Bunraku is a traditional Japanese theater art using puppets, narration and musical accompaniment that was born during the Edo Period (1603 ̵ 1867) in Osaka, the commercial center of the country at the time. Today, Bunraku is carried on by the Bunraku Kyokai organization, to which the puppeteers, “tayu” narrators and shamisen musicians belong, and the National Bunraku Theater with its staff of professionals that create the props and puppet heads (“kashira”) and the backstage artisans who prepare the puppet costumes (“isho”) and the puppet wigs (“tokoyama”), etc. The tokoyama profession exists because the dolls of Bunraku have wigs that require the same type of dressing as for the actors of Kabuki. In this interview we talked with puppet hairdressing artist Akiko Takahashi, the first women to enter the formerly all-male world of Bunraku. She talks about the stage technicians and artisans who support the Bunraku art from backstage.

A quarter of a century has passed since Takao Hashimoto helped start the Noge International Street Performance Festival as one of the founding members in 1986. Since then, he has produced the Sangenjaya International Street Performance Festival, the Hitachi International Street Performance Festival, the Theatre de Rue Tokyo (forerunner of the current Heaven Artist Tokyo festival held in Ueno), the Koenji Bikkuri Street Performance Festival and others, one after another. Hashimoto has also worked to establish a system for licensing street performance artists and to help young Japanese artists tour overseas. In this interview we talked with him about these 25 years of activities.