Namba Jinja Shrine

This guide to Namba Jinja Shrine in Osaka opens in 1811, when a modest puppeteer named Uemura Bunrakuken pitched his struggling troupe on the shrine grounds, at a moment when Osaka's puppet theater was losing its audience to rival kabuki actors. His life-sized puppets were worked in full view of the audience by handlers dressed in black. The shrine itself is older still, moved to Bakuromachi after Toyotomi Hideyoshi raised the walls of Osaka Castle nearby, its gate flattened again by air raids in 1945.