May we use Meta and Google cookies to learn which films and pieces people like? Details
The one craft this house can walk to.
2 pieces on the shelf ↓This is the local one. Hakata is the old merchant half of Fukuoka, ten minutes from where these objects are kept, and it has been pasting paper over moulds for as long as anyone has kept count.
The tiger is the piece the town is known for. It is built the same way as the daruma at the start of this room — layers of paper over a wooden mould, split off, joined, dried — but where the daruma is severe, this is pure cheerfulness: orange, thick black brush-stroke stripes, a mouth open on blunt white fangs, ears pink inside.
Call someone this in Japan. It's an insult. A paper tiger: fierce outside, hollow inside. But in 1822, Osaka handed them out in a plague. The old tale goes: a new sickness had reached the city. It could kill in three days. Medicine merchants made a pill called Tiger Head Kills Demons, since demons were said to hate tigers. They gave it away free, with a paper tiger. Did it work? … Nobody can prove it. But every November, crowds still line up for that tiger. Japan has another saying: a tiger can go a thousand miles… and still come home. In wartime, mothers stitched tigers onto cloth for sons going off to war. So a tiger carries two wishes: stay well, and come home. Someone you love is far from home right now. Send them a tiger. Want a paper tiger at home? Maison Homura will find one.
Kurashiki Hariko Tiger FigurineVintage · Made in Japan · Traditional Japanese Folk Toy$89 · Free shipping to 32 countries
Kubi-furi Tora Papier-mâché TigerVintage · Made in Japan · Japanese folk toy$179 · Free shipping to 32 countriesThese are the pieces we have in Fukuoka today. After something else? Tell us here.
5.0 · Star Seller on Etsy ↗Pick a budget and who it is for — that is enough. We write back with photographs, condition and a price.
Sent. We will write back to that address.
That did not go through. Try again in a moment.
Hakata forms are cut shallow, so the figure stays light in the hand.
Washi is pasted in thin layers — thinner than most districts use.
Split, removed, rejoined and the seam papered over.
Painted in the strong colours the Hakata festivals ask for.
The head is set so that it wobbles. Touch it and the tiger nods at you for a long time afterwards, which is the whole point of the object and the reason children were given them.
A tiger, in Japan, is for a boy — set out at the Boys' Festival in May, along with armour and carp streamers, because a tiger is what you want a child to grow up like. The same workshops also make a blue whale, a monkey face, a hen, and a round moustached daruma of their own.
In Osaka, the paper tiger has a second story. When a new sickness reached the city in 1822, the medicine merchants of Dōshōmachi made a pill named Tiger Head Kills Demons, since demons were said to hate tigers, and gave it away free with a small paper tiger to guard the door. Every 22 and 23 November, crowds still line up at their little shrine, Sukunahikona, for a paper tiger tied to a sprig of bamboo.
Japan also says that a tiger can go a thousand ri and still come home. In wartime, mothers stood on street corners asking women to tie one red knot each on a strip of white cloth for a son going to war, and on some of those cloths the knots formed a tiger. So a paper tiger carries two wishes: stay well, and come home.
Everywhere else in this house, the thing was made somewhere far away and arrived. This one was made down the road.
The house is in Fukuoka, and Hakata is the older merchant half of it — the side of the river with the markets, the shrines and the workshops. Of everything in these rooms, this is the only craft made within walking distance.
Hello! Ask us anything: a piece, a size, shipping, or something you are looking for. Photos are welcome too.