Finding Ouchi-nuri hina dolls in Yanaka, Tokyo's cat town.
I was in Yanaka on a quiet weekday morning, walking up towards Yuyake Dandan, the staircase everyone photographs at sunset, right before Emmei-in temple with its centuries-old shii tree. Yanaka is known across Tokyo as the city's cat town. Stray cats sleep in doorways, doughnuts are shaped like cat tails, and half the shop signs have a cat painted somewhere on them. Nobody quite knows why the cats settled here first, only that the neighbourhood has embraced them completely.
Not everyone in Japan feels the same way about strays. Plenty of residents consider them a nuisance, the noise, the mess in a garden, a cat that will not move off a doorstep. But in neighbourhoods like this one, it is often the older residents who quietly take it upon themselves to look after the cats nobody owns.
They leave food out on a set schedule, keep an eye on the same few faces year after year, and treat it as a kind of neighbourhood duty rather than a hobby. Yanaka lives somewhere between those two attitudes, and you can feel both of them if you spend enough time there.
A few stalls had set up on the temple grounds itself, the kind of loose, changeable arrangement you find all over Japan rather than a fixed market with a name and a schedule. One dealer had a small wooden box pushed to the back of his table, tomobako, the calligraphy still legible on the lid.
Inside sat two round little figures on a black lacquered stand, one in a deep red I had not seen before, one in glossy black, a pair clearly made to stay together.
We talked for a while, mostly about the lacquer, a little about where I was from and why I kept coming back to Japan. At some point I mentioned, almost as an aside, that I have two cats at home.
She laughed, disappeared into a box behind her, and came back with a small printed card: an abstract print of a cat's head, sharp lines, bold colour, nothing like the soft and sentimental cat art you usually see. She pressed it into my hand and would not take anything for it.
Just because, she said. Cat people find each other, even in cat town.
Ouchi-nuri craftsman hand-painting gold lacquer on a doll, Yamaguchi station display
When I got home I read the dolls' own story properly. According to the maker’s leaflet that came with them, a regional lord in Yamaguchi once brought a bride home from Kyoto, and she was desperately homesick.
He had doll makers brought in from the capital to keep her company, filling her new home with a piece of the one she had left behind. It is a story about making something small and lasting out of what you are missing.
I did not expect to run into the story again. A few trips later, standing at Yamaguchi station, an information board read 大内塗, Ouchi-nuri Lacquerware.
It gives the background: it is from the Muromachi period (1336 to 1573) born under the protection of the Ouchi clan, the same deep red lacquer and the same story about a homesick bride from Kyoto that I already knew from the certificate tucked inside the dolls' tomobako.
What drew me in, at the station where I was about to board my train back to Okayama, was someone painting a doll by hand. One careful stroke of gold at a time.
I had already been living with my pair for many months by then, it was strange to suddenly be standing in the town where they were made, watching the same kind of brushwork that mine have.
I guess that’s how life works.
A neighbourhood built around its love for cats. A pair of dolls made decades ago, Shōwa period, carrying a tradition that itself goes back centuries, to ease the same kind of homesickness. Different objects, same instinct, and a nice reminder that the thread connecting strangers in a market is very often the smallest thing you have in common.
The cat print is pinned above my desk in the Netherlands now. The dolls are listed in the shop here: https://www.kaikoandco.com/shop/p/ouchi-nuri-mamehina-hina-dolls-kuwahara-yamaguchi
