Japanese Doll Research Articles

The 1927 Exchange of Friendship Dolls: U.S.-Japan Cultural Diplomacy in the Inter-War Years

In 1927, over 12,000 blue-eyed American dolls travelled across the Pacific as gifts of friendship to Japanese children. In response, fifty-eight exorbitantly expensive Japanese dolls bearing a similar message were sent on the opposite journey. This curious spectacle, an early attempt at trans-Pacific cultural exchange, is still part of popular memory in Japan, although it has been largely forgotten in the United States. When the dolls arrived in Japan they received an enthusiastic welcome, and the Ministry of Education arranged for them to be distributed to kindergartens and primary schools all over the Japanese Empire. During World War II, however, many of the dolls were destroyed because the Japanese people had come to consider that they represented a false American goodwill. Those that survived did so because brave Japanese teachers had managed to hide them. When the dolls emerged from hiding in the early 1970s, their story was seen as an ideal topic for peace education. Many versions of the story have therefore been created, for use in radio and television as well as in schools.

Unintentional Cooperation

Abstract This study of the Friendship Doll Mission of 1926-1927 shows how, in the United States, the Japanese doll was part of the inescapable image of a kimono-clad little Japanese girl, and functioned to further existing anti-Japanese implications of that image. It further shows how an American popular-culture mission to improve relations with Japan by having American children exchange dolls with Japanese children, created an official, Japanese government response that presented the United States with Japanese dolls that were objects of Fine Art. Despite the different views of the Doll Mission in Japan and the US, an interchange resulted that, now nearly a century later, continues. The article uses Japanese dolls to demonstrate how genuine cultural exchange can occur even when the methods, approaches, and the very intent of those involved in it differ, in order to highlight the importance of considering both perspectives to understand phenomena such as Japonisme.

Queer Dress and Biased Eyes: The Japanese Doll on the Western Toyshelf

Queer Dress and Biased Eyes: The Japanese Doll on the Western Toyshelf

<i>Holy Prayers in a Horse's Ear: A Japanese American Memoir</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Holy Prayers in a Horse's Ear: A Japanese American Memoir Linda Trinh Moser Holy Prayers in a Horse's Ear: A Japanese American Memoir. By Kathleen Tamagawa. Edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef. 1932; reprint, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. 216 pp. $21.95 paper. The title of Kathleen Tamagawa's memoir, Holy Prayers in a Horse's Ear: A Japanese American Memoir, invokes a Japanese proverb, "Uma No Mimi Ni Nembutsu, . . . [meaning] . . . you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much!" to entreat readers to hear her words as "prayers" or lessons about binary and hierarchical notions of race (158). The daughter of a Japanese father and Irish American mother, Tamagawa (1893–1979) reflects upon her upbringing in the United States and Japan and describes the difficulties of defining oneself as biracial at a time when inflexible racial categories were the norm. "[I]n America," she writes, "I was Japanese. In Japan I was American" (38). By bringing Tamagawa's memoir back into publication, editors Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef make a significant contribution of recovery to the field of early Asian American literature. Parts of the memoir were first published in Asia magazine in 1930; the entire text, containing the three previously published pieces and others, was published in 1932. Shedding light on pre-World War II American attitudes toward Asians, particularly the Japanese, Tamagawa shares details about her parents' courtship and marriage in the United States, the international expatriate community in Japan, and her own marriage to an Anglo-American. With intelligence and humor, Tamagawa reveals the limitations placed on her identity by racial attitudes and stereo-types. She asks, for example, "Was I a Japanese doll, or a menace?" (92). Toward the end of the memoir, anxiety over her mixed-race ancestry leads Tamagawa to declare: "I do not approve of Eurasian marriages. I do not approve of international marriages" (157). Her explicit rejection of "Eurasian" and "international" marriages, coupled with her embrace of assimilation into white American culture, presents certain challenges to modern readers who value "models of transnational, hyphenated, or multicultural identity" (xiii). Anticipating these challenges, the astute introduction, "written collectively" by Floyd Cheung, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and editors Creef and Robinson (xxxii), reminds readers to view Tamagawa's choices within the historical moment and social milieu in which she lived. Moving from comparisons to the well-known [End Page 184] Eaton sisters and American expatriate writers to information about the memoir's critical reception and attitudes about mixed-race individuals, the introduction provides an overview of thematic concerns and multiple contexts in which to interpret Tamagawa's work. Details about the author's domestic life and career also point to the challenges faced by working women. She tried to follow up the success of her memoir with a novel about Japan; the story "A Fit in Japan," included in this edition, "may have been excerpted from that project" (xxviii). The demands of caring for four children combined with the necessity of seeking employment to supplement the family's income, however, left her little time for literary pursuits. The editors' thorough research and insights establish a strong foundation for future scholarship; their recovery efforts ensure that Tamagawa's "holy prayers" do not fall on deaf ears. Linda Trinh Moser Missouri State University Copyright © 2009 The University of Nebraska Press

Ninagawa Yukio's Intercultural Hamlet: Parsing Japanese Iconography

The efforts of Ninagawa Yukio to draw upon traditional Japanese theatrical techniques in the staging of Western classics arose from his desire to break from the mimetic, Western style of staging plays and to revitalize aspects of classical Japanese theater that had fallen out of use in modern "new theater" (shingeki) drama. Moreover, he wished to divest Shakespeare of the highbrow status it held in Japan and popularize Shakespeare by incorporating familiar imagery from indigenous culture. Owing to their highly visual approach, Ninagawa's productions have also enjoyed surprising success in the West, where his interpretations provide striking new perspectives on Shakespeare and other classics. Ninagawa has gained worldwide recognition and in Great Britain his work is often hailed as profoundly illuminating. This paper investigates Ninagawa's production of Hamlet (1998), which ran for eight performances at the Barbican Centre, London, as part of the Barbican International Theatre Event series. In this revival, the author served as backstage interpreter between the Japanese and the British stage crews. The paper examines four major aspects of Ninagawa's approach. First, it focuses on his transposition of the play in time and space: as a framing device Ninagawa sets the play in the dressing rooms of a theater, underscoring the themes of pretense and dissembling. Second, the paper examines Ninagawa's symbolic use of curtains and stairways. Third, it discusses the allegorical use of the Japanese doll tier (hinadan) as a central motif to highlight the hierarchy of the Danish court and the precariousness of power. Finally, it discusses the stage techniques which Ninagawa borrows from kabuki and nō to enhance the production's theatricality. The warm reception this Hamlet enjoyed in both Britain and Japan demonstrates how Ninagawa Yukio's stage iconography transcends cultural, linguistic, and political borders.

Aki Kato Kurose: Portrait of an Activist

Aki Kato Kurose, a Nisei, or first generation Americanborn Japanese, was born in Seattle in 1925. Still living in Seattle today, she is a public school teacher who specializes in developing math and science abilities in young children. She and her husband, Jun Kurose, have six children, all of them young adults. Aki and I became acquainted in the late 1950's through the peace program of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). In that period of political repression the number of people willing to associate themselves in the cause of peace was small-we were jubilant if a speaker drew an audience of fifty, ecstatic if that many attended a public demonstration-but among these few, the number of Japanese Americans was an even smaller fraction. With their experience as detainees in United States concentration camps during World War II only recently behind them, and the rebuilding of their economic existence still in a fragile state, Japanese Americans on the West Coast kept a low political profile. Not so Aki Kato Kurose. I have sometimes joked with Aki that the main reason I immediately liked working with her is that she is shorter than I am. Well under five feet, she is small-featured, has a merry laugh, and is polite and considerate. Here, all parallels to a sweet little Japanese doll come to an abrupt end. Aki's strong ethical consciousness came into being in her childhood home, developed into political consciousness during the Japanese American relocation period, and blossomed into social and political activity half a dozen years after World War II. In spite of very real community and private pressures to conform to a seemly stereotype, she has been continuously vocal, critical, and active. My mother came to this country from Kumamoto, in southern Japan. My father was from Sendai, which is in the northern part of Japan. My mother came to attend the Chico Normal School at Berkeley, California, while my father came directly to Seattle seeking work. They were later married here. Both my parents took on Christianity as their religion. My father felt especially obligated to the Presbyterians, because he had been helped by them when he came to America, and he studied the religion very carefully. But he was a person who seemed to appreciate all religions; he never seemed to feel that one was superior to another. We got a smattering of all the main religions represented throughout the world. My mother is more actively involved in attending church-Presbyterian, now-I think for spiritual as well as social reasons. But neither of them were fanatical about it. I had three siblings-an older brother, who passed away six years ago, and an older sister and a younger sister. My parents did not require us to attend church. They were very open, although they gave us some sort of guidance; they allowed us to choose any religion we wanted.

Japanese Dolls

Japanese Dolls