🏮 Kawano no Kuruma Ningyo

川野の車人形

Okutama, Tokyo (Kawano Seikatsukan) · Every year on 5 March

Traditional performing arts

172 days to go
Rooms around Okutama, Tokyo fill up while the festival is on.

Kawano's Kuruma Ningyo, a nationally designated Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, is held every year on the first Saturday of March at the Kawano Seikatsukan in Kawano, Okutama Town, Tokyo. It is a traditional performing art in which puppets are manipulated to the accompaniment of joruri narration. Performers wear black robes, sit on a wheeled box, and skillfully use their fingers and toes to move the puppets. Kuruma Ningyo was seen in various places from the late Edo period until the 1880s to 1890s, but today it is performed only in Kawano, Okutama Town, as well as in Hachioji and Miyoshi Town, Saitama Prefecture. When puppet theater shifted to three-person manipulation and one-person manipulation declined, Nishikawa Koryu of Saitama Prefecture founded and revived Kuruma Ningyo. The origins of the puppet theater in Kawano are old, and the "old heads" used in the one-person manipulation era are handed down as venerable cultural property sculptures. Performances run from 13:00 to around 16:00, and the repertoire includes "Asakura Sogoro," "Do chu Hizakurige," "Taikoki," and "Genpei Seisuiki." It is a valuable opportunity to see the wheeled puppet manipulation, which was advanced for its time, as it is passed down today.