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Kokeshi


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#1 Soupie

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Posted 14 December 2009 - 12:35 PM

I was browsing the interwebs when I came acorss an example of Kokeshi.

Kokeshi (こけし, kokeshi?), are Japanese dolls, originally from northern Japan. They are handmade from wood, have a simple trunk and an enlarged head with a few thin, painted lines to define the face. The body has a floral design painted in red, black, and sometimes yellow, and covered with a layer of wax. One characteristic of kokeshi dolls is their lack of arms or legs. The bottom is marked with the signature of the artist. ...

The word kokeshi itself is originally Sendai dialect, with the dolls being known as e.g. deko, kideko, dekoroko in Fukushima, kibako, kihohoko, obokko in Miyagi, hangyo, kiningyō in Naruko, none of which support the theory.[4] Instead, a more plausible explanation is that kokeshi are simply wooden (木, ki, ko?) or small (小, ko?) dolls (芥子, keshi?).

Here are some Kokeshi via a Google search.

What I find most interesting though, is the name, kokeshi. Obviously, most of us are very familiar with keshi. Many Japanese collectors refer to keshi as keshigomu. As I've been told many times, gomu means rubber. That has always made sense to me. What I never knew, which many of you probably did or were able to figure out :D , was that keshi means "doll" (or, I'm sure, figurine). Thus the rough translation of words like keshigomu and kinkeshi means rubber doll or kinnikuman doll. (We already knew this of course, but for me, knowing that keshi means doll makes it a little more "official.")
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#2 Nyarlathotep

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Posted 14 December 2009 - 02:47 PM

Neat! These must be LRGs ancestors: LWGs (Little Wooden Guys) :D
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#3 Soupie

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Posted 14 December 2009 - 02:52 PM

That might not be far from the truth actually. :D
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#4 dankingery

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Posted 14 December 2009 - 05:09 PM

i prefer the netsuke carvings to these. there's some really cool designs. i've also got a wood carving of a villager carrying buckets of water that i need to snap a shot of so you can see how kick ass it is.
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#5 Universal Ruler Supreme

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Posted 14 December 2009 - 05:13 PM

You know that's pretty cool Soups. I recall looking up the meaning of keshi on a couple times, but never could find a clear definition. Doll surely makes a lot of sense. :o
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#6 dankingery

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    hey beardo, vote quimby!

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Posted 14 December 2009 - 05:22 PM

war, wore
to, too, two
their, there
etc.

keshigomu means eraser right? i mean, there's some stupid movie that always comes up in "keshigomu" listings on ebay that's title, which contains "keshigomu", means something like my head is an eraser.

i think what is probably the case here is, the part "keshi" is being spelled by two different kanji symbols in the two words. even though the sound is the same, the meaning is different.
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if i encounter the demons in hell, i will kill them all..

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#7 Soupie

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Posted 14 December 2009 - 06:25 PM

Eh, could be. I plopped the keshigomu kanji from wiki into babelfish and gave me eraser. And we know that gumo means gum/rubber/plastic. Perhaps it is a coincidence that the keshi in kokeshi means doll and has nothing to do with keshi toys.

:lol:

According to web translator EUdict.com, keshi translates to poppy in English. :o

Edited by Soupie, 14 December 2009 - 06:40 PM.

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#8 Nyarlathotep

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Posted 14 December 2009 - 06:59 PM

I'm no expert, but I believe it's not uncommon in many languages for a word to have multiple meanings, all different, but all equally valid.
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#9 nickdeth

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Posted 14 December 2009 - 09:24 PM

kokeshi and the netsuke are awesome my G-friend collects them both
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