Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties: A Seventeenth-century Japanese Picture Book for Children

Abstract

Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties:A Seventeenth-century Japanese Picture Book for Children Pia Jolliffe (bio) and Keller Kimbrough (bio) In a fabulous trove of Japanese children's books that was sealed inside a statue of the bodhisattva Jizō in the ninth month of 1678, there is a particularly charming volume with the double title Imo jōruri (Potato Puppet Theater) and Bijin tataki (Beating the Beauties, a title that likely alludes to the act of tapping out a rhythm rather than beating anyone). [Figure 1] The book was published by Tsuruya Gohei, probably of Kyoto, sometime between 1661 and 1678, and it belonged to a child named Chōkurō, the son of a seventeenth-century merchant known as Obiya (obi-maker/seller) Jirōkichi. Chōkurō died young, and although his age at the time is unknown, upon his demise his father had Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties and nine of Chōkurō's other books and various personal possessions, including a thick sheaf of used calligraphy practice paper, a copybook of warrior pictures, and a kawaraban broadsheet—a kind of proto-news publication, in this case detailing a sensational double-suicide—placed inside a fourteenth-century image of Jizō as a memorial offering for his son. Jizō has long been associated with the Buddhist salvation of children, and Jirōkichi's decision to encase Chōkurō's personal things inside a wooden statue of the bodhisattva would have ensured the boy's connection to Jizō in the afterworld.1 Today the image stands at Izawaji Temple in Matsusaka City, Mie Prefecture, a hundred kilometers or so from the former capital of Kyoto, but when it came to be enshrined there is unknown.2 The seventeenth century is generally regarded as the beginning of Japan's early-modern period—a roughly 350-year span of relative peace, prosperity, and national unity during which the urban merchant class came to hold unprecedented economic power—and for the study of children and childhood in this period, Chōkurō's Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties is an object of great significance. As we shall show in this article, it is a precious source that addresses [End Page 197] all four of Peter Stearns's challenges in the study of childhood: the scarcity of historical data produced by children themselves; the lack of data on pre-teenage children of different genders and social statuses; the need for the history of childhood to go beyond "the West"; and the challenge of judging historical childhoods through a lens that is not distorted by modern values and ideas.3 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Cover, Imo jōruri, Bijin tataki (Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties), c. 1661–1678. Courtesy of the Izawa Town Council. [End Page 198] In its first part, Potato Puppet Theater, the book is a parodic warrior tale of the harvesting, washing, cooking, and consumption of a patch of planted potatoes. In its second part, Beating the Beauties, it is a sing-song list of the most famously beautiful women of the past and present, both historical and imagined: Yang Guifei of China; the goddess Kichijōten; the Somedono Empress; poets Ono no Komachi, Izumi Shikibu, and Koshikibu no Naishi; poet and author Murasaki Shikibu, who is best known for writing the great early eleventh-century novel/ romance The Tale of Genji; several fictional female characters from The Tale of Genji; celebrities of the seventeenth-century Shimabara licensed quarters (a Kyoto entertainment district of legalized prostitution, established in 1640); and many others. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Inside cover with drawings and a cursive signature ("Obiya Chōkurō"). Imo jōruri, Bijin tataki (Potato Puppet Theater/Beating the Beauties), c. 1661–1678. Courtesy of the Izawa Town Council. On its inside cover, the book contains the simplified cursive signature "Obiya Chōkurō" beside a crude drawing of what appears to be a man with long, curved arms, and an unidentifiable object that looks to us somewhat like a spaceship, or, perhaps, a striped potato or the face of a bug. [Figure 2] The signature suggests [End Page 199] the identity of...