เครื่องรางเซ็นนินบาริ (ผ้าพันฝีเข็ม)Senninbari千人針

The practice starts with the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The earliest senninbari were handkerchief-sized squares of cloth with a thousand knots or stitches worked into them to strengthen the material — and the implication carried was that the strength passed to the man who carried it.

The making was done in public, and by the women of one household first. A soldier's mother, sister or wife stood outside the local temple, or at the train station, or by a department store, and asked women passing to put in one stitch. At the height of the Second World War the demand outran that arrangement and women's organisations gathered to produce senninbari in bulk; the belts went into imonbukuro, comfort bags, and were shipped overseas.

The rules inside the thousand had exceptions. A woman born in the year of the Tiger could sew twelve stitches, or as many stitches as she had years. Some belts were lined with a woman's hair, or with several women's — a custom recorded as originating in folk belief on Okinawa. Coins were sewn in as well.

What the stitching said is on the cloth. The commonest slogan worked into a senninbari was bu-un chō-kyū 武運長久, eternal good luck in war. Tigers were stitched or painted on, because a tiger was known to travel a long way from home and come back.

What the men made of it varied, and the source is careful about this. The women who stitched them and the men who wore them held the belts to confer courage, luck, and immunity from injury, bullets above all. Some Japanese soldiers rejected the protection outright and held instead that the belt would let them do the most damage to the enemy before giving up their own lives. Others wore it as neither — a keepsake of the women who had made it. Three positions, in one army, about one object.

White cotton cut to a strip; a thousand French knots or stitches worked in red thread, set in rows, or laid out to make a flag, a slogan or a tiger. Yellow, red and green cloth were used too, with yellow, gold, red or white thread. Variants were made as hachimaki headbands, vests and caps; the rarest were good-luck flags. The belt made for the waist, the senninbari haramaki, was held to keep the wearer in health as well as in luck. Fastened at the waist under the uniform, or folded into the kit. No priest, no shrine, no consecration: the charging is the thousand hands.

Not a living practice in this project's sources, which carry it no further than the Second World War. Surviving belts are in private hands, in militaria collections and in museums; Michael A. Bortner's Imperial Japanese Good Luck Flags and One-Thousand Stitch Belts (Schiffer, 2008) is the collectors' reference, and Kazuhiro Watanabe's study at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies treats the bullet-protection belief as folklore of the war years. Whether a belt made by a thousand women for a conscript should now be traded as militaria is an argument this atlas reports and does not settle.