Japan: Kingdom of Dolls

Last Friday I saw an exhibit of 70 Japanese dolls currently on display at the Iowa State Historical Society Museum. (By some crazy coincidence I happened to be there at the same time probably 75 to 100 Japanese students were touring the museum. Almost everyone who was viewing the exhibit with me was speaking Japanese!) I’ve always been fascinated by dolls. Growing up they were one of my favorite things to play with, and even now, when I spot a doll in a museum exhibit or antique store, I am drawn to it, wondering about their lives when they still belonged to someone. Japanese dolls are not exclusively play things, as they are in America, but the have a rich heritage in the country, thus making Japan, a “kingdom of dolls.”


There were over a dozen different categories of dolls on display: Hina and Gogatsu dolls are used in the celebration of the girls and boys festivals each spring, Noh and Bunraku dolls that depict different aspects of Japanese theater traditions, Oshie Hagoita are cut from thick paper and then wrapped with silk or cotton, Hakata dolls are molded from clay and then brilliantly painted, Ichimatsu dolls specifically depict Japanese children.

Despite all these different categories, nine times out of ten, Japanese dolls have very serene expressions and their clothing will point to the richness of Japan’s ancient costumes and pageantry. (Also, one interesting tidbit, the dolls’ faces are made from layers of pulverized oyster shells.) There was one doll which should have had anything but a serene expression on his face as it appeared he was about to be blown away by a gust of wind! He was balanced on the toes of one foot with his other leg kicked up at an angle in front of him, almost if he was preparing to step to the right with a flourished kick. The blue and white paper umbrella he was holding was thrust almost completely horizontal. There wasn’t a hint of shock or surprise registered on his face. He just looked like he was out for a pleasant stroll.

I was most drawn to the Kokeshi and Oyama dolls. The Kokeshi dolls are made from blocks of wood using Japanese woodturning techniques. The traditional dolls have long, rounded bodies with large rounded heads placed squarely on top. They are all uniform in size, shape and expression, and look like bowling pins all lined up, just with a slightly different silhouette! I like the creative Kokeshi dolls better. They began to be crafted after WWII, born of the craftsmen’s desire for free imagination. Some of these dolls are cylindrical while others are round and others are more square. Some have distinctive heads carved above the body, while others have a face that is just carved into the one piece of wood. Many of these dolls had intricate designs carved into their bodies. I was amazed to see the variety of emotions created in these dolls with a few lines and dots of paint for their facial features. The Oyama dolls wore elaborate hairstyles and costumes, depicting the fashions of Japanese women. Their clothing was vibrant made from reds and oranges, patterned with elaborate embroidery.

I certainly felt like an outsider trying to look in and understand the Japanese culture in a bit better through the frame provided by these dolls, but they certainly kept hidden more than they revealed. I left wondering about other cultures where dolls were important and how something that is just a plaything in one culture can take on such significance in another.

My Favorite Flowers

Today was the gloomy variety of March days, and I was thankful to have these cheery daffodils, given to me by one of my friends, to brighten my table. I think part of the reason I love daffodils so much is because they seem to herald the beginning of spring. You can watch them bloom in a matter of hours, and they seem to be so full of eager life when their petals have fully opened.

MOMCC in Kansas City

Yesterday I returned from three days in Kansas City, KS, where I attended the Spring MOMCC conference (Midwest Open-Air Museums Coordinating Council). Not only was I able to enjoy three days without looking at any snow, I was able to spend time with employees and volunteers from a variety of other museums and historical societies. Each spring and fall since I began working at Living History Farms, I’ve watched some of my coworkers head off to MOMCC and return excited about the people they’d spent time with and the workshops they attended. I was excited when my supervisor told me she wanted to send me this year. MOMCC ended up being a very different experience than I anticipated. A lot was packed into the three days, so the following are just a few highlights.

The conference was hosted by Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop & Farm Historic Site. (This is the only intact stagecoach stop left on the Santa Fe Trail.) On Thursday I took a slat sunbonnet workshop. I started sewing it while I was there, but it’s only about half finished. We were able to look at several historic sunbonnets while we worked on ours to see the variety of things that were done with them. My favorite bonnet was the doll slat sunbonnet, which was constructed precisely how we were making ours – just smaller! We also read some primary accounts of mid-nineteenth century women talking about how annoying it was to wear this large bonnet, with wooden slats in the brim to make it stand straight out from their faces, but how very practical it was at the same time.

Friday I attended workshops on the different costumed interpretation traditions, the history of “Bleeding Kansas,” and the importance of your museum’s mission in planning programming. I also went to the foodways, clothing/textile, and artisans resource groups. Saturday I went to workshops on how to incorporate research into your interpretation and on how to fold and pack nineteenth-century clothing for travel without it getting all rumpled and wrinkled. This is quite the feat if you’ve ever seen some of the fancy 1870s overskirts people wear!

Friday night we toured Mahaffie and rode in their reproduction stagecoaches. We crammed five women into our stagecoach, and it was quite cozy. I couldn’t even sit back in my seat. I can’t imagine traveling any sort of distance in one! My friend Lucy and I spent a lot of time in the kitchen looking at their cookbooks, several of which we have at our museum, and exclaiming over their tiny woodstove that they were managing to bake biscuits in. It certainly made me thankful for the large six-burner woodstove I get to cook on at Living History Farms. We discovered that they had a round woodpile also! We take great pride in our round woodpile at LHF, so I took a picture of Lucy next to it just as two Mahaffie interpreters rounded the corner. The gentleman proceeded to give us a hard time about it, saying we were only taking the photos to showoff to our co-workers how much better our woodpile was than theirs. They threatened to confiscate my camera later in the evening over it too! Honestly, I just thought it was neat that they also had a round woodpile, although it is true that ours is about four times bigger than theirs. However, they justified its size by explaining that they just butchered four pigs, so they had to burn through a lot of it. It was much bigger several weeks ago.

After several days of talking with other museum folk about where they work, I must say I am glad that I work at LHF. I love my museum, and I am thankful for my place there.

Happy St. David's Day!

I smiled when I turned my calendar this morning and saw that today is St. David’s Day! Whenever I hear of St. David, I am reminded of leeks, daffodils, and my semester abroad in Wales during my senior year of college. While there I studied at Trinity College in Carmarthen. There were about a dozen American students in my program. While we were encouraged to take classes that were apart of Trinity’s regular course offerings, thus getting to be in class with Welsh students, we were also required to take a Welsh culture class that was just for the American students. It was in this class that I first learned of St. David, the patron saint of Wales, and the tradition of wearing leeks on St. David’s Day.

St. David was born in Wales in the 6th century and made his mark by founding monastic settlements and churches as he helped spread Christianity among the pagan Celtic people of Wales. He also became the arch bishop of Wales. The leek became his symbol because of the strategic role it played in a battle between the Welsh and Saxons. In order for the Welsh to not confuse friend with foe, St. David told them to wear leeks in their hats to distinguish them from the Saxons. The Welsh were victorious as a result!

St. David was canonized in the 12th century, and as the Welsh began celebrating his feast day, it became tradition to wear a leek on March 1 to commemorate him. At some point, though, the women started pinning daffodils to their bodices, perhaps deciding that wearing a type of onion was not very feminine. (Our instructor told us that if we were in Wales during the spring semester we would see fields and fields of daffodils blooming.) Our instructor told us of a humorous contest that eventually became part of this leek wearing tradition – that of the longest leek! It was quite simple; the gentlemen would measure their leeks to see who was wearing the largest/longest one. I’m not quite sure what you received if you won or even what it proved to win this contest; I can’t quite see it being a mark of your masculinity, although I think that’s what it originally signified!

(I have a great photo of one of my friends holding a leek, but I can't find it right now, so I put in a picture of St. David's Cathedral in Wales instead. It was a beautiful place to see!)

Oh, I should also add that remembering St. David and leeks also reminds me of cock-a-leekie-soup and my dear friend, Clarissa, which makes me smile too!