I bought this wooden bear carving while shopping for celadon in Longquan, Zhejiang Province on a road trip with my husband and my parents.
I’d seen a lot of these wooden bears on Xianyu, the Craigslist/Carousell app of China, and wanted one because I collect animal figurines. I liked this particular bear carving because unlike some of them, it isn’t too scratched, and unlike a lot of them, it isn’t eating a fish. (I prefer animal figurines that are just the animal, not multiple animals, and not the animal standing on something or engaging in an action.)
I had a suspicion that “vintage Japanese” might have been added to the descriptions of the wooden bears for sale on Xianyu for the sake of search engine optimization rather than to actually communicate their origin, because I’ve definitely seen some other things mislabeled. But now that I’ve done a Google search, I’m pretty sure these are actually Japanese.
History of kibori kuma
The internet informs me that farmers in Hokkaido (the northernmost island of Japan) started making them in the 1920s based on Swiss folk art wood carvings. The carvings became a famous type of souvenir. I have no idea how old mine is. Possibly not very. And of course it’s possible some place in China started making them too. But this kind of wooden bear folk art is firmly associated with Japan, specifically Hokkaido.
» Wikipedia article about kibori kuma (Japanese wooden bears)
» article about the wooden bears museum in Yakumo, Hokkaido
» website of the wooden bears museum in Yakumo, Hokkaido
