The one craft this house can walk to.
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.
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.
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.
Pieces are found one at a time, in Japan, and photographed before they are listed. Tell us what you are looking for, and we will write when something arrives that answers it.
We write when there is something to write about — some months twice, some months not at all.
Noted. We will write when something arrives.