Essay: Japanese doll exchanges offer lessons on peace, understanding

On Saturday, an exhibition of Japanese dolls opens at the Rochester Museum and Science Center. It is worth going to see the dolls for their beauty and craftsmanship. But even more impressive is what they can teach us about the power of exchange between peoples.

In 1927, Sidney L. Gulick, a former American missionary, organized the delivery of more than 12,000 dolls from children in the U.S. to children in Japan. Three hundred of these – their clothing sewn by children and their families – came from Rochester schools and churches.

The dolls were distributed to schools across Japan, where they were welcomed with enthusiasm. Soon, the Japanese reciprocated with a gift of their own – 58 dolls, each representing a prefecture or colony.

One was acquired by the RMSC in 1929. It was long believed to represent Aomori Prefecture, but in 2000 it was discovered that in fact it was Nagasaki Tamako, or Miss Nagasaki.

“The Gift of Dolls” exhibition celebrates the 90th anniversary of the “friendship doll” project, as well as the citizen-to-citizen exchanges it continues to inspire between Nagasaki and Rochester.

The exhibition is organized around Nagasaki Tamako and a sister doll given by citizens of Nagasaki in 2003. It also features four Japanese dolls from the Central Library of Rochester’s George W. Cooper Doll Collection, which commemorates a 69-country doll exchange organized in 1935 by the principal of School No. 43.

These exchanges may seem like the peak of childlike innocence, but in fact they are the responses of citizens determined to seek peace despite their governments.

The 1927 exchange was Gulick’s answer to the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned Japanese immigrants from entering the United States. If the countries’ leaders could not get along, perhaps the next generation could.

Neither Gulick’s nor Cooper’s exchanges kept the U.S. and Japan from fighting each other in World War II. But the war, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, showed citizens in both countries how high the stakes of belligerence could be, and gave them even more reason to engage in citizen diplomacy.

In 1979, 10 American dolls came home for an exhibition at the Rochester Museum and Science Center. The rediscovery of Nagasaki Tamako in 2000 sparked another series of exchanges involving institutions, civic groups and volunteers in both cities, including survivors of the atomic bombing.

Like Gulick’s original project, these exchanges are not about the objects that change hands, as beautiful as they may be. They are about the giving and receiving – about the hopes, prayers, money, time, and labor it takes to animate the gifts and keep them going. That in itself is a form of peace.

You can learn more at http://rmsc.org/science-museum/exhibits/item/460-the-gift-of-dolls.

Hirokazu Miyazaki of Rochester  is a professor of anthropology and director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University.