Just off the elevated expressway that threads through central Tokyo, the dolls stand quietly, the way they do every day. Wooden figures three hundred years old line the shelves; on the worktable, several bodies still wait for their faces. Amid the restless noise of the city, one thing alone seems to move at the pace it has kept for more than a hundred years: carving a groove at a time into the doll's body and tucking fabric into it, a technique the workshop calls Kimekomi — the word means, roughly, "worked into a groove." The air in the room seems to say as much.
The person we spoke with is Kenji Kanabayashi, president of Mataro Co., Ltd. and heir to the name Kanabayashi Mataro — the third generation to carry it. After university, he worked at a department store before returning to the family business, and has since carried two identities at once: manager and craftsman. Over the course of the interview, he spoke at length about his path into the trade; the three-hundred-year history of Edo Kimekomi dolls, from their origins to the present; his reasons for staying loyal to paulownia wood and wheat-starch paste; the visitors who lose themselves in the workshop's hands-on doll-making sessions; and what dolls have meant, and continue to mean, to Japanese people. The conversation ranged widely — from the story of the craft's origins at Kamigamo Shrine, to an exhibition at Haneda Airport, to the yearly ritual of Kawaribina. What follows traces the inner workings of a trade passed down across three generations, in his own words.
The Fate of the Family Trade, and the Day He Chose to Carry It
Kanabayashi was born in Tokyo in 1962. His family ran a doll shop. After graduating from university, he watched classmates head off to trading companies, banks, and advertising agencies, and found himself wrestling with complicated feelings.
Toguri: How did you feel about taking over the family business, back then?
Kanabayashi: The family business was a doll shop, so I assumed I'd naturally have to take it on eventually. But I was a young man, and honestly, there was a part of me that thought, "a doll shop, really?" All my friends were heading straight into trading companies, banks, advertising agencies, and there I was thinking, "is a doll shop really okay for me?" It wasn't an industry on the rise, the way IT is now — that much I was sure of.
Even so, he didn't join the family business right away. First, he was told to go learn at another company, and spent about three years working at a department store. He says he'd expected to stay there longer.
Kanabayashi: I'd really planned to stay longer, but I was suddenly told to come back. It wasn't that my father had passed away or anything like that. There were good sides to it and bad sides. Running a company by your own judgment carries real weight and responsibility, but there's also something to be said for working steadily as an employee your whole life. Still, I did genuinely like making things, and I didn't dislike working with people either. Having seen a fair number of dolls since I was small has, I think, been useful to my doll-making now.
When he first came back, Kanabayashi wasn't assigned to the production department. He worked through nearly every post in the company — purchasing, sales, store-floor duty at department stores — gradually carving out time for doll-making along the way.
Kanabayashi: Unlike other companies, it's not enough to just make things, or just sell them, or just handle purchasing — I have to hold both the management side and the maker's side at once. When you're making something, you want to make it well. Wanting to make it well drives up the cost. If it gets too expensive, it won't sell. Having to make things with an eye on what will actually sell is maybe a little different from ordinary studio work. Fine art and craft objects are one-of-a-kind pieces, something outside everyday life, but a traditional craft is meant for everyday use, so mass production is the basic premise. I'm always weighing how to cut down the labor of Kimekomi, how to shorten the time it takes, against the one thing that can never be compromised: never cutting corners in a way that betrays the work. And there's no shortage of difficult craftsmen, so standing between all of that isn't simple either.
A craftsman's hand, Kanabayashi says, isn't something that can be taught step by step by someone else.
Toguri: What do you keep in mind, in order to keep improving as a craftsman?
Kanabayashi: Just looking at as many things as possible. Not only in museums — dolls are almost always photographed from the front or the side, rarely from behind, so I make a point of photographing the backs of things whenever I can. I keep an eye on color combinations in costume too, on what tones are in fashion right now. And because I have to make so many different kinds of hina dolls, my own likes and dislikes inevitably show through. Sometimes I have to make something I don't particularly care for myself, and then it sells well anyway — which tells me it can't just be about my own taste, that the times are shifting. Kabuki, noh, whatever it is — go and see the real thing. That's really all there is to it.
Asked what makes his own doll-making distinctive, after so many years of looking, Kanabayashi answered with a delicate sense of balance suspended between tradition and the present.
Toguri: Could you tell us about what's distinctive in the way you make dolls?
Kanabayashi: Tradition doesn't become tradition unless it lasts a long time, so I have to make things that suit the present moment. And yet what we consider old-fashioned often strikes people today as remarkably fresh. It feels as though what my generation thinks of as "now" and what the younger generation thinks of as "now" have quietly drifted apart. There's a charm that comes from a doll being stylized, and there's also, these days, real popularity for dolls closer to realistic proportions — both exist at once. There's a real doll-like cuteness in figures with three-heads-tall proportions — top-heavy and slightly ungainly by human standards — that a truer-to-life doll simply doesn't have. But push too far toward the human form, and it turns into a mannequin. Once it's a mannequin, whatever character a doll has disappears entirely. Things do become more realistic over time, but I try to keep shaping the form so it never loses what makes it lovable and endearing as a doll.
This same line runs through his approach to pricing. As the number of children declines and demand for dolls contracts overall, he says, price-driven, inexpensive dolls are increasingly becoming the center of the market.
Kanabayashi: From where we stand, the dolls at the center of the market now are the kind you might feel a little let down by when they arrive. We have almost nothing in the low-price range; most of what we make sits on the higher end. And even so, we have a great many customers who come back to us specifically because they love Mataro Ningyo. A large share of our customers are people whose mother had a Mataro doll and came to buy one when their own daughter was born, or whose older sister had one and they came back when the younger sister arrived. Not betraying those customers is, I think, part of our mission — to keep making dolls properly. So we don't go for easy, cheap production; we hold firmly to our quality and our methods. We also put real effort into after-sales service — we take in about three hundred repairs a year. Because Kimekomi dolls never lose their shape, sometimes a doll that belonged to someone's grandmother, eighty years old, comes in for repair.
Why continue with work that demands so much effort? Asked, finally, about the feeling at the root of it all, Kanabayashi gave an answer that reached beyond the family business.
Toguri: Could you tell us again why Mataro continues to make Kimekomi dolls?
Kanabayashi: First of all, it's the family business — that much is true. But once I decided to carry it on, I felt I had to keep it going, and pass it on to the next generation too. There's also a sense of responsibility that comes from being certified by Kamigamo Shrine as its legitimate successor — we even carry the name Kamigamo school. Beyond that, I believe Japanese people and dolls are bound together in a way that can't be cut apart, and I want to see a Japan where dolls are displayed in every household again. I'd like people to notice again just how much peace of mind comes from looking at a doll — the happiness of simply having one nearby. The dolls made for Sekku carry a parent's wish that their newborn child grow up happy and healthy. Parents, grandparents, relatives, all gathering to celebrate a child's birth and wish for their happiness — I have a feeling that in the era when occasions like that were cherished, children faced fewer sorrows. Protecting a child as a community, protecting a child as a family, cherishing them, treasuring them, wishing for their happiness — I'd like dolls to become a tool that helps everyone hold onto that feeling again.
From the Shrine at Kamo to Edo: A Three-Hundred-Year Lineage
What is an Edo Kimekomi doll? Kanabayashi begins by explaining the method itself.
Kanabayashi: Edo Kimekomi is a traditional craft certified as such by both the national government and the Tokyo metropolitan government. You begin with a clay prototype, take a mold from it, pack the mold with a mixture of powdered paulownia and shōfunori, remove it, let it dry, carve grooves into the surface, and tuck fabric into those grooves. That's the Kimekomi method. Ishōgi dolls, by contrast, are dressed the way a person is dressed, in costumes sewn like real clothing and simply put on — a completely different technique from Kimekomi.
This technique's origins trace back to the Edo period. The stage for its beginning was Kamigamo Shrine, said to be among the oldest shrines in Kyoto and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Kanabayashi: Kimekomi dolls are said to have begun at Kamigamo Shrine during the Edo period, around the Genbun era (1736–1741). It seems to have started when someone in service at the shrine took up doll-making as a hobby, something to fill his leisure hours. At the time, they were called Kamo dolls. When they were born in Kyoto, they really were made purely as a pastime, but they were small, charming, and well made, so the practice was passed down to children and grandchildren and kept alive, and by the grandchildren's generation, they'd become popular enough to be sold as a well-known Kyoto souvenir. An ancestor in our own lineage saw them and wanted to make dolls just as charming in Tokyo, so he learned the technique and brought it back with him. That's said to be how it crossed over to Edo.
What, at bottom, is a "ningyō" — a doll — in Japan? Asked about the background that gives it a meaning fundamentally different from a Western doll, Kanabayashi traced the story back to the Heian period.
Kanabayashi: In the Heian period, there was a ritual called Nagashibina — figures shaped like people were made from paper or straw, made to stand in for a person's misfortune and impurity, and then set afloat on a river. At the same time, in the imperial court, young girls were playing a game of make-believe called Hiina Asobi — small things were apparently called "hiina." Nagashibina and Hiina Asobi are said to have gradually merged, and it was from that blending that hina dolls began to develop.
A doll as a stand-in that absorbs misfortune, and a doll as a plaything — a culture born from the melding of these two sides would go on to meet two major turning points, from the late Meiji era through Taishō, and again after the war.
Kanabayashi: I think there were two periods when Kimekomi dolls developed significantly. The first was from the end of Meiji into Taishō. Back then, dolls were more or less the only toys there were — there was nothing like today's video games — so playing with dolls was simply how children played. It was a period when women cherished their dolls, and small children carried dolls around, playing house with them. Figures shaped like girls were the mainstay at the time, but dolls recreating kabuki or noh roles, or made to resemble a favorite actor, were popular too. The second period was the postwar baby boom. Before that, the Sekku celebrations had been something only relatively wealthy families could afford to give their children. After the war, that feeling — "I want to do this for my daughter too," "I want to celebrate when my son is born" — spread to ordinary households as well, and combined with the baby boom, the number of Sekku dolls grew all at once. The 1950s and '60s, I think, were the period when Sekku goods developed the most.
Mataro Ningyo was founded in 1919, in the Taishō era, in the interval between these two turning points.
Toguri: Could you tell us about the mood of the era at the time of founding, and the character of the doll-making then?
Kanabayashi: When the founder started out, the Mataro face hadn't yet been established, and dolls with all kinds of different faces were being made. Later, there was a period when the war made it impossible to make dolls at all. During that time, when everyone said dolls couldn't be made or sold, the founder drew sketches every day and kept making trial pieces, and out of that arrived at the idea of expressing, through a doll, the elegance of the Heian-era imperial court. Ever since, this Heian-style face has been Mataro's signature look. Right after the war, when everyone was barely getting by, there were women who still came into the shop asking to have a doll repaired. Sensing, even in a time like that, just how much a doll could mean to a woman, the founder went through a great deal of trial and error to work out what kind of doll people would go on cherishing for years.
From Kamo dolls to Kimekomi dolls, and from Kyoto to Edo — this lineage holds one more branching point.
Kanabayashi: When it was made at Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto, it used mokuchō — a technique of carving the wood itself and dressing it — and was called Kamo dolls. Once that technique was brought to Tokyo and changed into a method that allowed mass production, it took on the name Kimekomi. That shift, from Kamo dolls to Kimekomi dolls, is the first major branching point. Later, once Kimekomi dolls became popular in the Meiji era, some of the craftsmen who had worked alongside us went independent and set up their own workshops as Kimekomi makers in their own right. Those lineages continue to this day. And the other branching point is material. New materials like resin and urethane have appeared over time, and how to handle them, I think, is the branching point facing Kimekomi dolls today.
There are newer branches, too, in the present day — creative dolls, and Kawaribina, among them. At the Mataro Ningyo Academy, teaching goes beyond Sekku dolls to cover a wide range of subjects: noh and kabuki roles, creative dolls, even animals. Among these, Kawaribina — an annual tradition carried on since the founder's generation — takes the events of a given year and represents them through hina dolls, unveiled once each year.
Kanabayashi: Back in the founder's day, there was apparently a playful custom among literary men, one with real iki — a refined, understated chic — of taking anything from daily life, an eggshell, a fishing float, whatever it might be, and treating it as a mitate, a stand-in, for one half of a pair of hina dolls, then exchanging them with one another around the hina season. That's said to be the start of today's Kawaribina. There are two rules: it must always come in a pair, and no matter how large the event, we never take up a sad accident or a tragic incident. There's a touch of social satire sometimes, but basically we try to present something auspicious, something that lifts everyone's spirits.
Hands Guided by the Mold, a Philosophy Held in Materials
The single greatest difference between Kimekomi and Ishōgi dolls is that a costume isn't "sewn and put on" — it's "tucked" into carved grooves. That difference is what gives Kimekomi its particular technical difficulty.
Kanabayashi: Because Kimekomi means carving grooves, applying paste, and tucking the costume in, how convincingly it reads as actually being worn — and how the body itself is shaped — matters enormously. Even in how the fabric is set, angling the grooves rather than cutting them straight in, is where the real skill shows, in whether it reads as clothing at all. One thing distinctive to us is that we always study sculpture first. My father did, I did, and my son did too. Normally, a doll craftsman learns by apprenticing directly under another doll craftsman — something like the old deshi bōkō system — but we make a point of studying sculpture, then studying skeletal structure and musculature, before ever starting on a doll.
Facial expression is another element that defines a Mataro doll. Where most dolls use glass eyes, Mataro has continued to hold to kakime and sasame — the technique of painting the eyes in ink.
Kanabayashi: Every face we make uses this kakime, sasame technique, drawn with the image of hikime kagihana from The Tale of Genji in mind — the classical style of rendering a face with "line eyes" and a hooked nose. Hikime means drawing the eye as a line; kagihana refers to the hook-like shape of the nose. The eye isn't drawn as a single quick stroke — it's built up from many thin layers of ink. Sometimes it's drawn a little thicker, as if there's a pupil there; sometimes there's no pupil at all — it varies from doll to doll. Fashions shift over time — sometimes narrow faces with upturned eyes are in style, sometimes softer, fuller faces with downturned eyes — but we've kept to the broad image of hikime kagihana throughout.
There's a line he won't cross when it comes to materials, either. Tōso, the base that gives the doll's body its form, is made by mixing sawdust from crushed paulownia wood with shōfunori until it takes on the consistency of clay. While many Kimekomi makers today use urethane resin for the body, Mataro doesn't use it at all.
Kanabayashi: To be certified as a government-certified Traditional Craft, both the material and the technique have to have been in continuous use for at least a hundred years. Urethane hasn't been around for a hundred years yet, so it simply wouldn't qualify for certification in the first place — and without a chemical material, the process probably takes about four times as long. But if you ask me why, exactly, there's no clear-cut reason. It costs more, takes more effort, takes more time — I just don't want to go there. Maybe it's nothing more than a feeling that this is something I want to protect.
Kanabayashi (continued): It's the same with glue — most makers today use wood glue, but we use kanbaiko, a paste made from rice. It doesn't dry instantly the way wood glue does, and if you need to redo something, dampening it slightly lets it come off cleanly. Our craftsmen are used to handling it too, so switching now would only make the work harder — that's part of the reason as well.
This strong commitment to materials seems to carry through into his approach to reaching audiences abroad. An exhibition at Wakuraba, a Japanese-culture zone in Haneda Airport, came about after a staff member there saw press coverage of the Kawaribina the workshop presents every year and reached out. On the hands-on workshop experience as well, Kanabayashi spoke of a strong commitment to making sure visitors actually come to know the craft.
Kanabayashi: The overwhelming majority of visitors from abroad simply don't know Kimekomi dolls exist. What we're doing is meant, first of all, to let people know Kimekomi exists at all, and to let them understand how large a role dolls play in Japan. We try not to just let people have the experience — we make a point of talking, while they're working, about what dolls mean here, what the patterns on the costumes signify, the history and the traditional craft behind it all, so that they come to understand the background they're experiencing this within.
The feeling Japanese people hold toward dolls, Kanabayashi says, may be something only a Japanese person can fully understand. The culture of ningyō kuyō is emblematic of that.
Kanabayashi: When a doll is no longer needed and has to be disposed of, Japanese people find it very hard to simply put it out with the trash — the overwhelming majority choose ningyō kuyō, having it blessed at a shrine or temple before letting it go. Visitors from abroad often ask, seeing this, "why say thank you to a doll?" — and even after an explanation, they're sometimes left with a puzzled look on their faces. Cherishing a doll, feeling a sense of calm just from looking at one — I think that's a feeling particular to Japanese people. Still, if even a little of that feeling reaches people abroad, and the value of Japanese dolls rises in the eyes of the world, I'd be glad to have played some small part in that.
How does he want to pass on a technique that has been carried forward for more than three hundred years? To that question, Kanabayashi answered quietly.
Kanabayashi: Continuing to make the same things matters, and I think we have to protect what's been handed down so far. But it would be one thing if we could simply keep making the same things and have them keep selling — if they stop suiting the times and demand disappears, the tradition itself can't continue either. Whether we can make things that suit the era, the country, whatever it may be, is what will decide whether this survives as a tradition. In any case, I'd like to try all kinds of things.
Time as It Passes in the Workshop
For a man who is both manager and craftsman, there's no fixed shape to Kanabayashi's day.
Toguri: Could you walk us through a typical day as a craftsman?
Kanabayashi: There's no set pattern. Some days I'm out visiting clients on business, and since I hold an officer position in an industry association, there are meetings for that too. Roughly speaking, mornings go to office work, afternoons to visiting clients or attending industry gatherings. The time I actually spend making dolls tends to fall in the evening, after the company's working hours are over. The one thing I always make sure to do, though, is greet the kamidana each morning.
On days off, too, he says he isn't the type to sit still at home. If there's an exhibition he wants to see, he goes; he goes shopping with his wife; and on trips, his eye is caught by the local fabrics of wherever he happens to be.
Kanabayashi: When I travel abroad, I'm always interested in the local fabrics, so I walk around thinking about what kind of doll I might make with a fabric like this. If there's time, I always stop into a museum, and I never miss recording the year's historical TV drama, just to check the color combinations and movements in the costumes. Even seeing a statue or a bronze figure in a park, I catch myself thinking, this could be a lovely doll. The longest part of doll-making, by far, is the time spent thinking about what to make, so I keep jotting down ideas on my phone the moment they come, and I photograph anything that might serve as reference material the instant I spot it — whether it's on paper, on television, or in a museum. Keeping things ready that way means that once I actually sit down to start, I can move straight into shaping the clay prototype.
Gathering material isn't enough on its own, Kanabayashi adds — understanding the story behind it matters just as much.
Kanabayashi: More often than not, a doll comes out better if I understand the background and history of whatever I'm making. There isn't always time, and sometimes I end up making a piece without having read the whole story behind it, but I do feel a doll turns out better when I've at least understood the outline of the story and the era it's set in beforehand. Dolls really do carry a lot of feeling. Even watching the dolls made by the teachers at our own classes, I can always tell when someone was restless, not at ease — it shows through no matter what. So I try, as much as I can, to keep a calm mind while I work.
As for his tools, he laughs that he isn't the meticulous, tidy-up-everything type — but he says the tools of his craft are a different matter entirely.
Kanabayashi: Tools really do need a fixed place, or you lose efficiency — and lately I've been getting more forgetful, too. The one thing I've kept strictly in order is where the tools of my craft are kept. A tool becomes like your own hand or fingers; when it comes down to it, I really only use two or three spatulas regularly. I'll switch to a different one only for fine detail work, but only a handful ever truly feel like an extension of my hand. The tools I've shaped myself are the easiest to use — the more you use them, the more character they take on, and the more they come to fit your hand.
Of all the steps in the process, which demands the most nerve? The moment Kanabayashi named was the instant of checking the balance between face and body.
Kanabayashi: While I'm shaping the body, I stop partway through to fit the face in and check the balance, decide the position. That moment of checking the balance between face and body is when I'm most on edge. There are many kinds of faces — for some dolls a slightly smaller face suits the body, for others a larger face is what makes it charming. You can't know until you actually set it in place, so there's always tension in whether it comes out the way you'd imagined.
Making the clay prototype takes three to four weeks, sometimes closer to a month. Days he can devote to it entirely are rare, so even this single step accumulates time naturally. He wraps it in a damp cloth to keep it from drying out, and opening it up again days later, he often finds himself thinking, "that's not quite right."
Kanabayashi: Looking at it up close alone doesn't tell you anything, so I check it from a distance, from directly above, from behind — from every angle as I work. If you don't do that, you end up with a doll that only exists within your own field of view. Take the mold, remove the cast, let it dry, carve the grooves, apply gofun, tuck the fabric, attach the head. Rather than finishing one step at a time, everything moves forward in parallel, so taken as a whole, it usually takes about two months.
Even in the paulownia they use as raw material, there's a commitment particular to this workshop. A coarser powder is used when casting the body, and a finer one, which lets edges and lines come through more sharply, when making corrections.
Kanabayashi: Kimekomi dolls originally used paulownia, it seems, because it's light and doesn't leak resin. These days, if you order the sawdust from a supplier, other woods sometimes end up mixed in with the paulownia, so we grind it ourselves in-house. We get sawdust passed on to us from a woodworking shop in Ibaraki, and source some from a supplier in Yamagata as well. There are very few people left in the business of selling paulownia sawdust, so grinding it ourselves is the surest way to avoid any mistake.
What the Experience Leaves Behind
The workshop runs a program in which visitors can try their hand at doll-making themselves. They choose whether to make a boy or a girl doll, choose a color and pattern from among several available costumes, and complete a single doll of their own. The name Kimekomi itself is still almost entirely unknown abroad, but the doll a visitor holds in their hands at the end of the experience quietly tells the story of what makes this technique distinct, all on its own.
Toguri: How is Kimekomi seen, both in Japan and abroad?
Kanabayashi: I'd say almost no one abroad recognizes it and says, "oh, Kimekomi." Kimekomi tends to be smaller than Ishōgi dolls, which suits modern housing conditions very well. Even the share within Sekku dolls has shifted — it used to be said that Ishōgi held about eighty percent and Kimekomi twenty, but now it's grown to something like seven-to-three, even six-to-four. Because of how the body is formed, it will never lose its shape no matter how many decades pass — that's one distinguishing trait — and because the prototype is sculpted in clay, the curves come out beautifully. Unlike Ishōgi, where the shape is built by bending wire, the beauty of the curve is what really sets a Kimekomi doll apart.
Even without knowing the name, the beauty and lightness of its form, and its durability against decades of wear, may be things that come through the instant a visitor touches the doll in the workshop — no words required.
Toguri: What kinds of reactions of surprise do you hear from participants during the experience?
Kanabayashi: A lot of people find it fascinating and delightful to learn that the patterns on the fabric have their own stories, or that the materials in the doll they're making come from paulownia wood and a paste made from rice. And the moment the face goes on, everyone claps their hands in delight. Even at the very end, when they comb the doll's hair, people handle it with real tenderness.
Behind these reactions lies something beyond mere novelty. At a time when the experience of working with one's hands to slowly finish something has become rare in daily life, many participants speak of another kind of satisfaction as well — not just sensory surprise, but the feeling of losing themselves entirely in something.
Kanabayashi: From the young to the elderly, what everyone says, without exception, is, "I've never been this absorbed in something," or "it's been a long time since two hours passed without me thinking about anything else." Having given themselves over to just one thing, without a single other thought, seems to leave a strong impression on everyone.
Two hours of moving one's hands with an empty mind may already, in itself, be a form of understanding this culture. For travelers whose itineraries often keep them rushing from one thing to the next, time spent absorbed in a single task, with no room for anything else, seems to become an extraordinary experience in its own right. Explanations of the history behind the dolls and the significance of Japanese dolls are woven into the experience along the way — there's an intention here that goes beyond simply sending people home with a finished piece.
Kanabayashi: Even while people are making their doll, we talk with them about Japanese history, the background of the era, and how Japanese people think about their own dolls, so I think they end up making a doll while coming to understand a little of Japanese culture along the way.
A technique carried forward for nearly three hundred years isn't something a first-timer can simply pick up as-is. The hardest part of Kimekomi, Kanabayashi reveals, is that the fabric can bunch up and jam in the groove.
Kanabayashi: In our own work, we carve the lines as fine as possible and tuck the fabric into that, but that's difficult for a first-timer in the experience program, so we make the grooves wider and deeper, built so the fabric goes in firmly and securely. It's the same work in principle, just made a little easier for the experience.
A process handed down across units of two hundred eighty, three hundred years is traced, in a matter of hours, by a single traveler visiting the workshop for the first time. With that strangeness in mind, we asked, finally, what he hopes people carry away from the experience.
Kanabayashi: I'd be grateful if people came away with some understanding of what dolls mean in Japan, and the feelings Japanese people hold as they display and cherish them. And then, I hope they'll take the doll they made home with them and display it somewhere — that every time they look at it, it brings back a good memory of their time in Japan, and becomes a small reason to think, I'd like to go back to Japan, I'd like to try something else there too.
Widening the groove, deepening it. Behind that small adjustment is a determination to hand even a first-time visitor, touching tōso for the very first time, a genuine piece of a three-hundred-year lineage. Rather than let the difficulty come through untouched, only its essence is kept, so that anyone can reach the joy of the moment a face is finally set in place. That calibration may itself be another technique — one tuned over years by a craftsman's own sense of feel. The finished doll is a memento of the trip, and at the same time, in a home far away, it quietly carries forward the very role that Japanese dolls have long held.
A small doll for play, once called a Kamo doll, crossed over to Edo, was given the face of the Heian court, and over the span of three hundred years became the daily work that a single workshop has kept alive, generation after generation. What remains, once the story is told, is not so much the refinement of the technique as the quiet, unbending line Kanabayashi returned to again and again: never make something you don't truly understand. Between what sells and what's honest, between efficiency and time, between tradition and the moment — caught between these opposing pulls, the hand that keeps choosing paulownia and wheat-starch paste carries a humility that still insists it hasn't yet become a fully accomplished craftsman. A sense of calm that comes simply from looking at a doll — a feeling that perhaps only Japanese people fully know — is something he wants to see restored, once more, to many households, and to lives on the far side of the sea as well. Underneath his words, quietly running through all of it, was a wish that resembled something close to a prayer