amuletsTeru teru bōzu照る照る坊主

said TE-ru TE-ru BOH-zu

also: teru teru bozu · てるてる坊主 · fine-weather priest · shine-shine monk

A small handmade doll of tissue paper or cloth, white, a ball of stuffing for a head with the cloth falling loose below it and a string tied round the neck. It hangs outside a door or a window, made the day before a day the maker wants dry. Children make them; most Japanese meet one in kindergarten or daycare.

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Japanese teru 照る 'to shine', doubled, + bōzu 坊主 'Buddhist monk' — 'shine, shine, monk'
The doll's head is read as a monk's shaved head, which shines in sun; the name is also the request. A children's rhyme addresses the doll directly as the fine-weather priest. cited

When

c. 1603 to now, with a Heian-period import behind it still carried cited

Period	Edo to the present
How the date is known	textual — a dated text describes it
Note	The source says the doll became popular in the Edo period and originates in a Chinese practice adapted in the Heian period; 1603 is the start of the Edo period and stands as the earliest year the statement carries. The firm attestation is Kiyū Shōran, 1830.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Figurine
Made of	Paper · Cloth · Thread and cord · Ink
Goes	At the door · On a wall · On the roof
Made by	anybody, usually a child; no priest, no shrine, no consecration
It says	the eyes, drawn in afterwards where a fine day is granted
Colour	white
Retired	yes — it is replaced rather than kept
Note	No published measurement was read. Hung on the eve of the day wanted; discharged with sake and a river.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

Bad luck, unspecified citedsaid by children making one the day before an outing, in the chant recorded from the Edo period: 'Fine-weather priest, please let the weather be good tomorrow'the harm named by the carriers is rain on a particular day; this atlas's vocabulary has no weather key, so the nearest one is used and flagged

The story

The practice came from China and changed sex on the way. In the Chinese version, Saoqing Niang 掃晴娘, the figure is a young girl with a broom, set on the end of a broom to sweep the sky clear; the story attached has a girl ascending to the heavens in a heavy rainfall to sweep the clouds off and save her city, and paper cut-outs of her hung outdoors afterwards in her memory. Japan took the practice up in the Heian period, inside an older weather-watching culture, hiyorimi, that runs with certainty from the Heian period through the Edo.

The Japanese doll seems to come out of the resemblance between origami dolls and the names recorded in mid-Edo literature. The reference this project can name is Kiyū Shōran, written in 1830 by Nobuyo Kitamura, a scholar of Japanese classical literature: "If the weather becomes fine, I write my pupils on the paper, offer sake to the gods, and pour it into the river." Painting in the eyes after the sun comes out, and the libation, and the river — the whole disposal is in that one sentence.

It became popular in the Edo period among city dwellers, whose children made them the day before and chanted, "Fine-weather priest, please let the weather be good tomorrow." A warabe uta released in 1921 fixed the modern version, and children sing it while making the doll. The song is not soft: it promises the doll plenty of sake if the wish comes off, and decapitation if it does not.

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How it is made and carried

Tissue paper or a scrap of white cloth, gathered over a ball of stuffing, tied at the neck with string, hung from an eave, a window frame or a door on the eve of the day in question. The face is often left blank and drawn on afterwards, when the weather has behaved. If the day comes up fine, a libation of sake is poured over the doll and it is floated away in a river. Hanging one upside down is the reverse request, for rain — a use this project has not read in a cited source and so does not assert here.

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