Backstage at Buranku

A friend kindly offered to introduce Sam and me to a friend of hers who was a Bunraku puppeteer. We visited him backstage at the National Theatre. We got to tramp all over the stage and even hold a puppet - just 10 minutes before the curtain went up.

On stage before curtain-up. Neither the stage nor the brown-painted parts
are visible from the audience.

Sam is standing in the puppeteers' trough. To his left is the audience.
Along the front edge of the stage there is 3 feet of masking so
the puppeteers are only visible from mid-thigh up.

In the dressing room. Puppeteers are responsible for dressing their own
puppets but there is a professional seamstress for helping with new costumes

The puppeteers wear different-height clogs to give the characters different
prominence on stage. 

The woven patches muffle the clogs on the wooden stage.

The major characters are operated by 3 puppeteers each. The most junior
operates the feet while the left hand is operated by the middle-ranking puppeteer.

The female puppets don't actually have feet or legs so the illusion is
created by using the hands underneath the kimono.

The senior puppeteer (the only one not hooded on stage) operates the
head and the right arm.

The right arm.

Female puppets have a needle in their mouth. The kimono can be hooked
on to it to give the impression it is being chewed. This is a typical thing
for a Japanese girl to do and might represent shyness, bashfulness, worry &c.

A few assorted snaps

Dachshunds are every which way you turn in Tokyo.

There are quite a lot of nice manhole covers, too.

A park I stumbled upon.

Couldn't resist.

You see a lot of this sort of outfit walking around areas like Shibuya.

There are very few tramps. At least where I hang out.
This is the only one I've seen.

Another typical kitsch outfit.

The school uniforms you see around are priceless. They have as much
fun dressing up their children as their dogs out here.

We visited some friends in a rather nice patch of Tokyo
with lots of temples and shrines. NB the plasters on his face.

I'm Back

I don't have a bin. It's easier just to put rubbish on the floor and the collection system is so complicated - there are 6 collections a week for bottles, cans, combustible (twice), non-combustible and paper - that if I had a bin for each one I wouldn't have space to live.

It took me until a week or so ago to start getting the hand of the collections - which are very confusing because all sorts of plastic stuff is in fact combustible even though we would recycle it. And you cannot recycle paper packaging, it seems - only flat stuff you can tie up in neat bundles (which my neighbours do).

So when I got back after Christmas I cleared the floor in my kitchen and here was the rubbish I generated:

The last bag was taken away this morning so things are now cleaner. To celebrate I went and bought a broom type thing. And while so doing was also seduced by a chopping board which also strains vegetables and a ceramic knife. You see, the latest installment of grant came through yesterday.

Here is a fun menu. I ended up ordering the 'pork pluck' - not something you see very often on menus, even if it is legitimate:

I also liked the title here: