Japan · Puppet Making / Theatrical Craft
文楽人形 (Bunraku Ningyō)
Bunraku (文楽) is Japan's traditional puppet theater — UNESCO inscribed in 2003 — using puppets operated by three visible puppeteers per puppet: the omozukai (主遣い) operates the head and right hand, the hidarizukai (左遣い) operates the left hand, and the ashizukai (足遣い) operates the feet. The puppet-making tradition (ningyō-shi) produces heads with mechanically transforming expressions — eyebrows that move, eyes that roll, mouths that open and close, and some heads where the entire wig-and-face can reverse to reveal a demon face (keren — 外連). The head mechanism is the critical craft knowledge: levers, pivots, and strings embedded within the wooden head must produce facial transformations that are immediately legible to audiences from 20 meters. The mechanism design is each head-maker's proprietary knowledge.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · UNESCO Representative List — Ningyo Johruri Bunraku Puppet Theatre (2003)
Gifu Wagasa (岐阜和傘) is the traditional Japanese umbrella of Gifu City's Kano district, built from a washi paper canopy pulled taut over 30-70 carved bamboo ribs radiating from a wooden hub (rokuro) atop a bamboo shaft.
Jōyachi (上焼, 'upper/fine-fired ware') is the glazed, decorated branch of Tsuboya ware in Naha, Okinawa: slip-covered tableware, sake vessels and vases painted, carved and glazed with natural stone-and-coral glazes.
Arayachi (荒焼, 'rough-fired ware') is the unglazed branch of Tsuboya ware, Okinawa's principal pottery tradition — the stoneware of storage: great water jars, awamori and miso jars, and many shisa guardian lions.
Hand-painted earthenware dolls and whistles made in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture, by pressing red-earth-and-sand clay into molds, bisque-firing at about 800 °C and painting by hand over a white ground in yellow, purple and red.
Glazed ceramics made in and around Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture, from local iron-rich clay, glazed with black tenmoku or with an apple-ash glaze made from burnt apple tree wood, sometimes blended with rice-straw ash in a namako ('sea…
Lacquerware of the Hirosaki area of Aomori Prefecture in which patterns are built up in many layers of colored lacquer and then revealed by repeated grinding and polishing back through the layers (togidashi kawari-nuri).
Pinguli is a village in Sindhudurg District, Maharashtra, home to the Thakar tribe, practitioners of a leather shadow puppet tradition closely related to the Chitrakathi painting tradition of the same community.
Sawantwadi is a royal town in Sindhudurg District, Maharashtra, with a lacquered wood toy tradition patronized by the Bhonsle kings of Sawantwadi.
The toy making tradition of Sonneberg — the Thuringian town that was Germany's toy manufacturing capital from the 17th century onward, exporting dolls, wooden toys, and papier-mâché figures across Europe and America and co-developing the…
The carving of entertainment masks by the Baule people, roughly 400,000 strong in central Côte d'Ivoire, whose rich carving tradition produces two recognized categories: Goli, a sequential four-mask dance series adopted from the…
The making of warrior costumes, ceremonial swords, jewelry, and musical instruments used in the Sebeïba, an annual Tuareg ritual dance-and-song competition held in the oasis of Djanet in Algeria's Tassili n'Ajjer region, coinciding with…
Channapatna is a small town in the Ramanagara District of Karnataka, known since the 18th century as a center of turned-wood toy production using ivory wood (Wrightia tinctoria) and organic lac (shellac) in a distinctive on-lathe…