National Bunraku Theatre

The National Bunraku Theatre has a bunraku theatre of 753 seats and a small hall of 159 seats, and stages dance, traditional Japanese music and popular entertainment as well as bunraku. The exhibition room on the first floor shows rare material on bunraku in displays that change through the year, and anyone can look in. In bunraku the story is carried by joruri, chanted narration that tells a dramatic text to set melodies, and by the shamisen, the stringed instrument that plays it. The puppets are finely made, and mechanisms let them show joy, anger, grief and pleasure in time with the chanting and the shamisen. The people who work them are called ningyo tsukai, and the three-man operation, in which three of them move one puppet, is said to be rare anywhere in the world. Ningyo joruri was performed all over Japan in the early Edo period, and through the work of two men of genius, the chanter Takemoto Gidayu and the writer Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Osaka established itself as the home of the art, as it remains.

Translated and shortened from the Osaka Prefecture and Osaka City tourist listings (観光施設一覧, CC BY 4.0).