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ix Acknowledgments I have, over time, received grants from Pomona College, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in particular and most recently the Japan Foundation, all of which contributed to the creation of this book. I thank them all warmly for their encouragement and their financial support. Professor Uchiyama Mikiko of Waseda University in Tokyo was most gracious in allowing me to sit in on her seminar on the puppet theatre and take advantage of her knowledge and insights. One could have no more warm and hospitable a friend than Professor Fukui Shigemasa, also of Waseda University, who has long made so many things possible for my wife and me in Tokyo, not the least of which was finding Waseda-connected lodgings and study space during our 1998–1999 stay.Edward Fowler read the translation of “Moritsuna’s Camp”when it was first published in the Asian Theatre Journal in 1985. Leonard Pronko and David Reinke both read and commented on the present manuscript. All these friends offered thoughtful and useful observations that can only have improved matters. Similarly, I appreciate very much and have benefited from the observations and suggestions of the two anonymous readers for the University of Hawai‘i Press. Mike Ashby has been a model and congenial editor, lifting me with good suggestions, catching me as I fall. In a small way this has been something of a family project: my son Terril Jones has given much valuable help in locating illustrations for the book; my other son, Derek Jones, drew the map at the book’s beginning. Unless otherwise credited, all photos were taken by the author in 1972 and 1981. My thanks to all, but none of those who have helped see this book into being, of course, can be charged with any infelicities that may still remain; these can be ascribed only to me. A word about the lady to whom this book is dedicated, Mabel Suzuki. In 1955 and 1956 she introduced me to Kabuki,to the Bunraku puppet theatre, and to an engaging spectrum of Japanese culture at a time when I was new to the country and still hobbled to some extent by the wartime anti-Japanese propaganda that had been directed to all Acknowledgments x Americans.In the 1960s or 1970s Mabel and her family,at considerable sacrifice, moved from Yokohama to Chicago, where she and her husband , Fujitsugu, felt that their children would have greater advantages than in Japan. We remained in touch until around the late 1990s, when I ceased to hear from her, and I was afterward unsuccessful in efforts to locate her. I hope that her children—Hiroko, Hiroshi, and Reiko—may see this dedication and know that their mother is held in warm esteem by one on whom she had a deep and salutary influence. Sode furiau mo tashō no en. ...

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