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1927 Friendship Dolls

Friendship dolls were sent to their new homes in America with many accessories. The accessories were made of fine lacquer; delicately painted wood mounted with silver ornaments, traditional ceramic forms and carved wood and cast bronze and pewter. Together, these objects were considered sufficient to paint a picture of traditional life in Japan in the 1920s.

The Torei Ningyo (Friendship Dolls) were established in 1927 by the Japanese Committee for World Friendship Among Children in response to 12,739 “Blue-eyed dolls” sent by American children to Japan as part of a cultural exchange. Wishing to reciprocate but not compete with the quantity of American dolls, the Japanese committee decided to create magnificent dolls, one for each US state, with accessories appropriate to each doll and her home prefecture, to show the material culture of a Japanese child of the time. Fifty-eight Japanese dolls were made, representing Japan’s 47 prefectures, four territories, six major cities and one “national” doll.

The Torei Ningyo arrived in America in November 1927. Some dolls toured the United States while the balance of the dolls waited in New York. Once reunited, the dolls were distributed in late 1928 to the American states. All dolls were distributed with chests, trunks, food boxes, toys and dolls of their own. Unfortunately, the significance of the family crests, prefectural symbols and matched accessories were not always understood, and the distributors sometimes mixed up the accessories, identity papers and some of the dolls themselves. Today (2007) some of the doll identities and accessories are in question.

Friendship Dolls Today

The interest in Friendship Dolls revived in the 1970s as scholars in Japan and America started seeking out these fifty-eight silent ambassadors of 1927. Mrs. Michiko Takaoka, director of the Japanese Cultural Center at the Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute in Spokane, Washington, has been an integral part of locating many of these dolls and unraveling their tangled histories.

Michiko

In 1991, Takaoka decided to reinstate the distribution of dolls from Japan to American schools to further cross-cultural education and international friendship. Since 1992 she, along with her successors at the Japanese Cultural Center, have distributed about 50 dolls each year to schools across the United States.

Michiko

Some of the original friendship dolls arrived in America with traveling companions. These were half-size dolls meant to be play companions for the larger doll and express another facet of Japanese dress and life. Miss Tsukuba wasn’t lucky enough to have a traveling companion in 1927. But on her return trip from Japan in August of 2007 she had little Michiko to keep her company. Michiko was made by friendship doll scholar Mrs. Michiko Takaoka and was presented to Miss Tsukuba as a traveling companion. Michiko has a bag of toys to share with Miss Tsukuba and a “Hello Kitty” backpack carrying a token of friendship, a 5 Yen coin.