their art to receive scholarly attention. I struck up a friendship with troupe members Michigami Tetuo and his wife Michigami Yurika and decided to include the company in my studies. Both the Ishikawa troupes originated in small mountain villages in an area that used to be known as Oguchi, where locals performed puppet plays annually with themes drawn from The Heike Monogatari and folk stories, not as a ritual, but as a lunar New Year celebration. Some of the eight plays in their combined repertoire are early works of Chikamatsu. The village of Fukaze, sadly, was destroyed in the 1970s to facilitate the construction of the Teodorigawa dam that now brings water from the mountains to Kanazawa City. Villagers were relocated to Tsurugi and have tried to maintain their puppet tradition in this new location. In February 2022, when Fukaze’s annual performance, which I had hoped to attend, was cancelled for the third year in a row due to the pandemic, troupe members kindly offered to host me for an April visit to learn more about their tradition. With the help of Hakusan City Hall’s Intercultural Exchange Department and the Mayor, who gave me an official welcome covered by the local papers, the troupe organized a full schedule of events. The local museum curator pulled the oldest puppets out of storage, a collection of over 30 figures, and set them up for us to view. The most elderly former resident of Fukaze village, Toki Kawagishi, 92 years old, joined us at this display and shared her memories of the tradition in the village. The full Fukaze hozonkai showed up at the troupe’s rehearsal and performance studio in Tsurugi to talk about the form and their work with the puppets. Troupe leaders drove me to see the former location of the village, now under water. Together we visited a museum of local village life and the rehearsal/performance space of the Higashi Futakuchi company, where we were welcomed by their association members who spoke with us about their art. Fukaze members hosted me once more when I made a return visit in April 2023, and I have now written an article about the tradition for the UNIMA-USA magazine, Puppetry International, and another for a special issue of the Italian academic journal AOQU devoted to the theme of puppets and epics.The intercultural exchange department of Hakusan City Hall lent me Evan Rostetter, a CIR (Coordinator of International Relations) from the well-known JET program, for the length of each of my visits to help me with translation as my Japanese is weak. In 1983-84, I lived - 66 -
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