nendo

With its adventures of Japanese folktale spirit-monsters or yokai, the Japanese manga and anime series GeGeGe no Kitaro has been immensely popular with fans since the series launch in 1967. We updated the traditional Japanese daruma doll with 120 new designs based on yokai, including many characters from the series.
Japan is known as a major exporter of characters from anime, manga and computer games, but has been rich in stories about yokai as manifestations of natural phenomena and chance events since ancient times. Given this fondness for yokai, it might not be going too far to suggest that yokai could be the origin of characters.
We might also hypothesize that as embodiments of characters, these figures are an extension of Japanese daruma and kokeshi dolls. If we do this, then yokai and daruma have a strong affinity, too. Working from this logic, we thought we would try to emphasize this strong character-ness by fusing yokai and the daruma doll.