Also called teru teru bozu, fure fure bozu, sunny doll, rain doll, weather charm
A small white cloth or paper doll that Japanese children hang in a window to ask for sunshine; hung upside down it becomes a fure fure bōzu that asks for rain. It is the easiest weather charm in the world to make and has roots in a Chinese broom-lady custom.
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Take care: Do not hang dolls near candles, heaters or cords. If you copy any frog-wedding custom, leave wild frogs alone.
In northern China, a paper figure of a woman holding a broom was hung from the eaves during long rains to sweep the clouds away. A Yuan dynasty poem by Li Junmin is the earliest mention, and Ming and Qing writers record the custom. Many scholars link the Japanese doll to her.
Uses: coloured paper, small broom
In drought years Assamese villages hold a mock wedding of two frogs, dressed and blessed with vermilion while neighbours sing rain songs, then release them into a pond. The belief comes from a folk verse in which the clouds will not rain until the frogs croak. It is a community rite; a home version can be singing a rain song, with no animals involved.
Girls dressed in green leaves dance through the village in early summer while householders splash them with water to call rain. It is the best-known European rain-calling custom and has its own entry.
Teru teru bōzu means shine-shine monk. The doll became popular among city children in the Edo period, and an 1830 work by the scholar Kitamura Nobuyo, Kiyū Shōran, describes offering sake when the weather turned fine and sending the doll down a river. The monk image may echo Buddhist priests who once prayed for weather. A nursery song about the doll, with lyrics by Asahara Kyoson and music by Nakayama Shinpei, appeared in 1921 and is still sung.
Many writers trace the doll to Saoqing Niang, the broom-carrying paper woman of northern China, first mentioned in a Yuan dynasty poem. Rain-calling customs elsewhere range from the Romanian paparuda to the frog weddings of Assam. A story that the doll recalls an executed monk who failed to stop the rain is widely told, but folklorists think it grew up after the custom was already common.
Tanabata is Japan's Star Festival on the seventh day of the seventh month, honouring the weaver Orihime and the herdsman Hikoboshi, lovers who meet once a year across the Milky Way. People write wishes on narrow paper strips called tanzaku and hang them on bamboo.
On Midsummer night Slavic villagers gathered healing herbs, floated flower wreaths on rivers, leapt over bonfires and searched the forest for the fern that blooms only at midnight. Herbs picked that night were dried and kept as protection all year.
In Romanian and Balkan villages, in drought or in late spring, girls dressed in green leaves danced from house to house while women poured water over them, singing for rain. In the related Caloian rite, children buried and mourned a small clay figure and then sent it down the river to unlock the rain.
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