Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

What do you call the little statues that you see in Japan pretty regularly that have a little red round body and a man's face (usually with a mustache)?



I was a little curious about that because I read a Hideshi Hino manga a couple of days ago in which they pop up pretty regularly.

That is a Daruma doll. Here is the wikipedia entry for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daruma

The square watermelon is cool,too.

go wrote:The square watermelon is cool,too.

Yes they are. We saw a whole display of them when we were in Kyoto. They were about $40 each. I think the little watermelon are put in box, and as they get bigger it takes its shape.

$40 for a watermelon? Yikes!

Thanks for answering my question about Daruma dolls. I wonder what kind of symbolic significance they might have in the manga that I read that has them. (Hideshi Hino's The Bug Boy [Sounds a little bit Weekly World News, doesn't it?]) I thought that the part of the Wikipedia entry that discusses how people in the corporate world in Japan sometimes use them as a time management/motivational tool was interesting.

Come to think of it, there's a Japanese steakhouse close to where I live with a display case up front that has a few of them inside. There's some other stuff there that I'm a little curious about too. Next time I go there, I might take my camera and post a few pictures.

Jet_Jaguar wrote:
Come to think of it, there's a Japanese steakhouse close to where I live with a display case up front that has a few of them inside. There's some other stuff there that I'm a little curious about too.

Is this one of the other stuff?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beckoning_cat

Yeah, they have some little Maneki Neko statues too, but I knew what they were.