Daruma Dolls!

This is a picture of my little girl while attending the famous Darura Doll festival in Atsugi town back in January:

Daruma Dolls are a popular item in Japan, both for tourists and locals. A typical doll looks like this one shown on Wikipedia:

The word daruma is the Japanese pronunciation of dharma as in the famous Indian monk named Bodhidharma. Indeed, the doll even bears a resemblance to Bodhidharma:

And according to legend, Bodhidharma meditated before a wall for so long, that his arms and legs had fallen off, so the doll has no arms and legs either. I always liked Daruma Dolls first because of their Buddhist origins (even if it has no relation now), but also because they are just cute. In Japanese custom, the dolls come without any eyes, so a person makes a wish, then fills in one eye. Later when the wish is fulfilled, the other eye is painted in. I never really followed this custom myself. I just like collecting them. Since my wife’s paternal side of the family lives in and around Atsugi, we often get a few of these a year. As you can see in this online shop, there’s quite a variety in the doll styles.¹

As Wikipedia points out, good Daruma Dolls always stay on their feet, because they are roly-poly in design, so it’s kind of a nice reminder of nana korobi ya oki (七転び八起き) or “7 times down, 8 times up”.

¹ Use Shift-JIS encoding to read this link correctly. This still happens with Japanese sites that haven’t moved to more modern UTF8 encoding.