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A helmet with no head in it, set out for one month a year.
On the shelf · Tokyo Kyugetsu Kabuto Helmet · $315 →On the fifth of May a house with a son puts out armour. Most houses have no room for a full suit, so they put out the helmet alone — the kabuto — on a black lacquer stand, and take it in again when the month is over.
It is not a war trophy and it was never worn. It is a wish, made in the shape of the thing that protects a head. The two gilt prongs curving up from the brow are kuwagata, and the crest between them is the maedate; below the bowl hangs the shikoro, five tiers of lacquered plates laced together to cover the neck.
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The bowl is raised from iron plates riveted together.
Lacquered plates are laced into the neck guard with silk cord.
The crest is cut from gilt copper and fitted at the brow.
Assembled onto its stand — this is a display piece, and never was worn.
The lacing is where the money goes. Odoshi is silk cord threaded through every plate in the same direction with the same tension, and a helmet where the lacing has drifted is obvious across a room. A maker who laces well is not doing anything a machine could take over.
The trade for these sits in Asakusabashi, the wholesale doll district in the east of Tokyo — the same few streets that supply the March dolls two months earlier. The oldest house there, Yoshitoku, dates its founding to 1711.
It comes out at the end of April. It goes away in the middle of May. A child sees it perhaps eighteen times, and then it belongs to somebody else.
A few streets in the east of Tokyo, near the Kanda river, given over almost entirely to one trade. Wholesalers of festival dolls sit shoulder to shoulder: the March dolls for girls, then eight weeks later the May armour for boys, and then the shutters come down and it starts again.
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