JAPANESE DOLLS: Boy's Day Festival in Japan

 by: Helen Vanderberg

Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the concept of having a whole festival dedicated to dolls?

Dolls are shown in Girl’s Day and Boy’s Day festivals in Japan, and cherished over the

generations. Boy’s Day dolls can consist of anything from a healthy-looking Sumi wrestler

to a samurai warrior or his armor.

The dolls are usually set up in a hierarchal arrangement in the family home, meant to show,

perhaps, the emperor and empress, courtiers, handmaidens, and warriors in a social

hierarchy in a way a child can understand.

The same approach may ring true with the carp-shaped banners ranged according to size

either on a pole outside the house. The big fish is daddy, next size down is mother, the

next smallest is elder son or daughter. In the countryside, on a rope across a river, the fish

banners represent the villagers. Everything has a hidden meaning.

Beside the obvious link with Japanese doll festivals, collecting dolls has a much deeper

psychological basis. It is believed that ancient Japanese samurai warriors tied cloth mascot

dolls underneath their clothing before going into a particularly ferocious fight.

Whether this is true or not, try this experiment. Walk through the Cairo Museum in Egypt,

turn right, and just beyond where the yellow flowers were found, still colorful after 2500

years in a pyramid tomb, you’ll come on the figure of a scribe. He’s almost life-size, seated

cross-legged, and as you swing around the corner his quartz eyes stare out at you across

the centuries, and your heart turns over with a jolt of recognition.

Further north in Istanbul, touring the museum on Topkapi grounds above the Bosphorus,

you come across the statue of Sappho and the same sense of recognition hits you. This

woman lived. And loved, and wrote amazing poetry. A human response across the centuries

since Ancient Greece.

Dolls give you this leap of recognition, albeit on a much smaller scale, and you don’t have to

be a rabid doll collector to account for it. Perhaps it is the human miniature that grabs our

imagination. To find out more about a broad range of Japanese dolls, go to :

http://www.welcome.city.yokohama.jp/eng/doll/4010.html.

To explore these connections further brings us up against questions of identity.

Is it the samurai spirit residing in the young boy’s heart that needs nourishing?

To make a connection with a samurai doll go to www.boonsby.com.