เครื่องรางเทรุเทรุโบซุ (ตุ๊กตาไล่ฝน)Teru teru bōzu照る照る坊主

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.

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.

Still made by Japanese children in 2026, taught through the 1921 nursery rhyme. Ikeda in Nagano Prefecture has built its town mascot on the shape.