Thursday, 10 Sep 2020 03:06 PM MYT
His art, a traditional, male-only Japanese puppet theatre, was born in Osaka in the late 1600s, but in 2020 felt existentially threatened, he said. Nearly 30 sixth graders took part in recent classes, with children practising their puppetry in a gymnasium amid scorching heat, as a T-shirt-clad Kanjuro instructed them.
Like everyone else, he started with the puppets' feet, then moved on to the left hand. It can take more than 30 years until a puppeteer is allowed to manipulate the head. “I learned from him that you would have to use your entire body — from your toes to fingertips — to make the puppet come to life,” Kanjuro recalls. “And how a small and thin puppeteer could manipulate a big puppet by doing that.”