Dolls in Japan

Elaine Gerbert
In the first episode of the enormously popular Japanese television drama Oshin, the camera focuses on a faded kokeshi doll given to Oshin when she was a child. Though she is now an old woman and the dowager of a prosperous merchant family, Oshin still cherishes the simple wooden doll that her mother gave her as a keepsake in the days when the family struggled to survive and Oshins mother was forced to leave home to work as a geisha. Elsewhere, in a story in a Japanese elementary school reader, a woman prizes a crude pair of dolls fashioned from pencil stubs by a village boy during the war years when her family was evacuated to the country? Stories such as these about a grown womans heartfelt attachment to an old, worn doll abound in Japan. Home to the Doll Festival (hina matsuri),3 and a long tradition of ritual puppetry, origin of the Kewpie doll, Astro Boy, Ultraman, and most recently Pokemon, Japan would appear to have a special relationship with dolls. I would like to explore this notion by looking at some of the ways in which the image of the doll has figured in Western representations of Japan, and in Japanese representations of itself, both in works of literature and in the arenas of politics, economics, diplomacy, and trade.

Japan, The Land of Dolls The predominance of the doll in Western conceptualizations of Japan began almost from the beginning of the era of renewed contact with Japan in the nineteenth century following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Indeed, doll metaphors and an emphasis upon the miniature in general may be said to distinguish the impressions of Japan held in the West from those of other lands then being discovered and publicized in the Western press. The diminutive size and cleanliness of its people captured the imagination of Victorian travelers who had been writing disparagingly of a China that they found appallingly chaotic and dirty (Yokoyama 159). The doll-like proportions and dainty mannerisms of the Japanese led many observers to liken Japan to a neat and tidy elfland:
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Figure 1. Kokeshi dolls with daruma dolls from the Japanese Folk Toy Museum, Kurashiki, Japan. Photo from the authors collection. The rounded, wooden head of the kokeshi doll is fitted on top of a cylindrical, wooden body that is shaped on a lathe. It is impossible to realize that the Japanese are real men and women. What with the smallness of the people, their incessant laughing chatter, and their funny gestures, one feels oneself in elfland (Yokoyama 158); and filled them with Alice-in- Wonderland wonderment: All who love children must love the Japanese, the most gracious the most courteous, and the most smiling of all peoples, whose rural districts form, with Through the Looking Glass Country and Wonderland, three kingdoms of merry dreams. (Yokoyama 159) Outstanding among Western writers who saw Japan through a diminishing, exoticizing, and eroticizing lens was Pierre Loti, whose Madame Chrysanthemum (1893) inspired both Van Gogh and the librettist of Madame Butterfly and shaped the image of Japan held by Europeans for years to come. The power of the miniature to charm and fascinate comes across strongly as he writes about the countrys fantastic fairy tale landscape inhabited by tiny, doll-like people moving in a tiny, artificial, fictitious world like the paintings of lacquer and porcelains (42). He observes a dolls tea party, with little spirit lamps, little pipes, little lacquer trays, little teapots, little cups (40) and enjoys

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a plaything of a meal served by a darling little fairy (42). But as he goes on describing the fairy-like and enchanted unlooked for Eden , a disparaging tone slips in and the tiny people take on the appearance of puppets. A slim, elegant, delicate dancing girl is drolly painted white as plaster, with a little circle of rouge marked very precisely in the middle of each cheek, and she moves with jerky and mechanical salutations (45). Is it a woman or a doll? he queries. And it seems to him that his betrothal is a joke, and his new family a set of puppets. By the time he approaches the end of his memoir, the Japanese are a swarming crowd of Liliputian curtseying people (328).
The Magic of the Doll The charm exercised upon the imagination by the miniature size of the doll was noted in an early, pioneering study of dolls by Hall and Ellis, who in 1897 pointed out that a large part of the worlds terms of endearment are diminutives and suggested that a large part of the charm of doll play is the small scale of the doll world which brings it not only into the limited range of the childs senses and knowledge, but focuses and intensifies affection and all other feelings (3). Some of that affection may be due to the sudden omnipotence that such miniaturization bestows upon the viewer and handler. Dolls are manipulable and offer, even to those normally deprived of authority and circumscribed in the exercise of free will, an opportunity to exercise both over the form of a surrogate human being. It seems no accident that small children are given to doll play, or that the bound women of the pleasure quarters were frequently depicted in ukiyo-e prints holding dolls. Doll owners delight in the dolls perfection of form-its cunningly molded features, its perfectly smooth skin-a perfection seldom found in human beings. In their reduced-scale size, dolls bring a touch of the exotic- the familiar represented on an unfamiliar scale-and often of the subliminally erotic. For Loti, the strangeness of Japan was made all the more exotic through its diminutive size, which turned everyday existence into a kind of play. Writers on the subject of dolls also allude to the way in which dolls function as mirrors of the self that open new levels of self-awareness and consciousness. Although mute, dolls possess the power to elicit speech from their owners, who are often overheard holding conversations with them. Paul Coates, for example, suggests in his analysis of Jamess What Muisie Knew that in the process of projecting her own emotions onto her doll, a doll owner may transform her doll into her double. He argues that to behold the doll is to see oneself in the magically miniaturised form and so occupy the position of Narcissus (63). The doll that

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serves as a mirror of the self performs for the child the function Lacan has described as that of the mirror stage. The doll stimulates the development of a consciousness of the self. Beholding the physical wholeness of the doll convinces the child of its own physical wholeness (63). The fascination exercised by the doll upon the imagination is also said to lie in its paradoxical quality of materiality and agelessness. In Rilkes words, the doll has outgrown the understanding, the sympathy, the pleasure, and the sorrow of the child; it has become independent, grown up, prematurely old (43). Moreover, when mobile, as a puppet, it may even hold the promise of reversing the sequence of life and death itself. Jane Marie Law, who has undertaken a decades long, detailed study of ritual puppetry in Japan, quotes Dezso Szilagyi, Director of the Budapest Puppet Theatre, on the puppets capacity to bring about a spectacle in which lifeless dead matter is turned into life: The audience at a puppet show witnesses action which satisfies an urge present since time immemorial. On the puppet stage, before the spectators eyes, the supreme act of creation is taking place -lifeless dead matter is turned into life (27). The uncanny aura of the doll figure has given rise to the attribution of a soul in dolls. Rilke apotheosizes the doll soul in his essay on dolls. For Baudelaire, the first metaphysical stirring is to be found in the impulse of children to get at and see the soul of their toys (Tiffany 73).The notion that dolls possess souls appears to underlie the Japanese belief, reported by Laura B. Starr who lived in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, that a doll became alive if it is treasured long enough (73). Such a doll not only possessed life, but had the power to bring about life. A doll that had been the recipient of the love of many generations was thought to have acquired a soul and to possess supernatural powers. Such a doll would be borrowed by childless couples wishing for children. They would care for it, and give it new clothes before returning it to its owners in the belief that they would soon thereafter become parents (74). As soul-bearing objects, dolls have been used as charms to transport good luck from one place to another; hence the custom of buying souvenir fushirni ningys (Fushimi dolls) at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto to share the shrine deitys blessings with those who stayed at home (Yamada 66). Such a belief in the power of the doll to transport love and good fortune may underlie the traditional Japanese custom of women taking along their ceremonial dolls when they left their natal homes to travel to the unfamiliar territory of their new homes.

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Dolls have functioned as surrogate love objects. Japanese literature is filled with instances of people who fall in love with dolls. The eponymous protagonist in Tanizaki JunichirBs Mr. Aozukas Story (Aozukashi no hanashi, 1926) makes night visits to a secret hiding place to make physical love to beautiful, anatomically correct rubber dolls, which he has had fashioned after the image of an actress he adores. A man in Edogawa Rampos The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture (Tabibito to Oshie, 1926) falls in love with a pasted rag picture doll that he glimpses through a pair of binoculars. As the narrator looks at the Oshichi doll through the same strange binoculars, the inanimate doll is transformed into a living, breathing girl: Raising the binoculars again, this time in the proper way, I began to adjust the lenses, and gradually there came into focus an amazingly large image of the girl on the tablet-her white skin glistening with an utterly natural lustre, and her entire body seeming to move. (207) The middle-aged woman in Takahashi Takakos Doll Love (NingyG ai) experiences a nightly dream about a wax doll modeled after the body of her young lover. The dream becomes so compelling that it invades and takes over reality: And what Japanese child is not familiar with Kaguya-hime (Shining Light Princess), the tiny doll-like princess from the moon who is discovered in a stalk of bamboo by a woodcutter and wooed by a series of suitors? As the epitome of the person reduced to a thing (Coates 61), dolls have been used to wreak vengeance on hated enemies. Indeed, fetish dolls have often been used as objects upon which to vent wrath on the beings for whom they serve as doubles. The ancient Japanese cursed people by manipulating effigy dolls (hitogafa)representing their enemies (Law 35). As substitutes for people, dolls have also served to deflect evil spirits that might otherwise harm human beings. The origin of the Japanese doll festival is commonly traced to a rite in which effigy dolls were cast into a river as sacrificial substitutes for girl children (Higuchi 187). References to effigy birthing dolls appear in Heian period (794-1 185 A.D.) and especially Muromachi period (1392-1573 A.D.) texts with notable frequency (Law 35). Such dolls, shaped like infants, were dressed and offered on shrine altars following the birth of infants to serve as spirit substitutes for the new children lest epidemic spirits take the children away (Law 35). One can easily imagine that the ejiko dolls (doll replicas of babies in straw cradles) sold today as souvenirs might

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Figure 2 . The pasted rag picture (oshi-e)of a girl praying at a shrine for luck in w r and long life is mounted on the back of a wooden battledore. Photo from a The Toy Museum, vol. 12. Courtesy of Childrens Museum Big Bang, Sakai City, Osaka-fu, Japan. The Oshi-e is a picture made of pasted pieces of fabric stuffed with cotton. Oshi-e pictures of actors and geisha became popular in the early eighteenth century and enjoyed a great fad during the Meiji Period.

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Figure 3, HCko fetish dolls made of stuffed white silk. HCko were placed near the pillows of women who were about to give birth in the belief that they would lure evil spirits away from the newborn chidren. Photo from Identifying Japanese Dolls by Lea Baten. Hotei Publishing, Leiden, 2000. All rights reserved.

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Figure 4. Ejiko dolls also functioned as fertility charms. Photo from Zdentifying Japanese Dolls by Lea Baten. Hotei Publishing, Leiden, 2000. All rights reserved. once have been set out to lure harmful spirits away from babies while parents worked in the fields. In some areas of Japan daruma dolls were thought to possess prophylactic power and were used to ward off disease and misfortune. Painted red, the favorite color of the smallpox demon, these legless tumbler dolls representing the legendary Buddhist saint Bodhidharma were set by the pillows of children to function as propitiatory talismans to curry favor with and ward off the demons? In her book on ritual puppetry, Law provides many fascinating illustrations of the doll or puppet as a medium for channeling dangerous spirits away from the human sphere. In a Heian period ritual a doll called a nademono (a thing one caresses or pets) was made by a Taoist diviner on the first night of each lunar month and sent to the imperial court, where court ladies would admire, fondle, and dress it in fancy costume. It would then be given to the emperor to rub all over his body to absorb all his ritual pollution and transgression. After the cleansing, the doll was placed in a box and floated downriver to the sea (34). Relics of such customs live on today, at places such as Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto,

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Figure 5. A miniature kite bearing the image of a durumu doll from the authors personal collection. where, for a few cents, one can purchase a paper doll to immerse in a basin of water in which the figure dissolves, along with ones misfortunes. Another related practice is the institution of the Dokumbo mawashi ritual puppeteers who visit homes on Awaji Island at new years. The puppeteers play music to attract the dangerous spirit forces in the houses and draw them into their puppets, which they have been manipulating to spellbind the spirits. When they leave the houses, they take along the spirit forces, contained in the puppets (Law 49-50). Standing between human and non-human, the puppet creates a protective ritual space between dangerous deities and the human community,

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something which cannot be accomplished by using a human intermediary (Law 112). As Law puts it, puppets challenge the boundaries of what it means to be human. Puppets which exist in the shape of the human are
not simply metaphors for the human but actually compose a world of their own, a parallel world bridging the domains of the humans and the divine. The puppet, as an intersection of these two worlds, is powerful and frightening, eliciting

both fear and fascination. (68)

Learning from Dolls Dolls and toys as miniature, manipulable facsimiles of a larger reality have mediated the unknown in secular as well as religious spheres. As substitutes that render external forces less threatening and more controllable, dolls, together with other toys, have served as learning tools, bridging the familiar and the unfamiliar and instructing novices in the mores of foreign cultures. During the Edo period (1600-1868), when the distance between social classes was great and members of the low-ranking merchant and artisan classes had limited opportunity to interact on a familiar level with members of the upper classes, hina matsuri dolls and their furnishings are said to have afforded commoners a glimpse of the customs and life-styles of the more exalted classes. These doll displays featured an emperor and empress and court attendants dressed in costumes and accoutrements said to be the exact replicas of those worn by the nobility. They were accompanied by furniture, table service sets, miniature items of food, musical instruments, and even miniature libraries containing books with poetry inscripted in microscopic letters (Yamada 90-96). Even today these dolls provide an occasion to establish a feeling of familiarity with and affection for an aristocratic court to which ordinary people would not otherwise be exposed. In the Meiji period (1868-1912) when new standards of social and cultural superiority were introduced from the West, Western dolls and other toys became objects of close scrutiny and eventually, of emulation. SaitG Rybsuke describes how Meiji period educators associated the quality of a nations toys with the degree of its cultural development and how the Meiji government advocated the dissemination and adoption of Western toys for the edification of Japanese children (SaitG 274). The Western toy was billed as modern, progressive, functional, and clean, in contrast to native Japanese toys, which were associated with ignorant, superstitious, and dirty practices of the past. The traditional Japanese words for toy, asobimono (play thing) and omocha (held in the hand) were slighted in favor of the more learned Sino-Japanese com-

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Figure 6 . Hina Mutsuri doll festival dolls. Photo from Bcha no asobi. Courtesy of ShikGsha Art Books, Kyoto, 1999.

pound, gangu, and the fashionable term kyFiku gangu,educational toy, was coined for the toys of civilization and enlightenment coming from the West (SaitO 273-74). It was generally held that playing with kyEku gangu would encourage the youth of Japan to develop a more wholesome, rational attitude toward life, and leading department stores and toy shops posted signs advertising kyFiku gangu imported from the West. In 1904 the Shirokiya Department store displayed a playroom fitted out with modem toys (Kyburz 25) and in 1909 the Mitsukoshi Drapers Store staged a widely acclaimed major international toy show (Kyburtz 18). Childrens exhibitions featuring toys sponsored by Mitsukoshi on a yearly basis thereafter stimulated research in toys begun by the author of childrens literature, Iwaya Sazanami, who was joined by the prominent educator Nitobe Inazo (Saito 276-77).

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Although tin was used to mass produce toys after the introduction of a newly invented German tin printing press in 1890 (Tada 1 4 - 3 , most of the dolls of the new era were manufactured from celluloid, which had been introduced into Japan in 1877 (Tada XIII 3). Inexpensive to manufacture and easy to mold into attractive shapes, celluloid quickly replaced wood as a primary material in the production of toys. Celluloid dolls with Caucasian features introduced Japanese children to Western fashions and customs. In a book on celluloid dolls, published by the Kyoto Toy Museum, a doll with yellow curls plays a violin. Another blond doll dressed in a smock feeds a cracker to a parrot. A blue-eyed boy holds a toy train. Dolls representing Japanese children have straight black hair and black eyes (unlike todays manga and anime figures that

Figure 7. Celluloid dolls from the TaishiS era (1912-1926). A foreign girl and boy. Photo from The Toy Museumj, vol. 15. Courtesy of Childrens Museum Big Bang, Sakai City, Osaka-fu, Japan.

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look Western while speaking Japanese) but wear Western-style school uniforms and hair ribbons (Tada XI11 24-25). Popular clay and porcelain figurine dolls small enough to fit in the palm of the hand also illustrated new styles of Western dress, such as the schoolboys cap and the middy blouse, and Western toys, such as the jump rope and the tennis racket (Tada XV 30-3 1). Trick mechanical dolls (karukuri ningyc),operated with wire and bellows, which had been popular during the Edo period, now wore Western frocks and bonnets (Tada XV 10-11). The enthusiasm for Western-style dolls and toys was so great that by the end of World War I Japan had replaced Germany as the worlds leading manufacturer of tin and celluloid toys and by 1927-28 had become the worlds largest producer of celluloid toys. By 1936, toys-primarily tin and celluloid-made up Japans fourth largest export commodity. In the heady, cosmopolitan atmosphere of the so-called Taisha democracy era which led some journalists to refer to Japan as a childrens paradise (Kodomo no Tengoku), interest in toys grew, and by the early ShBwa era (1926-1979) a toy education movement was wide-spread, reflecting the pride with which the export of toys to countries throughout the world was regarded as a sign of the youthful energy of the newly emergent Asian nation (Saitb 278). By 1958 Japan was the worlds largest exporter of toys (Tanner 127), a position it held until it was surpassed by Hong Kong in 1972 (Kyburz 21). An especially popular doll was the culture doll (bunku ningyo), introduced to the public during the Taish6 period (1912-1926). The bonneted doll with the exaggeratedly large, round eyes, rouged cheeks, bowlipped, and heart-shaped mouth drawn on a cloth face represented a Japanese child in pretty Western dress. Unlike many traditional Japanese dolls, which were made for display, or, as in the case of the paper anesama (big sister) doll, to be held in the hand, the culture doll made of cloth and packings could be cuddled and strapped on a girls back. Just as the practical, functional structure of the culture house (bunku ie) with its Western-style room that admitted sunlight and fresh air replaced the dark, musty traditional Japanese house and introduced the model of a healthy, enlightened life style, so the culture doll served as a model for enlightened play that allowed little girls to express themselves wholesomely and creatively. Yet more closely associated with Westem-style cultured living was the French doll Cfuransu ningyc), which represented a Western woman. The making of French dolls as room decorations was a widespread fad among high school girls during the later Taisho period. These dolls were easy and inexpensive to make, as their parts were readily available for sale in shops. Designing a dolls face and dress enabled the

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Figure 8. Culture Dolls (bunka ningyd) were widely popular from the Taish6 period (1912-1926) through the 1950s. Their faces were either three dimensional (as in the case of these dolls) or flat, painted cloth surfaces. Photo from The Toy Museum,vol. 15. Courtesy of Childrens Museum Big Bang, Sakai City, Osaka-fu, Japan. doll-maker to explore her fantasies, which were often inspired by the glamorous images of the foreign and domestic stars of the motion pictures and revues which had become ubiquitous features of urban life by the end of the second decade of the century? Dolls continued to disseminate ideas about fashions and manners and to serve as markers in shifts in social attitudes in the postwar period, when the Barbie doll (introduced to Japan in 1962), and later Barbies little sister Skipper and Barbies boyfriend Ken won great popularity among older elementary school girls (Tada XV 39-43). The marketing of Barbies traditional white wedding dress set complete with bridal veil and bouquet undoubtedly accounted in part for the fad of Westem-style church weddings evident in Japan in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when couples sought out not only newly constructed Western-style wedding halls in Japan but English-style churches in New Zealand in which to hold their nuptials. In 1967 a mixed-race doll was introduced to the public. Rika-chan, the eleven-year-old daughter of a French musi-

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cian and a Japanese designer, came with a printed biography that identified her as Rika Kayama, 5th grader at Shirakaba School, birthday May 3, Taurus, 0 blood-type. Excels in music and gym; weak point, arithmetic. As might be expected, Rikas poor math skills made her especially easy for Japanese schoolgirls to identify with. She was an instant hit (Tada XV 43).

Dolls as Vehicles o Nostalgia f At the same time that Japan was importing Western dolls and beginning to produce and export Western-style dolls, tropes of dolls were appearing in literature with significant frequency. The miniature size of the doll that focuses and intensifies affection can also evoke feelings of pathos, loss, and longing for that which has been or is being lost. In the Meiji periods classic paean to the passing of childhood, Higuchi Ichiy6 s masterpiece, Growing Up (Takekurabe, 1895), dolls and other toys foreground a downtown street scene as the neighborhood prepares for the Otori Day festival which marks the last opportunity for childhood play for the storys young protagonists:
There were pear-shaped Daruma dolls, owls, papier-mache dogs for those under thirteen or fourteen, and the child who could show the most was the proudest. Some had seven, nine, eleven, dangling from their sleeves. Large and small bells jangling on backs, youngsters prancing about in stockinged feet-a contagious display of vitality. (77)

The toys disappear as the joyous exuberance of children at play gives way to the paralyzing self-consciousness of young adulthood. Midori who had once impulsively regaled her classmates with matching rubber balls, gives up her crayons and paper dolls to don the kimono of an apprentice geisha and stops speaking to people. Her playmate Shota puts away his marbles and takes up the money lenders lantern. Nobu the priests son puts on the dark robes of the seminarian, and the gaiety disappears from the main street like a fire put out (110). The penumbra of a lost world surrounds the image of the toy in Higuchis story. In an essay on Growing Up the cultural historian Maeda Ai implies that what is lost is not only the childhood of an individual, but that of a generation and an entire nation, as he contrasts the games of the children with the prevailing utilitarian ethos of the Meiji period and suggests that Japans modernization destroyed innocent, childish pleasures such as the ones that Higuchi portrayed (16-34). Hina matsuri dolls also frequently evoke the passing of childhood, and the disappearance of an era and a way of life in Japanese literature.

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Set in the civilization and enlightenment era of the Meiji period, Akutagawa Rytinosukes The Dolls (1923, Hina) tells of the trauma occasioned when a family decides to ease its financial difficulties by selling its Doll Festival dolls. The female narrators attachment to the dolls provokes the contempt of her practical elder brother, who studies English each evening by lamplight and has no patience for such fripperies. At the brothers instigation, the dolls are packed away to be sold to an American in Yokohama, but the night before they are sent away, the narrator awakens to find her father seated before the dolls decked out for display. Thinking back on that strange scene of long ago at the end of the story, she wonders, it might have been a time of night when people say they see reality in a dream, and queries whether the dolls of that night were real or a dream (168). Recalling a little foreign girl she once met playing with the heads of some old dolls in the guest room of a certain Englishmans house in Yokohama, she imagines her heirloom dolls discarded with leaden soldiers and cheap rubber dolls in some toy box (169). And in a vicious/delicious aside, we are informed, incidentally, that the prosaic older brother, who engineered the sale of the dolls, became a Meiji era politician who ended up in a mental asylum. K6da Ayas story, Dolls (Hina, 1955) traces a womans relationship with dolls over a period of several decades spanning the years of depression and war. At the beginning of the story the narrator muses about the aristocratic appearance of the festival dolls, wondering how the visage of a distant empress, higher above us than the clouds, is transferred to the face of a doll (184). The elegant mystery of the dolls, and the extravagant enthusiasm they inspire in the young mother who throws herself into preparations for the Girls Day doll festival in celebration of the birth of her daughter, contrast with the hard, practical reality of the later war years: in the cold daylight of the evacuation from the bombed out city, the dolls have grown old; their faces look shrunken and pale ...The once cool and serene black eyes had a look of middle-aged complacency, and they no longer shone (19 1). Perhaps the best known instance of a story in which a doll figures as an objective correlative for a lost tradition is Tanizakis Some Prefer Nettles (Tude kuu mushi,1928-29).Kaname, the authors alter-ego, turns from the distractions of the superficial amusements of his modern, cosmopolitan life-style when he is seduced by the attractions of old Japan by a woman who is constantly juxtaposed with an old-fashioned puppet doll. Kaname has gradually been discovering the charms of his father-inlaws old-fashioned, doll-like mistress Ohisa (whose name is written with the character for eternal). Visiting Awaji Island, he discovered that the islanders have faces like the Awaji puppet dolls and imagines that they must have past lives like stage lives (132). The world of the

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country town begins to merge with the world of the puppet plays, and he imagines Ohisa as a part of that world where fiction and history have coalesced. The identities of doll and woman merge in the last scene of the novel where he is spending the night in his fathers old-fashioned house and mistakes the white face of his fathers puppet doll for Ohisa. He then confronts the real Ohisa approaching his bed, armed with a half dozen old-style Japanese books. The novel ends with the provocative statement: It was no puppet that sat faintly white in the shadows beyond the [mosquito] netting (202). According to Kitti Carriker, it is the condition of the modern self, which finds itself divided, that foregrounds the figure of the doll in the discourse of nostalgia. The author of Created in Our Image draws upon Masao Miyoshis study on Victorian writers, The Divided Sew, in postulating that the doll answers to the longing akin to the need for unification felt by the severed halves of man that characterizes the modern age. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative. Such an absence, such a sadness, is allayed in part by the acquisition of miniature objects of desire-like souvenirs and collections. For example, nostalgic longing is countered by the sense of completion or perfection one feels when seeing the smallest doll in the world, encased in a box whose lid is a magnifying glass (27). Kitahara HakushU, a poet of nostalgia, employs images of cruelly manipulated puppets and marionettes and dismembered dolls in poems that express an extreme sense of displacement and helplessness in his 1911 collection of poems, Memories (Omoide).The central image in The Orphan (Minashiji) is a paper doll trembling at the end of strings suspended from the fingers of a faceless, itinerant puppeteer. The paper doll, framed against the red sunset on a slope and quivering to the tune of a desolately wailing horn, conveys an image of a lonely ending rather than the promising beginning heralded by the rising sun, which had by 1911 been adopted as a symbol of imperial Japan. If the state of the fragile paper doll is likened to that of an orphan in The Orphan, in another poem, translated by James OBrien under the title, Autumn Day, a child made to perform acrobatics under the iron rod of a grim master in the unforgiving glare of the setting sun is likened to a marionette. The small size and pliancy of his body are emphasized through repetition:
Autumn Day
So small, in the sunset glare He somersaults, juggles his plates ....

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So small, he curves backward In a pliant loop, hands touching feet, Then wedges his head with heels, The face pallid and sad between his legs.

He gazes at the spherical sunset, shedding a tear. He stares at the spherical sunset. Hands touching feet, face held steady, so small and shedding another tear. The grim master stands near; To echoing drum and bell he tumbles like an empty sack To bright tune echoing....
A mallards call faintly white from unknown shores,

Sunset upon the fishmongersshining blood-like, Autumn passing bereft of people, echoing....
So small and alone,

He somersaults,juggles his plates ...? The setting of Hakushii s poem, The Dollmakers (Ningya zukuri), is a doll makers workshop littered with the body parts of infant-like dolls piled on the floor, which are likened to babies of a prostitute fed with an aborticide. Phrase repetition creates a cadence echoing the repetitive movements of the human actors-now alien doll makers viewed through the tinted windowpane of a workshop in Nagasaki, a port city with a strong foreign flavor. In the dim light of the shop, in an atmosphere colored by tinted glass that turns sunlight blue-green and yellow, doll heads roll off a spinning mold, rolling over and over (korokoro to korokoro to, korokoro to korobu) into the hands of a redbearded youth who ominously awaits the tumbling heads with a silver knife in his hand to slit the eyelids, the eyelids, the thin shut eyelids (mubuta, mabuta, usu tsubutta mabuta) busily, busily (isogashiku, isogushiku). The image of the marble eyes that are brusquely sorted and flicked aside, flicked aside (chiyoto hujiki, chiyoto hujiki) (Hakushii 38) by a fat, red-kerchiefed woman who forces the glass eyes into the eye sockets of the dolls recalls the dominant image of glass eyes in E.T.A. Hoffmans The Sandman, in which a mysterious, menacing eyeglass peddlar gouges out the eyes of the brilliant human-like automaton Olimpia and thereby reduces her to the state of an inert doll.

Automatons of the Machine Age Interest in dolls was further stimulated in the machine age when machines sophisticated enough to perform human tasks appeared. Daniel

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Tiffany for instance notes that Frankenstein was created at the beginning of the machine age after Mary Shelley had seen a Swiss collection of remarkable androids owned by Jaquet-Droz, which included a doll that could play a harpsichord (57). In Japan, fears of a mechanistic civilization gave rise to an interest among Japanese intellectuals in the philosophy of vitalism expounded by Henri Bergson, Ernst Haeckel, and Nishida KitarG (Suzuki 125). But at the same time that the threat of the machine age stimulated the production of stories such as Yokomitsu Riichis The Machine (Kikai, 1930), in which a fear of machines is expressed, the promise of machines that could function as humans also led to a robot boom (robotto buurnu) in popular culture (Yonezawa 52). As dolls had earlier mediated between the realms of the known and the unknown, channeled and nullified harmful influences, and introduced foreign culture, they would now serve to put a friendly, nonthreatening face on technology and to humanize the machine? Interest in automatons had flourished in the Edo period when doll makers created mechanical trick dolls that were operated with springs, mercury, water, sand, air, and wind, and manipulated by strings to produce the illusion of independent movement (Tada XV 31). Now automatons were run by electricity, which was advertised as an exotic magic in the early part of the century when science (kagaku) and electricity (denki) were fashionable words signifying the new and marvelous. Spectacle attractions touting the latest application of electricity (denki Sy5) and applied science (kagaku 8yG) opened in the entertainment districts and amusement parks of major cities (Hashizume 42). A life-sized, electrically powered statue of one of Japans most familar and popular heroes, the 16th century generalissimo Hideyoshi, attracted spectators and introduced them to the marvels of the new technology at the Hall of Wonders (Fushigikan) in Osakas Shinsekai district. Hideyoshi amazed onlookers by turning from chalk white to flesh color and opening his eyes and moving. Another favorite attraction was a large, mechanical doll named Gakutensoku that was put on display at the Matsuzakaya department store. Billed as the worlds foremost artificial human being, Gakutensoku was said to be superior to other robots because it possessed not only mechanical strength but an ability to think (Yonezawa 53). The idea of an artificially produced human being gained further currency when audiences were treated to the spectacle of a clay statue (played by the German actor Paul Wegener) that was turned into a living being by a rabbi in Wegeners film The Golern, initially produced in 1914 and remade in 1920. (The jerky movements of figures in early

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motion pictures must have also reinforced the idea of the human automaton.) In 1928, the Kaizasha publishing company included a translation of Metropolis in its Popular Literature series, and the following year Japanese audiences saw Fritz Lang s visually stunning film, Metropolis, set in a futuristic underground city and featuring the actress Brigitte Helm in the role of a beautiful woman who was actually a robot created by a mad scientist. In the theater, Karel Capeks RUR: Rossums Universal Robots, a play about robots that acquire human emotions and rebel against their human masters, was translated into Japanese by Uga Itsu in 1923 under the title, The Artificial Human Being (JinzF ningen), and again by Suzuki Zentarb under the title The Robot (Robotto), before it was staged by Hijikata Yoshi and Yoshida Kenkichi at the Tsukiji Little Theatre in 1924 (Yonezawa 52). In contrast to the negative perspective on robots in Metropolis and RUR, a more optimistic view was presented in The Human Creation Hall (Ningen Seizskkan), which dealt with the new science of constructing live human beings from photographs. Its hero, who had spent many years in America, attempted to bring back to life his dead fiancee from her photograph. Performed in the Great Electric Exhibit Hall in Osaka, the plays stagecraft employed mirrors and tricks involving electricity to accomplish the task. The play was one of the top theatrical attractions in 1926 (Hashizume 43). Robots enjoyed a boom among juvenile readers as well. Pictures of robots appeared on the covers of Youth Club (Shsnenen kurubu) magazine, and manga about robots included Oshiro Noborus Puppet Tea Server (Kuvukuri chugabg) and Mizushima Jihokus Sightseeing Saeimon (Kenbutsu Sueimon) (Yonezawa 52). Writers simultaneously produced stories featuring human beings who become or take on the attributes of dolls. In Edogawa Rampos The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture a man has his brother look at him through the far end of a pair of strange binoculars to turn him into a paste-rag doll and enable him to live in a paste-rag picture alongside the paste-rag Oshichi doll with which he is infatuated. Tanizaki Junichira s hero in The Secret (1911, Himitsu) dons a wig and womens clothing and paints his face to disguise and transform his male features into those of a doll-like woman. Horita Hbka and Kawano KBmu, the rival poets in Uno K6jis Empty Spring (1923, Munushiii haru), are a doll-like, tweedle-deekweedle-dum pair. HCika, whose deformed legs are wasted away, rocks like a daruma doll when he is set down on the floor. KBmu, whose doll-like face is smooth and bland as that of a lover in an ukiyo-e print, walks like a wind-up doll in the scene where he sets out for a tryst with a poetess.

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Doll Diplomacy While these writers were experimenting with doll-like characters in their stories, real dolls were playing a role on the global stage of intemational diplomacy in a curious episode that took place in the late 1920s. Saddened by the deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States following the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 which barred further immigration of Japanese to the United States, Sidney Gulick, a missionary in Japan, founded the Committee on World Friendship and collected dolls from around the United States to send to Japan in the belief that children held the key to better relations in the future. In 1926, 12,739 dolls over one foot tall were shipped as gifts to the Japanese children, many of whom had lost their dolls in the Great Earthquake of 1923. The dolls carried passports that read: This doll is a good citizen of the United States of America. She will obey all the laws and customs of your country. Please take care of her while she is with you (Nishimura 31). The doll envoys (ningyp shisetsu) collected by American elementary schools, kindergartens, and childrens associations and distributed among Japanese elementary schools became known as the blue eyed dolls (aoi me o shitu ningyq after the popular Japanese childrens song, A Blue Eyed Doll. After touring Japan, the Doll Ambassadors of Good Will (kokusui shinzenshisetsu), as they were also known, were installed in schools throughout Japan and in its colonies. The most famous of these dolls was the Miss America doll specially sent as an ambassador of peace to the young imperial princess Terumiya (Yomiuri shinbun 1). The Japanese Committee on International Friendship, founded by the president of the America-Japan Society with assistance from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Education, responded by collecting one sen each from over two million Japanese school children to have 58 kimonoed Yamato dolls made and sent to the United States through the Ministry of Education. Dollmakers in Tokyo were commissioned to make dolls representing each prefecture and each major city. These tri dolls, known as the return envoy dolls ( s e ningyo),were the size of three-year-old girls (about 3 feet high) and were a sophisticated type of doll fitted with flexible hip, knee, and ankle joints. Each one was valued at around 350 yen or $16,800 in todays terms (Nishimura 31). Each doll not only had its personalized passport and set of furniture, but, according to Tokubei Yamada, president of the Yoshitoku Doll Company, each doll wore underwear and formal tabi socks because it was making an official visit (Nishimura 31). The dolls toured the U.S. and were welcomed by over 1,000 parties in 479 cities before being distributed to museums and schools.

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With the onset of the war, most of the Yamato dolls in the United States were placed in storage, or in the case of the Miss Kagawa prefecture doll, which had been sent to the North Carolina State Museum of Natural History, turned to face the wall. Many of the blue-eyed dolls in Japan were smashed and burned. Sumie Kobayashi, curator of the Yoshitoku Dolls Data Center, evokes the Japanese tendency to attribute life-like qualities to dolls as she explains the more drastic fate of the blue-eyed dolls in Japan:
The Japanese have a special attachment to dolls; they empathize with and personify them. Whereas in America the Japanese dolls were seen essentially as works of art, the American dolls in Japan became objects of hate because the Japanese personified their countrys feelings of antagonism for America in them. (Nishimura 32)

The Doll as Transcendent Hero Deep-seated, unarticulated beliefs in the magical efficacy of the doll figure may also account in part for the extensive use of the doll-like figure of the Motnotar5 (Peach Boy) fairy-tale hero by military propagandists during World War Two. MomotarCYs image figured repeatedly in school readers, magazine articles, and cartoons to position Japan in the role of the youthful, innocent hero battling the jaded, corrupt nations

Figure 9. Momotartj dolls emerging from peaches. From the Japan Folk Toy Museum, Kurashiki, Japan. Authors photo.

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Figure 10. Yamato doll with inset of an American Aoime (blue-eyed) doll displayed at the SogG Department Store Friendship Doll Exhibition. The accompanying text reads: Welcome Home Return Envoy Doll; Exhibit of the Exchange of the Blue-Eyed Dolls. April 27-May 9,1998 at the Yokohama SogG 8th floor Exhibition Hall. Over 50 Japanese American Friendship Dolls that inspired dreams in children 61 years ago are gathered here. The plaque on the stand identifies the doll as Dai Nippon (Miss Great Japan) and the imperial crest on the stand indicates that she was donated by the Imperial Family. Photo from Zdentzfying Japanese Dolls by Lea Baten. Hotei Publishing, Leiden, 2000.

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of the West (Antoni 160). Born of a peach (in traditional lore a fruit with magical properties capable of subduing nefarious spirits), Momotara, like the Japanese themselves, was tiny in comparison to the Englishspeaking demons in the South Seas, but with unfaltering Yamato spirit (Yarnuto durnashii) and the assistance of his helpers the pheasant, the monkey, and the dog, he conquered the demons and hauled their stolen treasures back to the home islands. Through the stylization and miniaturization of its form, the Momotara figure acquired a rhetorical power and a transcendence that no photographic likeness of a human being could have achieved. Klaus Antoni suggests that in its small proportions and childlike features the Japanese found the image of their own innocence and the purity of their motivation in an undertaking that was divinely inspired and led. In his words, little MomotarG subtlely transmitted to young school pupils that which official Japan looked upon as the goal of its ideological education: through a fairy tale the gate to the Japanese spirit was opened ( 160).
Invusion o the Dolls f Dolls again served in the capacity of go-betweens where more openly competitive and threatening agents would have aroused fearsome antagonism in the post-war era, when Japans comeback as an economic power was presaged by the manufacture and export not of cars or machine tools, but of dolls in the form of toy robots. Ron Tanner points to the significance of the fact that the engineering skills which were later manifested in the production of high tech wizardry were first devoted to the creation of toy robots in small shops right after the war. Just a partial list of the mechanical dolls to come out of Japan in the last fifty years is impressive. While some were marketed only in Japan, others became popular in foreign countries as well. They were, to name but a few: Non Stop Robot; Mr. Atomic Robot; Mr. Chief; Mr. Mercury; Robert Robot; Space Scout; Zoomer; Iron Man No. 28; Tetsuwan Atom (renamed Astroboy in the U.S.); Zoomer the Robot; Garon the Robot; Shagun robot; Mirror Man; Ultra Man; Gigantor; the 8th Man (a murdered policeman who has returned as a cyborg); Ken the Wolfboy raised by wolves and dressed in a leopard skin loincloth who tackles people who destroy the forest; Zero Sen Hayato (a fighter pilot, descendant of a ninja); Big S (a youth who transforms into the steel-bodied Big X to fight a Nazi alliance intent on conquering the world); Super Jetter (a robot on a motocycle who fights for world peace); Space Ace who flies about drawing energy from the air with a silver ring; Masked Planet man; Kamen Masked Rider with compound eyes like a fly who fights evil; Great Majinga who combats the Dark General; UFO Rob0 Grendizer; Combatter V; Jetta Marusu (a remake of Astroboy); Scientific

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Figure 11. The 8th Man: a murdered policeman returns as a cyborg and can appear in human or robot form. The Toy Museum, vol. 3. Photo Courtesy of Childrens Museum Big Bang, Sakai City, Osaka-fu, Japan.

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Ninja Corps Gatchaman I1 (a robot reborn as a cyborg who fights against Galacta); and New Gigantor. Today, in retrospect, those toys that the West could hardly take seriously are now regarded as some of the most ingenious and wellwrought inventions of twentieth-century manufacture, outstanding not only for their beauty, clever design, and high quality workmanship, but revealing a vision that far exceeded that found in the conventional, low-tech construction of American toys manufactered at the same time (Tanner 125). Japan led the world in the production of toys in the 1950s; by the 1970s Japan was ahead of other nations in the production of electronic consumer goods. No less numerous or ingenious than the robot dolls are the cyborgs, androids, and mecha that populate the contemporary manga and anime that flood foreign markets around the world-a veritable invasion of dolls and doll images. The Japanese female cyborgs and androids of recent decades possess the long limbed, slender, curvaceous figures of Barbie dolls. In the manga and anime for adolescent girls (shao) especially, the characters look doll-like with smooth, light-skinned, heartshaped faces, enormous, wide eyes set off by masses of curling locks, small noses ,and tiny mouths. The number of manga and anime featuring female priestesses, mediums, and females with magical powers and/or special connections with supernatural forces is noteworthy. Miss Sakura in Urusei Yatsura, Chiaki, the high school heroine of Zenki, Nami Yamigumo of Silent Mobius, Keiko of Doomed Megalopolis, Ran Komatsuzaki of Blue Sonnet, Miki of Zeguy, Demon Hunter Yohko, Belldandy in Oh My Goddess!, and the school girls of Sailormoon are some of the miko-like charactersI2cited by Antonia Levi in Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Anime. These priestesses do not manipulate doll effigies as the shamanesses of old did; instead they are themselves doll-like figures through whom extra-terrestial powers operate in the world, invisibly and magically, like electricity. Like the anime robots preferred by boys, they are engaged in a cosmic battle against forces of darkness.

Japan, Still the Land of Dolls More than a hundred years after Pierre Lotis accounts of the dolllike people in the Eastern fairy land, human beings with doll-like attributes continue to figure prominently in the image of Japan held by many. Perfectly groomed, bowing escalator attendants; neatly uniformed, automaton-like workmen; ramrod-stiff martial arts experts; kabuki actors made up to look like bunraku puppets, and not least of all, the global explosion of Pokemon pocket monsters continue to perpetu-

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ate the image of Japan as a land of dolls. Such an image of Japan was most recently reinforced by the 1998 publication of Arthur Goldens novel about a Gion geisha. Much of the fascination of Memoirs o f a Geisha derives from the tension produced by the contradiction between the voice of the living woman who narrates her very human autobiography, and the strict conventions that regulate her professional life as a geisha and make her seem so doll-like. Her public appearance is conventionalized and stylized according to a rigid code, like the appearance of a doll or a puppet. A heavy coat of white, plaster-like make-up masks the individuality of her facial expression. A lacquer-heavy hairdo and layers of tightly wrapped kimono skirts constrain the movements of her head and limbs. Stereotypical utterances issue from her small, painted mouth, which she hides delicately when she laughs, a gesture so artfully dolllike as to prompt the question, might she not be fed like the Ka on imaginary food?13

Notes
*I wish to thank Gordon Holland, University of Kansas Photographer, for kindly photographing the images that appear in figures 2-5,7-9, and 11. Since the time that it was first aired on NHK television to wide acclaim in 1983, the drama series that follows the life story of a poor country girl who triumphs over adversity has attracted viewing audiences in China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, the United States, Iran, and Belgium (Morris-Suzuki 131-35). The kokeshi doll is a simple folk doll (always female) that is manufactured in a wide variety of sizes in the northern Rhoku region of Japan. One explanation attributes its origin to the practice of giri baby infanticide in times of starvation. Keeping a kokeshi doll in the home may have been a way of keeping a sacrificed child close to the family and consoling its spirit. 2The Pencil Dolls (Enpitsubina) appears in a second grade reader, Vol. 1, published by Nihon Shoseki in 1989. In a similar story, Mothers Paper Dolls (Okausan no kamibina), appearing in a third grade reader, Vol. 1, published by KyTiiku Shuppan in 1984, a child watches her mother make origami doll substitutes for the expensive Girls Day dolls which she has had to sell to buy food during the war. In both stories the simple doll substitutes later assume a transcendent value in the eyes of the grown-up narrators. 3The hina matsuri or Doll Festival is celebrated on Girls Day, March 3. Dolls representing the emperor and the empress, three maids in waiting, ministers of the left and right, five court musicians, and three servants are displayed on a tiered dais covered with red cloth. The dolls are usually very expensive and are traditionally passed down from mother to daughter.

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4Tanaka and Hanson, 198. I am indebted to Livia Monnet for calling my attention to this story. 5According to Josef A. Kyburz, from whose article this information is derived, the Daruma dolls ability to right itself after tumbling gave rise to the idea of quick recovery and success in business as well, and the doll was used as a good luck charm by silk producers in Takasaki. Kyburz also notes that in the Kansai region of Japan the custom of painting toys the propitious color red was so widespread that toys were designated by the term red things (ukamono) and toy sellers, by the term red ware shops (akamonoyu) (24). 6According to Yamada Tokubei, the making of modern, artistic dolls received an impetus when the famous painter Takehisa Yumeji (1886- 1934) began making dolls with a modern touch (Yamada 139). A photo of afurunsu ningyc can be found in Tada Toshikatsu, ed., The Toy Museum: Dollsfrom the Ed0 Period to the Present Days (ningys: Ed0 kuru gendui made). Kyoto: KyGto Shoin, 1922,36. T h e Otori Day festival is a lively merchants fair at which gaily festooned rakes are sold to better rake in profits. The downtown (shitamachi) of the storys setting in Asakusa was the merchant and artisan quarter of old Edo (todays Tokyo) and evokes not the image of skyscraper office buildings and automobiles but single story shops and dwellings crammed together in a densely populated, boisterous neighborhood. *I am very grateful to James OBrien for calling my attention to these poems by Hakusha and for sharing with me his translations of them, which appeared in his paper, Beyond Sensualism: The Poetry of Kitahara HakushU, the draft of a report discussed at the Midwest Japan Seminar at the Rose Hulman Institute in Terre Haute, IN, in Dec. 1989. The poem Autumn Day quoted in the text was translated by OBrien. The lines quoted from NingyG zukuri (The Doll Makers) are a modified version of OBriens translation. Minashigo and Ningyb zukuri, both from Omoide, appear in Kituharu Hukushii shishii, Kaminishi Kiyoshi, ed. ShinchB Bunko, 1950,36-38. 9Saya S. Shiraishi points out that the popular imagery of robots has been on the whole very positive in post-war Japan. Doraemon, the popular nuclear-powered manga cat, for instance, is portrayed as a friend of children. This positive portrayal of robots in rnanga helped create the psychological conditions for the current explosion of the [Industrial] robots in the Robot Kingdom [Japan] , according to scientist Eiji Nakano, whom Shiraishi quotes in Japans Soft Power: Doraemon Goes Overseas, Network Power, Japan and Asia, eds. Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999) 259. Roy Tanner in his article on robots makes a similar point about the readiness of the Japanese to embrace robots. The list of robots is drawn from Ron Tanners article and from the volume on Character Dolls in The Toy Museum series edited by Toshikatsu Tada.

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ILA mecha is a term designating a kind of machine, usually a robot or some other high tech object (Levi 161). IZAmiko is a female Shinto shrine attendant and is often associated with shamanism. 13The Ka in ancient Egypt was a guardian spirit that accompanied a person throughout life and survived bodily death, taking up residence in the tomb (where it was nourished on imaginary or toy food passed to it through an aperature in the sepulchre) (Tiffany 307-08). Rilke in his Essay on Dolls alludes to dolls that are Fed like the Ka on imaginary food (43).

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Levi, Antonia. Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation. Chicago: Open Court, 1996. Loti, Pierre. Madame Chrysanthemum. Trans. Laura Ensor. London, Boston, Sydney, and Henley : KPI, 1985. Maeda, Ai. Kodomotachi no jikan. TenbB 198 (June 1975):16-34. Moms-Suzuki, Tessa. Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Nishimura, Kunio. The Friendship Dolls. Look Japan July 1995: 30-33. OBrien, James. Beyond Sensualism: The Poetry of Kitahara Hakushti, the draft of a report discussed at the Midwest Japan Seminar on Dec. 9, 1989, at the Rose Hullman Institute in Terre Haute, IN. (Unpublished paper). Rilke, Rainer Marie. Some Reflections on Dolls. (Occasioned by the wax dolls of Lotte Pritzel), first published in Die weissen Hatter, 1913114 and republished in Where Silence Begins: Selected Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. G . Craig Houston. New York: New Directions, 1978. SaitTi, RyGsuke. Nihon no omocha. Minzoku mingei sDsho 46. Tokyo: Iwasaki Bijutsusha, 1969. Shiraishi, Saya S . Japans Soft Power: Doraemon Goes Overseas. Network Power, Japan and Asia. Ed. Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi. Ithaca: Cornell UP,1999: 234-72. Starr, Laura B. The Doll Book. New York: Outing, 1908. Suzuki, Sadami. Three Themes and a Few Points of View for Rewriting Japanese of Modem and Contemporary Cultural and Literature History. Nichibunken Japan Review 5 (1994): 125-44. Tada, Toshikatsu, ed. The Toy Museum. Vol. 3. Character Toys (masukomi gangu). Kyoto: KyGto Shoin, 1992. -. The Toy Museum. Vol. 15. Dolls: From the Ed0 Period to the Present Days (ningyE edo kara gendai made). Kyoto: KyGto Shoin, 1992. -. The Toy Museum. Vol. 1. Tin Toys (burikisei gangu I ) . Kyoto: KyTito Shoin, 1992. -. The Toy Museum. Vol. 13. Wooden Toys and Celluloid Toys (mokusei gangu seruroido gangu). Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin, 1992. Takahashi, Takako. Doll Love. Trans. Mona Nagai and Yukiko Tanakai. This Kind of Woman: Ten Stories by Japanese Women Writers, 1960-76. Ed. Yukiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Hanson. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1982. Tanizaki, JunichirG. The Secret. Trans. Anthony Hood Chambers. New Leaves. Ed. Aileen Gatten and Anthony Hood Chambers. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, U of Michigan P, 1993. -. Some Prefer Nettles. Trans. Edward Seidensticker. New York: Vintage International, 1995. Tanner, Ron. Toy Robots in America, 1955-75: How Japan Really Won the War. Journal of Popular Culture 28.3-4 (Winter 1994): 125-54.

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Tiffany, Daniel. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Uno, KiTji. Munashii haru. Uno Kai Zenshii Vol. 3. Tokyo: Chiib KGronsha, 1972. Yamada, Tokubei. Japanese Dolls. Tokyo: Japan Travel Bureau, 1959. Yokoyama, Toshio. Japan in the Victorian Mind. London: Macmillan, 1987. Yonezawa, Yoshihiro. Robotto Buumu. Edogawa Rampo no jidai. Bessatsu Taiy588 (Winter 1994): 42-47. Yonjiitaime no taei ningyc mitsukaru. Yomiuri Shinbun 3 Mar. 1998: 1. Elaine Gerbert is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Kansas.