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 exploitsbecame 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

Gidayū and Chikamatsu were the leading lights of an explosion of artistic creativity on the Osaka stage, as actors, musicians, writers and narrators scrambled to keep up with an insatiable audience who were seeking outlets for their ever-increasing prosperity, and who were embedded in a commercial culture that encouraged congenial group gatherings. Their students expanded the puppet and Kabuki repertoires, carrying their traditions into the eighteenth century. Gidayū and his fellow performers, promoters and writers established a vibrant theatrical form drawing on and refracting the delirious energy of Osaka itself. Osakan puppet theater is known more widely today as “Bunraku,” after Osaka’s Bunraku-za Theater, which was founded by Uemura Bunrakuken in 1872. Through these various transformations, Osaka and the performing arts that it nurtured remain noteworthy for a fierce spirit of independence. For all its prosperity, Osaka has long been a tough town full of dirt and intrigue, success and failure, skilled financial magicians and ordinary street criminals. The city struggled to adjust to the enormous transformations taking place as Japan reentered the world following the 1853–54 visits of Perry’s “Black Fleet.” The city harbored remarkable achievers throughout the entire Tokugawa period. Yet Osaka’s traders, craftsmen and manufacturers were fundamentally in trouble long before the new Meiji government (1868-1912) set out to “modernize” Japan. death in 1724, inventive puppet makers, such as the Toyotake Theater puppet master Yoshida Bunzaburō, advanced the art further by perfecting team puppetry, whereby figures were manipulated by three men. This new technique promoted fluid and complex movement, especially by an increasingly expressive complex head, kashira, of which there are now some seventy types. The additional operators allowed the puppets to grow in size throughout the eighteenth century, to as tall as four to five feet. The opening of Gidayū’s puppet theater coincided with the fortuitous arrival of another young performer, Sugimori Nobumori. The son of a samurai family, Nobumori became a master-less rōnin following his father’s death and set out to make his way in the world. He eventually landed in Kyoto and began writing and performing. Assuming the pen name Chikamatsu Monzaemon, after the Chikamatsu Temple in today’s Shiga Prefecture, he grabbed the opportunity to write for the new increasingly popular puppet theater. This decision drew him to Osaka, where he teamed up with Gidayū. Chikamatsu’s personal decision transformed Japanese theatrical and literary art, as he established himself as Japan’s premier playwright and one of its leading poets. Writing first for the puppet stage, he later added Kabuki scripts to his repertoire. Chikamatsu is the confirmed author of more than 130 plays in both genres, and may have written many more plays by the time of his death in 1725 (less than three months after Gidayū’s demise, in October 1724).

Osaka eventually made a successful transition to become a major industrial center, reinventing itself from a “sea of roof tiles” to a “forest of smokestacks.” Japan’s “Venice” — much of its trade had moved along an intricate network of canals — would become a city of furnaces, factories and commerce, the center of the modern spirit of feverish activity in manufacturing and commercial enterprise. The city exploded from a town of about 350,000 residents to approximately 2.2 million during the half century beginning in 1870. For a brief moment in the early 1930s, the Osaka region surpassed Tokyo in the size of its population.

Osaka could not escape the fate of a Japan hurdling toward the precipice of

Bunraku puppets at National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka Japan. Photo: Brikski. 2006. Flickr.com. CC License 2.0

war. World War II destroyed the city, with recovery taking at least two decades. The increasingly centralized postwar Japanese state posed a particularly pernicious challenge for Osaka. Political and economic power has come to rest ever more squarely in Tokyo, drawing all but a few symbolic corporate headquarters and much-needed financial capital away from Osaka.

Osaka remains a place apart; a town of directness and impatience with rules that place the city as much at odds with contemporary Japanese culture as when its vibrant chōnin culture gave birth to Bunraku puppetry.