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It bites people on the head. Being bitten is the good part.
Would you like one like this? ↓At New Year and at festivals the lion comes down the street with two men inside it — one holding the head, one bent under the cloth behind — and it stops in front of people and bites them on the head. Children are pushed forward into it, screaming, by parents who are laughing. The bite is the blessing: the lion eats your misfortune. It is also said to make a child clever, and to cure a headache, and both of those are said with a straight face.
The head is carved from one block of paulownia, and the choice of wood is the whole of the engineering. Paulownia is the lightest timber worked in Japan, and it has to be — a man holds this over his head, at arm's length, and dances with it for hours. Anything heavier and the dance would be a different, slower dance.
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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Paulownia or camphor — light enough to be worn on the head for a whole day.
Hollowed out from behind first, so the shell is thin and even.
Brow, jaw and ears cut. The jaw is hinged so it can be clapped.
Lacquered red and black over ground, then gilt. It must survive being struck all day.
The lower jaw is a separate piece on a hinge, worked by the dancer's hand inside. It is not there to look real. It is a percussion instrument: the clack of the jaw is on the beat, and a lion that cannot clack properly is a lion nobody wants.
Then it is lacquered — vermilion or black — with gold on the teeth, the brows and the horns, and a mane of horsehair fixed round the back. Old heads are rubbed thin at the brow and the cheekbones, because that is where hands go.
The dance came in from the continent in the 7th century as part of gigaku, court entertainment. What made it a village thing everywhere was the Edo period, when troupes of travelling performers took it door to door, and it settled differently in each place it stopped — two men under one cloth in most of the country, one dancer to one lion in the north, and in parts of Tōhoku not a lion at all but a deer.
A single street of workshops, all of them open to the pavement, all of them carving. The reason is a fire: in 1763 the main hall of Zuisen-ji burned, carver-carpenters came from the Higashi Hongan-ji in Kyoto to rebuild it, and they taught the local carpenters while the work went on. Then they went home. Inami did not stop.
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