puppets don’t bleed; dolls don’t cry
Speculations on "the uncanny" in Butoh through a looking glass of Ghost in the Shell, Asian superstition, and Bunraku (Japanese Puppet Theatre).
During my summer in Japan, Kae from the Tatsumi Hijikata Archives suggested that I watch Bunraku (文楽), Japanese puppet theatre, to experience how the body is moved by outside forces. Hungry for all things Butoh and Butoh adjacent, I immediately bought a ticket to catch a play at the National Bunraku Theatre in Osaka when I visited Japan for the second time this year. There, I watched Part 1 of Kanadehon Chūshingura. The name of the play, Kanadehon Chūshingura translates to The Treasury of Loyal Retainers and recounts a famous tale of 47 masterless samurai, or ronin, who embark on a doomed expedition to avenge the wrongful death of their master Enya Hangan. Enya Hangan’s death happens in act 4 of the 11 act play and is the catalyst for the revenge epic that unfolds.
Hooded puppeteers, cloaked in black robes, remained in plain view throughout the show, only the master puppeteers kept their faces exposed. The puppets were either manipulated directly or moved by rods attached to them. In Bunraku, the puppeteers play a role similar to that of empty space for the Butoh dancer—guiding and activating the body internally and externally, facilitating a process of transformation.
Under the fluorescent lighting of the theatre, it was clear that the puppets were being moved by their masked attendants, yet they appeared unnervingly lifelike despite the visible manipulation by their operators. Similarly, in Butoh, we can consider the dancer to be a human puppet whose movements are powered by various operatives. The uncanny quality of the dance can be attributed to the fact that the body is being moved by something other than itself.
Seppuku, or harakiri (腹切り), is a ritual suicide of self-disembowelment that originated in feudal Japan. To commit seppuku, a samurai would make a deep cut across the abdomen, typically from left to right, which is believed to be the most painful way to die. Although the puppet Enya was not of flesh and bone, both myself and the audience were gripped by the image of the puppet carving gracefully into itself. It was then, in the tension between the anticipated bloodshed and the absence of viscera, that I encountered a realization of the uncanny.
I don't think that, on close inspection, a bunraku puppet appears very similar to a human being. Its realism in terms of size, skin texture, and so on, does not even reach that of a realistic prosthetic hand. But when we enjoy a puppet show in the theatre, we are seated at a certain distance from the stage. The puppet's absolute size is ignored, and its total appearance, including hand and eye movements, is close to that of a human being. So, given our tendency as an audience to become absorbed in this form of art, we might feel a high level of affinity for the puppet.
The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori [English Translation]
In the Kabuki staging of Kanadehon Chūshingura, the actor, like the puppet, does not bleed, yet it is the puppet that proves to be a more intriguing subject, perhaps because of its vacuity. In Bunraku, there exists a certain purity in the puppet’s role as a vessel for human emotion to perform itself. We develop an affinity for the puppet and its circumstances because of its familiarity, yet it is precisely its foreignness—the gap between its human likeness and its inhuman essence—that seduces us. The puppet suicide led me to think about the Butoh body as a type of puppet as well. A puppet is a performing doll, designed to be operated. Similarly, the Butoh body is a human-shaped vessel, conditioned to be danced by design.
… the pathos of the puppets depends on their ability to be simultaneously much more than human and much less.”
Interpreting Anime (2018), Christopher Bolton
The posthuman uncanny
I have always been fascinated by the ‘uncanny’ as both a philosophical and aesthetic phenomenon. It is precisely because of this unique quality that I am drawn to Butoh dance as an artform. The "umami" (旨味)—or the deep, rich, sometimes unsettling quality of the uncanny—within Butoh is not something reserved only for seasoned practitioners or well-established Butoh dance companies. Rather, it is inherent in the practice itself, available to newcomers or even those who are entirely unfamiliar with the term "Butoh."
The concept of the uncanny is explored in Ernst Jentsch's 1906 essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny ("Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen"), in which he links the uncanny to disorientation—specifically, an intellectual uncertainty about whether something, such as a doll or automaton, is alive or not. In his 1919 essay The Uncanny ("Das Unheimliche") Freud also expands on the ideas Jentsch introduced, linking the uncanny to repressed memories and hidden desires feel altered or estranged to us.
Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open.
Friedrich Schelling
The term "uncanny valley" was subsequently defined and popularized in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, as the moment when “we lose our sense of affinity.” Mori introduced the concept of bukimi no tani or "the uncanny valley," a theory in robotics and psychology that describes the unease people experience when encountering something that appears human but feels slightly off. According to this theory, as an object—be it a robot, puppet, or doll—becomes more human-like, it eventually reaches a threshold where its near-perfection exposes its defects. These irregularities—such as unnatural movements, overly glossy features, or artificial expressions—elicit a sense of repulsion or eeriness, which produces a feeling of alienation. This space of dissonance is what Mori termed the "uncanny valley."
Hijikata stated in 1977, “Now is the very crucial moment when the world has become filled with all kinds of materials … He was very aware of how such changes influence the relationship between the world and the body: “The body is constantly violated by things like the development of technology” (1969:19). Today these changes are accelerating. The rapid development of computer technology, virtual-reality technology, and the internet have extended human possibilities for the future but seem simultaneously to be eroding or changing our sense of what is real. From this current context one can more clearly read that Hijikata’s struggle was to present the real in a time when the body is constantly simulated.
Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh: [Introduction], Kurihara Nanako
My take on Butoh and the uncanny operates as a kind of inversion of Mori’s robot to human paradigm. In Butoh, uncanniness does not emerge from a deliberate exploitation of one’s own personal trauma or desires for artistic expression nor built only from technique, but is a fascinating byproduct which stems from a disjunction between the real and imagined, between transfiguration and the recurring foil of human physicality. As the dancer’s body is transformed into something other than human, it is the traces of humanity—bodily ticks, loss of control, secretions, fleshliness—that invoke the uncanny, through a type of fracturing or slippage. Butoh dancers dance at the interstice of estrangement and attachment, tightening or loosen the tether between reality and unreality by maintaining a thread of concentration. As the Butoh body is always changing in relation what it carries, it challenges audiences to constantly redefine how they relate to the body.
Because this myoelectric hand makes movements, it could make healthy people feel uneasy.
The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori [English Translation]
According to the designer, a smile is a dynamic sequence of facial deformations, and the speed of the deformations is crucial. When the speed is cut in half in an attempt to make the robot bring up a smile more slowly, instead of looking happy, its expression turns creepy.
The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori [English Translation]
Another element that contributes to the uncanniness of Butoh is the speed at which it occurs, which often operates outside the realm of typical human measure—either much faster or slower. Butoh, as a process of becoming, unfolds a complex progression of transformation across time and space. One reason many Butoh dancers move at a glacial speed is to preserve the integrity of this metamorphosis—the slow, deliberate pace at which flesh becomes something else. This pacing allows the dancer to fully inhabit their body, creating a heightened sense of the uncanny, yet Butoh can also accelerate as the images become more vivid and layered. At times, the uncanny quality is not sustained throughout the entire performance but instead emerges as a singular moment. If Butoh can be understood as a sequence of frames, the uncanny appears as the anomalous frame—an aberration in the flow of time.
The flesh in itself is the expression, but Butoh is what protrudes from that flesh.
Reflections on Butoh-fu, Yukio Waguri Source: Butoh Kaden
In Mori’s robotics theory, whereby the human/robot dichotomy results in a stark decrease in affinity with the subject, Butoh dance provokes a dynamic spectrum of affinities in a push and pull, taking us away from the body while simultaneously drawing us back into the reality of our embodied humanity. To understand Butoh requires a shift in our consciousness, in the same way that to accept the death of an object, we have to believe that it has something within it that can die.
The immortal spirit of Hijikata Tatsumi
Early Butoh began from the powerful personality that was Hijikata Tatsumi challenging the pre-existing dance world with the violence and perverted eroticism that he carried in his hands. Evidently the main figure is Hijikata, who we should even call a super- personality, and Hijikata was Butoh itself.
Reflections on Butoh-fu, Yukio Waguri Source: Butoh Kaden
Hijikata Tatsumi, the first founder of Butoh, was a darkly charismatic figure with a voracious appetite for the transgressive, a man who spoke in riddles. He thrived on challenging the physical and psychological limits of both his dancers and audiences. His legacy in Butoh spans bizarre anarchistic instigations to exacting and intricate choreographies in his later years. Hijikata channelled the tempestuousness of his inner world and cultural discontents into art, turning the body into an impersonal and elemental medium for expression.
What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet in midday, and three feet in the evening?”
The Sphinx’s Riddle
Hijikata’s methods ranged from ingenious to cruel, as exemplified by an infamous anecdote in which he inserted a marble into his wife’s anus just before she stepped onstage to perform, or by forcing a dancer to crawl on their knees for weeks, with the dance culminating in the simple act of standing. He demanded that his followers practice extreme self-renunciation and pack-like living conditions, enabling them to shed the habits of a civilized or dancerly physicality.
When I first visited Hijikata at his studio, he pointed me Yoko Ashikawa beside him and told, “ Here I’m keeping a hen.” Ashikawa, clad in a baggy shirt and a pair of men’s under[ants walked around crying “clucking” like a ‘hen’.
It seemed to me this was one of his (self-renunciations). He must be convinced in order to ‘become’ a hen, a dancer must throw away his ego as a human being.The Body as a Vessel (2016), Mikami Kayo
Butoh students in the 21st century are introduced to a range of mental and bodily conditioning techniques designed to access a state of "emptiness" or "blankness" before they can dance. This erasure of the self allows the body to become a vessel, enabling an intricate process of transformation. Butoh performers consciously omit the presence of a human consciousness, one of these strategies is not using sight as a means of navigating the dance. The uncanny or mannequin-like quality often associated with Butoh dancers can be traced to the emptiness of their gaze, which creates a sense that the figure is not quite human.
Just as an invisible force animates the puppet, the human imagination and/or the integration of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh-fu have the potential to powerfully alter the body’s expression. Under the guidance of a good teacher and the dedication of the student to cultivating their capacity for this type of immersion, Butoh practitioners can be primed to reach sublime states of transformation.
The most difficult part of this exercise was that one had to "be it," not merely "imagine it." This was emphasized in the class again and again. The condition of the body itself has to be changed. Through words, Hijikata's method makes dancers conscious of their physiological senses and teaches them to objectify their bodies. Dancers can then "reconstruct" their bodies as material things in the world and even as concepts.
Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh: [Introduction], Kurihara Nanako
While it is important not to reduce Butoh to the singular influence of Hijikata Tatsumi, nor to suggest that all of his tactics should be replicated as pedagogical models for the art form, I do believe that the errant and countercultural "spirit" of Butoh—its embrace of the taboo and unexpected—owes much to the wicked predilections of its founding father and his relentless search for a vernacular originating from the body that would never settle for itself. In the body of the Butoh dancer, the shadow of Hijikata’s ghost dances.
I would like to make the dead gestures inside my body die one more time and make the dead themselves dead again. I would like to have a person who has already died die over and over inside my body. I may not know death, but it knows me. I often say that I have a sister living inside my body. When I am absorbed in creating a butoh work, she plucks the darkness from my body and eats more than is needed. When she stands up inside my body, I unthinkingly sit down. For me to fall is for her to fall.
Wind Daruma, Hijikata Tatsumi (May 1985)
Originally printed as "Kaze daruma" in Gendaishi tech.
The dancer as vessel
The Butoh-Kaden website, which organizes and archives Hijikata Tatsumi’s Butoh-fu through the notes of his disciple Wuguri Yukio, states that “Butoh is the incessant substitution of emptiness.” Dolls, as human miniatures, have long been feared or fetishized, serving as receptacles for the dark unconscious, sexual deviance, ghosts and supernatural beings. In Asian cultures, the human-like appearance of dolls lead many to believe that they can act as vessels for wandering spirits. Ceremonies like ningyo kuyo, held at temples or shrines in Japan, are performed to respectfully part with dolls and release any lingering energy. Butoh draws also from spiritual and mythological undercurrents of spirituality and superstition, embedding its performances with a folkloric or ritualistic quality. Just as dolls are perceived as receptacles for spirits, the Butoh dancer’s body is trained to be a carrier as well. However, I believe that although the practice of Butoh can have a shamanistic quality, it is ultimately still a somatic craft.
If I return to what I stated earlier about “the substitution of emptiness,” something is always trespassing into an empty vessel, taking root there, and then fleeing again. That is probably the dead, ancestors, spirits, or fallen gods.
Reflections on Butoh-fu, Yukio Waguri Source: Butoh Kaden
Another aesthetic hallmark of Butoh that contributes to its uncanniness is the white paint that dancers often use. Over the years, I have encountered many explanations about its origins and significance. One suggests that Hijikata collaborated with a sculptor, who covered him in stiff white plaster which made it difficult to dance, contributing to his jerky and disjointed movements. Others allude to more spiritual concepts of self-erasure, catharsis or emptiness, while another account, shared firsthand by a teacher, suggests that Hijikata, ever the maverick, decided on the white paint on a whim, to surprise audiences. Nowadays, many dancers may choose not to paint themselves, likely for practical reasons: it can be difficult to clean in performance spaces and is a huge chore to remove afterward (which I can attest to from personal experience). Nonetheless, from a visual standpoint, I think the paint serves a very simple and effective function, which is to flatten out the features of the face, rendering it pore-less and inhuman—much like a doll or a computer-generated image—creating an uncanny effect, especially when the Butoh dancer dances with their face. I remember an instance in which a student cried, moved by a demonstration by one of my teachers, Agatsuma Emiko (whose Butoh faces are some of the most immaculate I have seen) of a mask slowly cracking from the weight of a crawling ant.
In an interview with Asian Week Tamano Koichi declares that: “We paint our bodies white to provide clear, uncluttered canvas for physical manifestations of agony, ecstasy - the whole spectrum.” Shaving their heads (and sometimes the eyebrows) at the same time, the dancers reach a state beyond sex, age, race or gender. Lastly, the painting turns the body into an object, allowing the dancers to alienate themselves from their daily bodies, becoming material which can be molded.
Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh: [Introduction], Kurihara Nanako
Ghost In The Shell; diving into the sea with a body that only sinks
In the iconic 1995 cyberpunk film Kōkaku Kidōtai / Ghost in the Shell, Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg, emerges as a tragic heroine grappling with a crisis of the body. Her consciousness resides within a fully synthetic form, both of which—body and mind—are owned by the state. Held in a form that is simultaneously alien and commodified, she wrestles with the question of what, if anything, remains truly her own. The artificiality of her body, compounded by the state’s ownership of her cognitive and emotional faculties, underscores her existential dilemma.
Motoko's struggle mirrors broader political and philosophical tensions surrounding individual autonomy and state control in technocratic societies. The metaphor of the body as a puppet or objectified doll is central to her plight: she is an intelligence bound by the constraints of her synthetic vessel, yet imbued with enough consciousness to yearn for liberation. As an object with a soul, she embodies the disunity between the mechanical and the human.
There is a scene in the film where Kusanagi goes diving in the ocean, a seemingly human pastime that perplexes her partner Batou, who is also part cyborg. As she emerges from the water, Batou questions her motivations, remarking, “a cyborg who goes diving in her spare time. That can't be a good sign.1” This line encapsulates the tension between Kusanagi’s object-body and her pursuit of an experience that is not tied to her body’s built-in functions.
“ Her body and mind belong to the state, and she cannot leave Section 9 without surrendering that body and large classified chunks of her memory.
Perhaps as a result, the major treats her own body as a thing apart—something alien or inconsequential.”
Understanding Anime, Christopher Bolton
As the scene unfolds, Batou presses further, questioning Kusanagi's seemingly pointless pursuit: “Why dive into the sea with a body that only sinks? What is it you see in the water's darkness?2” She responds cryptically, “For now, we see through a glass, darkly”. Her words seem to come not from her programmed mind but from a deeper, more enigmatic part of her being—her ghost. Batou is thusly taken aback, asking, “That was you, wasn’t it?3” The exchange reveals a rare moment of vulnerability where her ghost breaches the surface, revealing a self that exists beyond the boundaries of her body and its state-defined purpose, a moment of the uncanny.
“ she is a virtual or performed subject that is real, unreal, and hyperreal from the outset. ”
Interpreting Anime (2018), Christopher Bolton
The main antagonist in Ghost in the Shell I, a hyper-intelligent software program known as the Puppet Master, has the ability to control other cyborgs and automata by implanting artificial memories. In the film’s conclusion, Kusanagi decides to abandon her corporeal form by merging with the Puppet Master, resembling a lovers’ suicide arrangement often depicted in Bunraku theatre. This union allows her to transcend her physical body and exist as a liminal, net-based consciousness, embodying a state of digital transcendence and freedom.
In contrast, Butoh is not a form of escapism but opens a pathway through which the dancer can encounter their own ghost. Unlike dolls or puppets, Butoh dancers are humans who “choose” to develop a puppet body to hold space for the vastness of experiences, human or otherwise. In her book Cradling Empty Space, my teacher Vangeline writes that Butoh “demands that we courageously dig inside ourselves and take responsibility for what we find. Facing our chaos and organizing it..." The reality is that we can never escape the ghosts of our embodied history, which will inevitably surface when we dance.
In doing so, we, as a living generation of Butoh practitioners in the 21st century, take responsibility for the choice to open up our bodies as vessels. We must cultivate the necessary faculties to safely receive, fully embody, and translate these experiences into the material world. This process is both a great privilege and a responsibility not to be taken lightly.
“Chikamatsu’s full argument is that the dramatic quality of the puppets, like the cyborgs, depends on their striking suspension between living and nonliving. He illustrates the possibility of imparting life to the inanimate puppets by describing a scene from The Tale of Genji, in which some courtiers are tending an orange tree after a heavy snowfall. When the snow suddenly drops from the branches of an adjacent pine tree, the pine is described as having shaken off its own burden in jealousy. “This was a stroke of the pen which gave life to the unconscious tree,” says Chikamatsu.”
Interpreting Anime (2018), Christopher Bolton
As the world continues to be plagued by genocidal warfare and racial violence, I reflect on the deep sickness of our modern condition, where race and nationality can be used to justify the senseless destruction of human life. Bodies are reduced to expendable resources in a futile struggle for power and resources by governing bodies and dictatorships. What, then, do we have left of ourselves and our autonomy that is still ours to reclaim? How can we liberate our bodies and the bodies of those we love from those that view us only as cattle or collateral damage in a game of dominance, or that insist we become part of a larger social body with values we do not identify with? This dehumanization of the body is not something we must accept.
In this context, Butoh can be understood as a psychosomatic technology of political resistance—a practice of radical corporeal reprogramming that resonates with the transgressive ethos of cyberpunk culture, a reclamation of one’s own body.
The Butoh dancer, through their practice, much like Kusanagi, harbors a "ghost" or "secret" within their flesh that belongs wholly to them—an awareness or sensitivity that allows one to be in the world, yet also not of the world, to retain autonomy as an individual and yet to make choices to be part of a larger body. The world opened up by the practice of Butoh could be said to bring the dancer closer to themselves, as well as to a world that they want to live in.
Another thing. What guarantee is there that I'll remain "me"?
None. But to be human is to continually change. Your desire to remain as you are is what ultimately limits you.
Interpreting Anime (2018), Christopher Bolton
To conclude this sprawling network of thought, I’d like to leave you with a song from my teenage years by the Indie Band The Killers, that hasn’t aged too badly over times and seems oddly poignant in the context of this writing:
Are we human
Or are we dancer?
My sign is vital
My hands are cold
And I'm on my knees
Looking for the answer
Are we human
Or are we dancer?
I don’t know who or what I am, but I am alive.
“Kōkaku kidōtai / Ghost in the Shell”
