Bunraku Rod Puppet

Decide which head you are making. Bunraku heads are divided into fixed types by gender, social class and character, and each role uses a set head. You choose a type rather than inventing a face.

Rough out a well-dried block of cypress about 80 mm tall, roughly a third of full size. A head carved from unstable wood will split once the mechanism is fitted.

Work in order: forehead, bridge of the nose, cheeks, jaw. The puppet is seen from below on stage, so cut a little deeper under the jaw and under the nose.

Saw the finished head in two along the line of the ears. This is to fit the mechanism inside, and the halves go back together afterwards. Hesitate here and they will never close straight again.

Hollow both halves, leaving walls about 5 mm thick. It is partly to lighten the head and partly to make room for the strings and mechanism to run.

Make eyelids from thin board, pivot them inside the head, and run strings down from them. Pull the string and the eyes lower; release and they open.

Run separate strings to the eyebrows so they move independently. Eyes and brows moving separately is the whole of the expression — put them on one string and the face has only one expression.

Fit a thick rod — the dogushi — up into the head and bring the strings down alongside it. The principal operator holds this rod in the left hand and works the strings with the fingers. The whole weight of the head hangs on this one rod.

Check the mechanism works properly, then glue the halves with hide glue and fill the seam with gofun.

Brush on thin coats of gofun — chalk white bound in hide glue — drying and polishing between each. Laid on thickly in one go it always cracks. The depth of the white comes from the number of layers.

Make a shoulder board with a hole for the grip rod through it. Build the body light, like a basket. Three people hold this puppet up for hours, so its weight is part of the quality of the performance.

Make arms with working elbows and wrists, and fit a slim control rod running backward from behind the left elbow. The left operator works that rod with their own right hand.

Make legs with bending knees and a grip for the foot operator. Female puppets have no legs at all — the feet are suggested entirely through the movement of the kimono hem. That is a convention, not a shortcut.

Take it in three pairs of hands and simply try to make it walk. It will not work. You learn that matching breath means matching the small differences in timing between head, left hand and feet. Why bunraku training takes so long stops being an abstract fact.

Born in Osaka. Bunraku is Japan's professional puppet theatre, generally dated to its founding in Osaka in 1684. It is a stage shared by three arts — the gidayu chanter, the shamisen and the puppets — and not a puppet art alone.

Three-man operation came later. Throughout the seventeenth century, small puppets of 60-70 cm were worked by one person on outstretched arms. The three-man system was adopted around 1730, and it was that change which allowed the puppets to grow larger and move in detail. They became big because there were three operators — not the other way round.

The three roles. The omozukai holds the grip rod in the left hand to work the head and takes the puppet's right hand with their own right. The hidarizukai works the left hand by its control rod. The ashizukai takes the lower body. Training begins at the feet, and it is said to take thirty years to reach principal operator. The weight of that number is not the hours of practice but how long it takes for three people to look like one.

Visible, and yet not seen. The operators stand on stage in black. They are not hidden. The audience watches three human beings and sees only the puppet. It is the opposite solution to Western puppetry's concealed operator: do not hide them, make them drop out of attention.

A head is equipment and inheritance at once. Heads are made to role types, repaired, and used across generations. Unlike an actor, the same face keeps appearing on stage for a century or two. That physical continuity is part of why this is called an art of fixed forms.