Japan Kokeshi Museum (日本こけし館) 日本こけし館
The first dolls date back to 1811, but the name ‘kokeshi’ was only fixed in 1940.
The museum grew out of the collection that the poet and children's writer Fukazawa Kaname donated in 1953 to the town of Naruko (now part of the municipality of Ōsaki), and out of the dolls that, from 1957, craftsmen from all over Japan went on offering every year at the Kokeshi Festival: seven years of construction, opening in 1975. The doll itself, according to the museum's reconstruction, was born in the hot-spring area of Tōhoku between 1804 and 1830, when the woodworkers who turned bowls and trays (木地師) began to make them too, as souvenirs for children visiting the hot springs, with a style of decoration influenced by papier-mâché dolls, Tsutsumi dolls and poppy-seed dolls; a document from 1811 already refers to them as ‘dolls’. The name ‘kokeshi’, written in three hiragana syllables, was only fixed in 1940 by an assembly of collectors and craftsmen, to put an end to the babel of regional names (kogesu, kōgeshi, kokesunboko, kiboko, deko, deku) that made it hard even to order them. A document from 1862 calls them ‘kofukeshi’, reading in it the wish to be granted children (子授けし): the band pattern on the head, the mizuhikite, comes from the ceremonial court dolls of Kyoto, and this is why the kokeshi remains an auspicious gift for children's growth.
Miyagi
Naruko-Onsen
