Samurai Wedding Appeal Success

We are delighted to have reached the £3,000 target we needed to conserve and restore the beautiful Samurai Japanese wedding dolls.  We would like to thank everyone who gave so generously to this appeal especially to The Japan Society who have donated the final £1,000 bringing us to target and ahead of our deadline.

The dolls will now go on public view from April at Weston Park Museum as part of Precious Cargo, a major redisplay of the museum's current Treasures gallery as part of  the 2012 Olympics Stories of the World project.  As they are so delicate, we will rotate the dolls every 8 months, ensuring that they all have their moment of glory.

About the dolls:

Dating from the late 1800s, the set of 30 dolls depict a bride, her servants, and watchful Samurai guards on their way to her wedding.  Each doll wears a beautiful Japanese embroidered costume, their hair styled in a traditional fashion, and some carrying swords and parasols.  They each stand on a wooden plinth.  Written underneath in Japanese and English is the doll’s position in the wedding procession.

We believe the dolls date were made in the Meiji period and were possibly a commemorative present made for Sir Arthur Balfour, the Sheffield Industrialist, when he married in 1899.  Sir Arthur presented the set to the city of Sheffield around 1929.