ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss the tradition of puppetry on the small island of Awaji, a stretch of land forming the gateway to the Inland Sea in Japan. In the late 1800s, there were over forty puppet troupes from Awaji performing throughout Japan, and although the tradition nearly died out in the postwar era, it has been successfully revived, and puppetry has again become a significant component of identity on the island. My discussion here is largely based on research I did on Awaji in 2003. My focus is a specific component of the puppetry tradition, namely the carved puppet heads known as kashira, with attention to their narrative histories (which I read as a kind of biography of kashira as cultural objects), their display and commoditization, and the challenge of finding inheritors of the demanding technical and aesthetic challenge of their creation.1
