ABSTRACT
It is easy to understand how a discussion of copying in Japan should rightly include a discussion of puppets. The Japanese word for puppet is usually ningyô, written with the two characters ‘person’ and ‘shape’. The same characters, read in another way are pronounced hitogata and this word was historically used to refer to small sticks or bundles of grass offered as ritual substitutes for actual people in rites of purification.1 Today, the term ningyô refers to what in English we would more commonly call a doll as opposed to a puppet, a distinction determined not so much by the structure of the actual object (for they are often similar), but by the presence of a performance before an audience. This chapter regarding puppets as a variety of a ritual ‘copy’ of the human form looks at cases from Japanese puppetry traditions which enhance a discussion of what it means to create a ‘copy’ of something.
