365 True Things: 352/Collecting

I'm not much of a collector, not in a strict sense. I have quite a few mugs, and several lovely Japanese tea cups, but I wouldn't say I formally collect them. Plus, I use them. (I think of "collecting" in terms of displaying.) I have one friend who collects vintage cameras, and another who collects little toad and frog statues (after his childhood nickname of Toad). But me? I'm not a collector.

Though I was for a brief year, 1965, when I was ten: I collected stamps and Japanese folk toys. (Actually, I may have gotten going with stamps a year or two before. I still remember opening the steamer trunk when it arrived at our apartment in Tokyo and feeling so glad when I saw my big stamp binder right on top.)

I was reminded of this the other day when someone posted a video on Facebook showing how a kokeshi doll is made:

I collected a fair assortment of traditional Japanese toys—among them the red cow, akabeko; papier-mâché tiger, hariko-no-tora; sea-bream on wheels, tai-guruma; daruma; Izumeko-doll, Izumeko-ningyō; straw horse, wara-uma; and of course kokeshi (all shown in the picture below, though these aren't mine).

I don't have the toys anymore. Well, a couple of them maybe, in the boxes of things I took from my mother's house. Anymore, they're just more stuff, and I don't need more stuff. But I certainly enjoyed collecting them at the time.