[CHAPTER XVI: DOLLS AND BUTTERFLIES]
"I asked a charming Japanese girl: 'How can a doll live?' 'Why,' she answered, 'if you love it enough, it will live!'"
Lafcadio Hearn.
The English and Japanese Doll
Our English dolls, with their flaxen hair, blue eyes, and simpering faces, are certainly not a credit to the toy-maker's art if they are to be regarded as bearing even a remote likeness to living children. Put in a horizontal position, something will click in their little heads and their blue eyes will close, or more correctly roll backward; a pinch will make them emit a tolerable imitation of the words "Papa!" "Mamma!" and yet in spite of these mechanical devices they have nothing more to their credit than a child's short-lived love. They are speedily broken, or liable at any moment to be decapitated by a little brother who has learnt too well the story of Lady Jane Grey!
In Japan, however, the doll is not merely a play-thing by which little children may become make-believe mothers, but in earlier days it was regarded as a means to make a wife a mother. Lafcadio Hearn writes: "And if you see such a doll, though held quite close to you, being made by a Japanese mother to reach out its hands, to move its little bare feet, and to turn its head, you would be almost afraid to venture a heavy wager that it was only a doll." It is this startling likeness that is perhaps accountable for the quaint and beautiful love connected with Japanese dolls.
Live Dolls
At one time certain dolls were actually said to become alive, to take to their small bodies a human soul, and the belief is merely an echo of the old idea that much love will quicken to life the image of a living thing. In Old Japan the doll was handed down from one generation to another, and sometimes remained in an excellent condition for over a hundred years. A hundred years spent in little children's arms, served with food, put to bed regularly every night, and the object of constant endearments, will no doubt work wonders in the poetic imagination of a happy and childlike people.