Since my daughter was a baby, she’s been obsessed with rabbits (usagi, in Japanese). We first had a stuffed sheep doll for her, but she quickly became enamoured of a musical pink bunny whose cord she could pull to start up a lullaby. When my wife’s great-grand aunt brought a white bunny with a purple ribbon as an early birthday gift, my daughter was hooked.
I don’t think the bunny was ever meant to be an actual child’s toy – we had to repair it on more than one occasion, as my daughter enjoys throwing it up in the air and flinging it by its feet — but it quickly became inseparable from our daily life. Usagi-san’s ears were frequently subject to all sorts of decorations: hair-bonnets, rubber bands, arm bracelets, hair clips and anything else my daughter could figure out how to attach.
At some point I started to pretend to be Usagi-san and “talk” to my daughter to get her to eat food she didn’t like (which was basically everything from age 2 to 3). From that point, Usagi-san became a part of our family. Our eldest would bring the doll to bed every night and pat it on the stomach saying, “Ne-ne shite” [Go to sleep]. She would bring it to every meal and make it taste her food to make sure the food was OK to eat. She would pretend that Usagi-san was sick and give it medicine. Once she started nursery school, Usagi would also go to “animals nursery school.” After some time, she began to insist that Usagi-san was a girl and demanded that my wife make the doll a purple velvet skirt (which eventually stained the bottom half of the doll purple).
The climax of our eldest daughter’s relationship to her “baby” Usagi-san doll came during our first trip to a zoo in Kobe last spring. Continue reading →
Taking Leave 