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If you see… a doll… 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. 84
Pate also refers to Hearn on the same topic, relaying that “in fact in the Meiji
era it was not uncommon for unmarried and childless women… to keep an
ichimatsu-ningyō as a substitute child… treated in all respects as an actual
child”. 85
In such situations I deem that the attachments between owners and
dolls, or “mothers” and “children”, are so strong that the potential loss,
damage or destruction of a doll, i.e. the substitute child, would result in
trauma and a sense of grief almost equivalent to the loss of a real child that
could very likely feel like a loss of part of one’s self.
To support this argument it is shown that, even without this
humanising aspect and, subsequently, the extreme case of bonding that can
accompany this type of relationship, the eventual loss of a doll, even as a
prized object, a possession, can have the same affect. William James, in
discussing one’s connections to lost objects, claimed that:
Although it is true that part of our depression at the loss of possessions is due to
our feeling that we must now go without certain goods… in every case there
remains over and above this a sense of the shrinkage of our personality, a partial
conversion of ourselves to nothingness. 86
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