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Chinese zodiac, twelfth sign: a pig. Japanese zodiac, twelfth sign: this.
Would you like one like this? ↓The twelve animals came to Japan from China, and eleven of them made the crossing unchanged. The twelfth did not. Where China has a domestic pig, Japan kept the wild boar — lean, tusked, and famously incapable of turning once it has decided.
That last part is the whole of what the animal means here. Chototsu-mōshin: boar-charge, fierce advance. A boar at speed goes in a straight line and cannot be talked out of it. The phrase is used to praise someone and to warn about them, in the same breath and often about the same person.
On the shelf now, from other workshops
Not this story's piece: new work from Japan's workshops that can be ordered today.
Kutani Ryusen Vasegold leaf pine crane flower vessel$189
Hakata Ningyo Monkey FigurineQueen Mother of the West peach$179
Oga Peninsula Namahage Wall HangingJapanese Red Oni Mask$109
Seibo Kitamura Fighting Spirit Bronze Bull SculptureYokozuna Ushi Cast Metal$465Pieces like this come and go, and most of what the house finds never goes online.
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Modelled for its own year — this shape is cast once in twelve.
Sand-cast in Takaoka in the autumn before the year turns.
The bristles are cut in by hand after the metal is cold.
Brown-black, with the tusks and back left brighter.
There is a quieter reason a house like this keeps one. In the old five-phase reckoning the sign of the boar belongs to water, and so the Day of the Boar is the day you may safely light a fire for the winter. Tea people still open the sunken hearth on it. A house named for a flame keeps a water animal on the shelf, and that is not superstition so much as an old and very practical joke.
The boar is also a messenger. At Goō Jinja in Kyoto the pair of guardians flanking the gate are not lion-dogs but boars, and people go there about their legs — a stiff knee, a long walk ahead of them.
Zodiac bronzes are cast in the autumn before their year and given at New Year, so they date themselves. Boar years are 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019 and 2031, and nothing at all was cast in between.
In 1609 Maeda Toshinaga built a castle at Takaoka and settled seven casting families in a quarter beside it, the district still called Kanayamachi — the metal-workers' town. (Where exactly the seven came from is given differently in different accounts.) The castle was abandoned within six years. The foundry quarter was not, and it is still there.
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