a pure form so as to remove their emotional content, placed a high value on the technique of delivery rather than on the words and their meaning. This approach became so well known that his name eventually served as the appellation for all Jōruri puppet narration and continues to be highly valued by puppet and Kabuki actors and audiences today. Gadyū had plenty of competition during his lifetime, with a popular narratoractor and his former student, Toyotake Wakatayū, joining with a playwright, Ki Kaion, to establish their own puppet theaters, as did other, perhaps less memorable performers. After Gidayū’s
