of society. They speak of tastes and consumption patterns, fashions and politics of the day. They are a barometer of popular culture, reflecting trends in theater, in literature, in story and song, which occupied the hearts and minds of the people from this particularly dynamic period in Japanese history. They speak of classes and divisions, of interest groups, merchants and nobility, samurai and townsmen. They speak of religion, of long-held beliefs regarding health, infant mortality, and efforts to placate the spirits. They speak of popular festivals, some of which still thrive today, others of which have faded into oblivion. Japanese dolls are windows into a world long gone, a complex but immensely rewarding world worthy of our study and contemplation. For amidst the strange and beautiful particulars of the world of the Japanese doll are also universal truths regarding humankind's quest for expression, the inner instinct to create, to understand the society within which we live, to document our lives, to appreciate, and to convey hope.
The focus here will overwhelmingly be on Japanese dolls of a time in Japanese history known as the Edo period. Corresponding to the years 1615 to 1868, it was a remarkable time in Japanese history known for its surprising level of peace and stability after centuries of intense and violent conflict. The political hegemony established by the Tokugawa shoguns, beginning with its founder Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), was characterized by efforts at strict political, economic, and social control. Tokugawa Japan was a closed society (sakoku), the doors of this island nation shut firmly to the outside world, limited only to trade through Dutch and Chinese merchants stationed at the remote southern fringe in the port of Nagasaki, quite distant from the capital in Edo. The national gaze was an interior one, leading to astonishing advances in all aspects of the domestic scene, from a sophisticated infrastructure and a cash economy to vibrant religious thought and a brilliant fruition in the fields of art and theater. Fashioned along nominally Confucian guidelines, Edo society was hierarchically divided into four primary classes: the ruling elite, farmers, artisans, followed lastly by merchants. The ruling classes were divided between the military classes (buke) headquartered in Edo, dominating the country politically, and the nobility (kuge) based in the former capital of Kyoto, seat of the emperor and repository of history and tradition. The farmers raised an abundance of crops, from rice, the lifeblood of the economy, to commodities such as cotton and tea, to decidedly luxury items such as silk. The artisans and craftsmen of the period benefited from a rapidly expanding economy, the broad-based appreciation of art in all of its forms, as well as massive and ongoing construction projects from the various residences of the feudal lords (daimyō), to the seemingly continuous rebuilding of the nation's largest cities which frequently succumbed to fire. The merchants were held in the lowest esteem but became an increasingly dominant force as the period progressed, with the wealth of the nation largely passing through their hands.
As time passed, the merchants were frequently far wealthier than many members of the ruling elite whose penchant for status-conferring display led to remarkable levels of debt. Shunted in the official Confucian hierarchy, the merchant class had to prudently balance their economic might with overt social discrimination and outright suppression. It was a pressure cooker in many respects, with conflicting trends, opportunities versus aspirations, economic realities versus social strictures. The cultural efflorescence of the time can be seen as partially the result of these countervailing trends. It was a beautiful by-product which produced many of the arts and cultural characteristics which we frequently use to define Japan: Kabuki, the culture of the courtesan, the art of the wood-block print known as ukiyo-e (art of the "floating world"), brilliantly dyed and decorated textiles, the kosode kimono, Zen painting, garden design, architecture, the painted folding screen, the decorative arts of lacquer work, netsuke, and inro. The development of a surprisingly rich doll culture, as well, was an unexpected outcome. No other country in the world can boast as long-lived, vibrant, and diverse a doll tradition as Japan. The artistry and quality that characterize many of Japan's fine and decorative arts are found in abundance within its various doll forms. Each of the principal types treated in this volume had its origin or fullest expression in the Edo period: gosho (palace dolls), hina (Girl's Day dolls), musha (warrior dolls), ishō (fashion dolls), and karakuri (mechanical dolls).
But before we can begin to explore the rich world of the doll of the Edo period we must first, briefly, turn the leaves of time, to look back, not in terms of centuries, but millennia, to correctly position the doll in the Japanese psyche, to establish its unique place in the earliest formative period of what was to become Japanese culture. For the doll in Japan holds layers of meaning and symbolism which anchors it more deeply in Japanese culture than its Western equivalent. Rather than a simple plaything or decorative object, the doll, as a representation of the human form, carries with it an ancient tradition of using doll-like objects as substitutes for living individuals in a wide variety of ritual practices promoting fertility, insuring contentment in the afterlife, purifying and cleansing the individual, and conferring blessings on the home. The Japanese word for doll is ningyō. Broken down into its parts, the Sino characters for "man" and "form," it literally means "human shape" or "human figure." By looking at four distinct ningyō forms from early in Japanese history, dogū, haniwa, katashiro, and nademono, we can begin to get a sense of the special and overwhelmingly symbolic role that ningyō have played in Japanese traditional culture.
Haniwa warrior figure
Kofun period, 6th century
Height 52 inches
Seattle Art Museum
Dogū
Late Jōmon period, ca. 800 BC
Height 52 inches Height 9 inches
Seattle Art Museum
EARLY NINGYŌ FORMS
The earliest ningyō date from early in Japanese history, from a time known as the Jōmon period (12000-250 BC), when the peoples who ultimately came to be known as the Japanese were first beginning to populate and establish dominance in the Japanese archipelago. Excavations from throughout the period reveal a rich pottery culture, with many clay objects primarily decorated with a cord pattern (jōmon) from which the period derives its name. Among the various pots and other utilitarian and ritual objects discovered have been a surprising quantity of doll-like forms referred to as dogū (lit. "pottery doll"). Abstract, primitive, and in some cases astonishingly futuristic, dogū are simple figures with rudimentarily formed heads, torsos, arms, and legs, all decorated with the cord patterns which were the hallmark of the era. Small in size, they average around five to nine inches high, although some large examples over twelve inches high have been discovered. The shapes and designs of the dogū varied over the long course of the Jōmon period, but archeologists such as Yamagata Mariko have noted that all of the figures are either androgynous or decidedly female, with no overtly male shapes. While most dogū are depicted standing, some are seated and appear to be giving birth, with legs splayed; others possess distended bellies with small clay balls inside. All the dogū excavated have been fractured or broken. This is not due to the ravages of time. Scholars believe that they were initially constructed in such a way as to be easily broken as part of ritual practices. Their solid clay heads, torsos, and appendages were loosely connected with small wood dowels and then covered with a lighter clay element before being decorated and fired. After being ritually broken, the parts were then distributed within the community. Although their association with fertility is generally assumed, there is no way of knowing the exact function of the dōgu. Their presence throughout all phases of Jōmon society, and the discovery of individual sites containing over a thousand figures, has, however, confirmed the importance of dogū within a ritual context. Whatever their purpose, dogū represent the first ningyō form in Japanese history, placing them within a powerfully symbolic context—a position never quite relinquished until the modern era.
In the Kofun period (AD 250-552), we find
