Joruri as Living Theater: Representations of Women in the Golden Age of Joruri in Early Modern Japan

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This project is to conduct research on how female characters were represented in eighteenth-century joruri puppet theater through textual andvisual examination of contemporary joruri-related publications. In the research in AY2022, I became interested not only how female characters were represented, but the historical roles of the female performers (especially female gidayu chanters) and their potential development in the future. After the pandemic-related travel restrictions were relaxed, I presented this preliminary research at The 16th Annual Conference on Asian Studies (Palacky University Olomouc, the Czech Republic) as "From Transgression to Culture: The Roles of Female Gidayu Joruri Performers in the Male-Dominant Traditional Performative Arts" in November 2022. I am revising this presentation for potential journal publication. I also presented my paper "Staging Tragedy: Reinventing Rural Landscape in Imoseyama Onna Teikin (1771)" at the Association for Asian Studies 2023 Annual Conference (Boston, USA) in March 2023. In this conference, I joined an international and interdisciplinary panel that explored the theme of "pastoral" in Japanese literature in a large sense (including classical poetry, theater, novels, and contemporary pop culture). We are looking into developing and publishing our papers together in a journal issue.