Odawara, Kanagawa

The Later Hojo clan governed the Kanto region from Odawara for five generations, from the early sixteenth century until 1590, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi's siege brought their rule to an end. The city that Ieyasu inherited from the Hojo — who had already surrendered it — formed the basis of what became Edo. The Hojo built the infrastructure that made the region governable; they did not survive to profit from it.

Odawara's festival on May 3rd is a celebration of the defeated: a procession of fifteen hundred participants representing the five generations of the clan that made this city significant. The decision to commemorate the Hojo, rather than the Tokugawa who replaced them, reflects a civic identity grounded in the city's pre-Edo history.

Odawara is thirty minutes from Tokyo by shinkansen and an easy day trip from Kamakura or Hakone. The castle in the city center is a reconstruction, but it stands in grounds that retain the scale of the original fortification. The May festival adds a historical dimension to what would otherwise be a pleasant stop on the way to more famous destinations.

Puppet theatre, three to a figure.

Sagami Ningyo is the puppet drama of western Kanagawa, around Odawara and Atsugi—the same three-handler technique as Bunraku, carried east from the Kyoto-Osaka region in the Edo period and rooted, over time, in the villages here.

Today it is kept alive by preservation societies. The people who work the puppets have other jobs—office workers, farmers—and they rehearse and take the stage in their spare hours. The heads are carved by local hands, and puppets passed down through generations are still in use; the oldest are two centuries old, the wood gone glossy with handling.

This is an art that nearly vanished and then held on. At one point the line almost broke, and local people gathered it back up. There is nothing flashy about it. But puppets that exist nowhere else are moving, here, in the place that made them—and that turns out to be enough.