puppet production of “Cassian”.This movement for theatrical improvement was carried out with the involvement of Kabuki actors, but Bunraku, the traditional puppet theater, was left out of this movement. Bunraku had been rapidly losing its audience from around 1905. In 1927, the renowned literary scholar Masamune Hakucho visited the Bunrakuza Theater and wrote “when I entered the theater after a long absence, the audience was, as I had imagined, extremely small. The ...... masters have died out, and their successors seem unlikely to emerge in an old-fashioned artistic society left behind by the times."It was at this point that knowledge of European artistic puppetry was brought to Japan, and it was only then that the Japanese began to realize that "puppetry" could also be a modern art form. The Marionettentheater Münchner Künstler was not only incorporated into actor's theater in Japan, but also gave rise to many new Western-style puppet companies.I would like to show some pictures from the end of 19th century in Japan, before the knowledge of European artistic puppet theatre came to the country. In fact, in 1894, an Irish showmen came to Japan to perform. They were called the “Darcʼs”, and it became very popular in Tokyo. At that time, however, this puppetry was performed at an amusement park with a small zoo and was treated as a freak show. Other puppeteers in Japan refused to perform there, saying that they did not want to usurp the animals' wages. It was imitated on the Kabuki stage as a funny thing by Kikugoro V, who was famous for immediately bringing unusual objects of the time to the stage. Thus, at the end of the 19th century, foreign puppetry was nothing more than a spectacle, but in the 20th century, it was transformed into something to be respected and imitated by artists. In April 1913, a detailed introductory article about the Marionettentheater Münchner Künstler was published in the Japanese theater magazine “Shibai”, and in September in the literary magazine “Waseda Bungaku”. Both are translations of an article in the German magazine “Die Kunst. Monatshefte für freie und angewandte Kunst”, July 10, 1912. The author is the art critic Georg Jakob Wolf, whose works include "Kunst und Künstler in München" （1908）. It featured a gorgeous interior of the theater and Taschner and Wackerle's puppets. After this, the puppet theater was repeatedly mentioned in magazines and other publications in Japan as one of the most ― 525 ―― 525 ―
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