Name: 150 Year Old Japanese Toys | Yajiro Kokeshi Factory
Uploaded: 2025-07-22T17:56:59.000Z
Duration: 20 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

It's a really beautiful place here in the mountains of Miyagi prefecture. If you don't know where Miyagi is it is one of the six prefectures of Tohoku and inside this workshop is a Kokeshi master which I'm gonna introduce you to also behind me you can see there is a museum in here. This is the

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Yajiro Kokeshi village so let's go inside and take a look see what they're making and learn a little bit about this really fascinating Tohoku toy

So right now he's making a Kokeshi and you can see all of this is made from a piece of wood that looks similar to this right here this is giant dogwood also known as

Mizuki which is water wood translated as. It's a very soft wood and it is said that having one of these Kokeshi in your house helps to prevent fire because it's made from water wood now Kokeshi I'm gonna tell you a little bit about. I'm so fascinated because I'm watching the process being made right here check it out. Now these Japanese dolls have been around for over 150 years going all the way back to the Edo period and they're sold mostly at onsen towns so as you travel around Japan especially in the Tohoku region you're going to see different Kokeshi. There's 11 variety of them from different areas, 11 different styles the Yajiro style is certainly original and that's what we're seeing right here. So you're starting to see it take shape from just a piece of wood into a Kokeshi doll

So you can see there's a lot of precision, a lot of detail in this. More so that I can see when you just look at a Kokeshi

I just see, you know, like a shaped piece of wood but it's a lot more than that. Each one of these grooves has a special meaning to it in the design of it

Also that's how they get the lines so straight

So I'll take a look at some of these in a minute

Wow! Different sizes and there's a story with that too on the different sizes that they have

A little sandpaper to smooth it off there

I'm nervous, you don't want to make a mistake

So apply a little bit of the wax onto there

But they all have their own different style here

How do you judge a really beautiful kokeshi?

If you look at the faces of these kokeshi dolls

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150 Year Old Japanese Toys | Yajiro Kokeshi Factory

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