Vintage Japanese Watercolor Sketches of Toy Designs

The Ningyo-Do Bunko database features thousands of late 19th and early 20th Century watercolor sketches of Japanese toy designs. More can be seen at Japan’s Akita Prefectural Library, which holds a series of six toy design illustration books produced between 1891 and 1913 by Yamada of Kyoto.

These sketches of various folk toy designs [kyoudo gangu] are part of a layer of Japanese culture that is very self-consciously regional, notes Paul K at BibliOdyssey . A lot of them are linked somehow to local shrines and temples.