Kimiko Koyanagi: We Must Accept Our Fortune to Live
Photo courtesy of Eric Koyanagi
At 92 years old, Kimiko Koyanagi, a third-generation doll-maker born in Tokyo, Japan, continues to create her art. Her experiences, from surviving the bombings of Tokyo during World War II to her travels around the world and eventual immigration to Canada and, much later, the U.S., have deeply influenced both her worldview and her entirely unique Japanese dolls. Listen in as Kimiko shares her wisdom on resilience, creativity, and the acceptance of life’s fortunes.
Hear her talk about:
Surviving the devastation of World War II in Tokyo
Traveling the world and then immigrating to Canada
Building a career as a female artist in a male-dominated field
Her philosophy on accepting one’s fortune and embracing creativity despite limitations
Why creativity is essential to her life, even at 92
Learn more about Kimiko’s art process and see her dolls on her website.
See all episodes of Wisdom of Age.
“Human get environment over fortune without choice. Everybody born without choice to be American, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Guamanian ... But that kind of reality is, we have to accept it.”
Read the Transcript for Episode 5
Wisdom of Age, Episode 5
Kimiko Koyanagi: We Must Accept Our Fortune to Live
Stacy: Well, thank you so much for being willing to sit down with me today. I really appreciate it.
Kimiko: I'm glad because I've been doing this kind of work. But, people don't know what I'm doing, right?
Stacy (as narrator): Welcome to the Wisdom of Age podcast, where we journey with our elders back in time, learning about life as they lived it. And the lessons they learned along the way. I'm Stacy Raine.
Stacy (as narrator): 92-year-old Kimiko Koyanagi is still making dolls. Now, these aren't just any dolls - not the toys that probably came to your mind. These dolls are works of art, of sculpture, done in an intricate process that takes weeks and weeks to make.
Kimiko: I'm a three-generation door maker. I was born in Tokyo.
Stacy (as narrator): At 92, Kimiko has slowed down a bit, but she can never not create:
Kimiko: I like to create. That is my life.
Stacy (as narrator): Kimiko, as she said, is a third-generation doll-maker. She was born into the Muroka family in Japan, well-known for their traditional Japanese doll making. She was one of eight children, all involved in the family business.
Kimiko: Doll making was very, very busy before, but war started.
Stacy (as narrator): Of course, Kimiko is talking about WWII. She and her family lived in downtown Tokyo, near Tokyo Bay.
Kimiko: Japan is a very small country, but a long island surrounded by sea. War started one year, I don't know how long later, four years – more than four years I guess. But the beginning started attack. Sometimes every day, B-29 by airplane attack, lots of bomb. So daytime when I started girls school when I was 11, end of 11 years old, or 12, every day goes to school: attack school. I was bombed.
Stacy: Oh...
Stacy (as narrator): She explained to me that while she was going to school that year, the second-year girls were on the upper floor, making bullets.
Kimiko: School was next year. I have to make a bullet upstairs to make a bullet, like a factory. No study, no English, English class, nothing.
Stacy (as narrator): I was surprised by this, but apparently it wasn't uncommon in Japan during the war to both use civilian buildings for the war, and civilians, including children, to power the factories there. They were also making something else:
Kimiko: Girl is like a worker. Girls is helping government. We have to make marijuana. I didn't know it was marijuana. We have to make that kind of things. Since I was grade 5 or 6. Not girls school yet. But later, oh, that was ... people were saying that is going to be medicine. That's it. But we made a nice green plant everywhere in the school, small places even.
Stacy (as narrator): As part of the "Total War" strategy, everyone was considered part of the war effort. The schoolchildren were even taught to kill.
Kimiko: When I was grade five, I study every morning at the school, public school. If soldier came front of me by parachute, I have to use bamboo stick to kill American soldier. That kind of things government school teach us. We were,
Stacy: Wow.
Kimiko: Oh, terrible things learned. But, we don't know. We were educated that way.
Stacy (as narrator): She remembers how cold it was, how by that point they had nothing, no clothes to speak of, no winter coats, no shoes, no heat, no food. Everyone was poor. There were bombings all the time.
Kimiko: Tokyo is every night bombed. House is bombed. School is bombed. That's why school was bombed every day, because school is second floor factory.
Stacy (as narrator): But even then, when she didn't have much, she would create, even if it was just drawing in the dirt. She still remembers the air raid sirens and how they would come in three stages, and it happened every day.
Kimiko: Sirens start. Beginning is it's coming. Attack is coming. That warning siren. Next one is middle one attacking bomb from sky, and the third one is finished one. Three levels of siren.
Stacy (as narrator): They would hide under their wooden desks, and she said there wasn't much studying happening by then. That was her school day.
Kimiko: Then one day school's hall, we were watching an airplane fight, an American airplane and a Japanese airplane in the sky fighting each other. Some were smoke down. It's down, that mean soldier will be die, but we were children, we don't know which one is smoking down airplane. I thought American airplane. We were very happy.
Then watching that kind of fighting, school window, hole, then suddenly black, no pain. Just my front of things are black. Then next time I woke up, lots of glass pieces, and, under the, I was lie down hole, I don't remember what happened, what happened? Then, a friend of mine, a girl, started to cry, Mother, Mother! Then the teacher was running with buckets or something. What's going on? I didn't know. But, stand up, broken window, then the front of ours, big holes. Inside the school. So, wow, I was bombed, but then nothing, no pain, just shaking my leg, that's it.
Stacy (as narrator): Kimiko was lucky to survive that attack, and the many she had lived through already. When the attacks would come at night, she and her family would hide in a small shelter. She said it was almost like a doghouse. She remembers one night in particular:
Kimiko: Then, bomb just threw out beside me. Very strange sound. Hewww, kind of, air runs that kind of goes to bomb in the earth, but not, not works. Just, that's it.
Stacy (as narrator): A bomb landed nearby but didn't detonate, and she would contemplate every night that she, or members of her family, might die there.
Kimiko: But we were lucky, nobody hurts. Every night like that. So, most of the, half of my family evacuated to next prefecture, Chiba.
Stacy (as narrator): But Kimiko stayed with her father when her mom and some of her siblings left, because she wanted to stay at her girls school. It was a prestigious school, all her friends were there. But things were obviously getting worse and it became clear she had to go.
Kimiko: Every day getting bad. So, school was bombed. The next day, I had to evacuate to next prefecture, Chiba. Chiba ken. So, my brother took me to. My mother couldn't sleep waiting for me to come home.
Stacy: I can only imagine.
Stacy (as narrator): Ten days after she evacuated, on March 9th, 1945, American forces conducted air raids over Tokyo, "incinerating nearly 16 square miles" per the New York Times, and killing as many as 100,000 people.
Kimiko: When I saw Tokyo sky was from Chiba prefecture, west side, all sky was red. Tokyo was burning.
Stacy (as narrator): This bombing of Tokyo, known as Operation Meetinghouse, was intended to break the morale of the Japanese people and decimate Japan's war effort. In addition to the loss of life, around a million people lost their homes.
Kimiko: I thought my father, my brother, I hope they are safe, I was thinking, but they are okay.
My older brother was almost blind because too much smoke. They have to fight with the fire. Then can’t see, almost blind. Father has to take him to evacuate, run away fire. So, everybody run away.
Stacy (as narrator): Kimiko thought about whether she would have been blind had she stayed, or dead.
Kimiko: So, the next day, Father came back. House was standing, but all the surrounded, black – burned. But the wind changed, wind, same day, same way. Wind comes. My house is burned, but inside was safe.
Stacy (as narrator): All her neighbors lost their homes.
Stacy (as narrator): She said out of the 300 other students she knew before the war, she didn't know what happened to probably 250 of them. Where did they go? Did they live or did they die? She missed her friends, studying with them, playing with them, their smiles.
She may have been safer in Chiba Prefecture, but life was far from easy there.
Kimiko: No food, no store, no doll-making business, nothing. We have to survive ourselves. So, Tokyo grown up city, people three generations, don't know farmers, but we were farmers for three, four years to make rice, plant, make seed to plant, take, take out that plant to put field, then make rice, make potatoes, make vegetables, all the things.
But, well, that was very, very hard because we never know those things till, but we have to make food, otherwise we dig, pound, got snail, many things for protein, because no food. My mother's clothes, kimono, bring to farmer's place, and they give us rice, miso paste, uh, beans, little bit basic things. Because no business, no store, ah, very hard to survive.
Stacy (as narrator): She said they ate snakes, frogs, and other terrible things, and were hungry every day. Lots of people were sick, there wasn't enough food. She would go with her mom to get water, carrying it back using buckets balanced on a stick over her shoulders, called a tenbin. She was a small girl, and it was a long walk with lots of stairs down, and then back up with the water. Then there were the insects, she said, that would bite their legs. It was a hard life, but she said despite the hardship, she said they helped each other and they were lucky to survive.
Stacy (as narrator): It took time to rebuild in Tokyo. She was around 14 when the war was over, but there was no place to live there. It was all burned, and it had to be rebuilt. She told me that later on, she reflected on life at that time, that life was very difficult then, but they shared in the difficulty together. They had to accept their environment, their existence, otherwise they couldn’t live it.
Kimiko: No money, difficult time, but we love each other, help each other.
Stacy (as narrator): This seems to be the foundation for her philosophy on life: acceptance. And through acceptance, resilience.
Kimiko: So, when I come back, came back, 16 years old. Tokyo was amazing. People working hard and build a house. Wow. Crazy busy. But, uh, wonderfully, city is back.
Oh, everything busy. Doll-making is all Saturday, Sunday, night, daytime. Always you have to work. Lots and lots of dolls you have to make. So, I couldn't go back to school.
Stacy (as narrator): She wanted to help her family in the family business – they needed her, she said – but she also wanted to make art, not the family's traditional dolls, but art. She wanted to be an artist. She couldn't go back to her school - five years had passed, so she had to study on her own.
Kimiko: So, then I studied by myself, drawing and taking private lesson. Dessin, woodblock prints, ceramics, calligraphy. Everything, but not go to school. Private lesson, that mean little bit more the time I could do. Family business, doll-making.
Stacy (as narrator): It was at some point in those years after the war, when she had returned to Tokyo, that she started wondering the big question of her life: Who was Kimiko?
Kimiko: I don't have a choice to be born Kimiko and the two parents, brothers, just my, my fortune, then my life started. I have to accept that kind of environment, existence. Then my own drive to live.
Stacy (as narrator): She was thinking deeply about who she was, and what her life would be, and what she would do with it. Who she wanted to be. She continued working in the family business, making art and taking lessons. She knew she wanted to be an artist, but how would that come to be?
Now, in Japan at the time, only men were taken seriously as artists, and women artists were seen as hobbyists, not a profession. It was a man’s world, she said.
So Kimiko starts to accept that this was the life she was born into but she decides that she can make a life she wants out of the one she has.
Kimiko: Then I have to start now to live my own way. But together, I have environment, nice parents, nice, kind brothers, lots of love, then, who is a Kimiko? I want to find out Kimiko, what I am, why I'm here, what I'm going to do. That kind of question is quite a long time.
Stacy (as narrator): Her reality was that she was born into a Japanese doll-making family, she was very poor, especially before the war, and, as she pointed out, there wasn't access to information like there is today. But, she realized, she'd have to work within her limitations and make her own way as an artist.
So, she begins moving away from the traditional doll, and starts to infuse a little bit of herself and her philosophies into the technique to make something wholly her own. And then it seems that the word got out about her dolls.
Kimiko: So very famous man came to see me, because I was making some kind of very modern or different work than traditional types. Doll artist work.
Stacy (as narrator): This famous man is dumbfounded by the fact that a young girl is making these beautiful modern dolls. He didn't believe she was the artist. She said he didn't talk much, but just stood there, with a look of surprise on his face. Her brother begins explaining to this famous man that Kimiko does a good job, her work is like a man’s; but she said, he never seemed to believe it was really hers. She was in a man's world, but she was making it her own.
Kimiko talks about how humans have been making figures, or dolls, for tens of thousands of years—before we made shoes, or even clothes. These were spiritual objects, carved from wood or stone, long before they became toys. Her dolls evoke this sense of spiritual connection. They are not toys; they’re art.
Kimiko: Maybe people don't call my work doll. Just a figure or ...
Stacy: Sculpture.
Kimiko: That kind of things, yeah. Ah, sculptor. Some people call me sculptor. But, uh, well, I'm a doll-maker. Three generation traditional doll-maker, I was born.
Stacy (as narrator): One day, a Japanese-Canadian architect with an interest in Japanese art came to see the family of doll-makers. Kimiko gave him a carving lesson to get started in doll making, and at some point later on, Jim asked Kimiko to marry him. She wasn't sure at first she wanted to get married – she was the oldest daughter, her dad had had a stroke recently, her mom was getting older – and did she want to share her life with someone? But he asked her again, and she decided he was different from the men she knew in Japan, softer, kinder, and he admired her art, so she finally said yes. They married when she was 30 years old.
Soon after, her new husband left for a job in Pakistan, while she stayed in Tokyo and had an exhibition of her dolls. Then he came back, and they took a flight to Guam for Jim's job. It was supposed to be a few months. It ended up being two years.
Kimiko: I don't like Guam – nothing, jungle, and nowhere. I was homesick. I might have suicide or something like that. I miss it. My family, Tokyo very much. Nowhere to go because my husband is Monday to Saturday, Sunday morning to 10 o'clock working.
Stacy: Oh! When did you have your children? How many children did you have?
Kimiko: Two. But Guam, I had one, oldest son. Another one is made in Canada. Eric.
Stacy: Right. And, and so, were you making your dolls when you were in Guam?
Kimiko: No, I can't. I was just sick. Homesick. That's it. Nothing to do. I just borrowed a record. Bach violin concerto or something, scratched, terrible record from library all day. Nothing to do. But when I was pregnant, I get a little bit stronger, not homesick anymore. I have to be strong because I will be a mother. So that helped.
Stacy (as narrator): Her son Mark arrived, and after two difficult years in Guam, they eventually went back to Tokyo for a few months, then embarked on a year-long tour of Europe so Jim could study the architecture.
Kimiko: Every country we were traveling by car. My husband drive, uh huh, yeah. That time, five dollars a day, that trip, very poor bed and breakfast kind of pension. Their home is staying, eat is their kitchen. Not like nice hotel, no, no heat, no hot water, no toilet in the room.
Stacy (as narrator): They were traveling on savings, like gypsies she said. Every day was a different place. It wasn’t an easy trip but I asked if she looked back on that time fondly after all these years. Was she glad she did it?
She said she was glad, she got tough there. One year by car with a young baby – that time was terrible.
Thirty years in Japan, then a couple of years in Guam and back to Tokyo, a year around Europe by car, and then finally to Canada, where her second son Eric was born.
I asked her what she learned from all her travels. She once again talked about acceptance.
Kimiko: Well, learned since I was little, but too young to understand. But getting older, then I was thinking, human get environment over fortune. It’s without choice. Everybody born without choice to be American, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Guamanian, don't know. But that kind of reality is, we have to accept it. Already accepted, that's why Kimiko is born.
Stacy (as narrator): The gift Kimiko was giving me was a lesson on acceptance. We don't choose our circumstances, but instead we have to accept them, embrace them, and make the best of them to move forward.
And that lesson is what she expresses in her art.
Kimiko: Happy I feel, that is still I have life, that's why I felt sadness, loneliness, many things are still I have life. Life is really thinking, always not happy. Lots of, lots of sad things. People think my doll is crying.
Yes, some are crying. But some are meditating, or some are accepting. Some are bearing their existence. That kind of things I put in the dolls face, figures, everything. So, my lonely feeling, spiritual things, strongly I want to make my figure. Long, not arms, not feet, not breast, not hip. That kind of things I don't want show my figure, almost cut, take off everything. The more loneliness feeling, or sadness feeling, is a long shape. That's why most of the doll is very simple but quite tall.
Stacy (as narrator): She told me how important line and shape are to her work. For example, short figures are viewed as happy – hers, however, are tall, with delicate lines, and few details. She must carve them carefully, as any small change in line can reflect an entirely different emotion.
Once they settled in Canada, she found she had very little time. Her children needed her. She didn't have the time to search for what she should be doing. She had to just do. Finding moments here and there to create.
Kimiko: So, limited situation, human has to be living best way.
Stacy (as narrator): So, she made dolls in the traditional Japanese way that she knew.
She would grab five minutes here or ten minutes there, whenever she could, and the constraint of time paradoxically gave her more time to create – she could concentrate, she said, in the little time she had. So in those few minutes, whenever she had the time, she would create her figures that illustrate these universal human emotions, as well as acceptance.
She said her husband must have known that her art would help her survive a new life in Canada, where she knew no one, had no friends, and didn't speak the language. Her art became her focus, and within a few years, she had her first exhibition there.
Kimiko: First exhibition in Canada. Everybody crazy. But the big newspaper pick up. They never seen my types of work. The Canadian people understand, Japanese are like a Zen philosophy or Buddhism. Yeah, Canadian people are very understanding my work. So, I'm glad.
Stacy (as narrator): Kimiko's husband was very involved in the art world as well, a ceramics collector, and they often gathered with artists until the wee hours of the morning. She said it took a while, but eventually Canada became her home too.
Kimiko: That kind of fight myself. But after 10, 20 years, even equal Canada, Japan, two countries I have inside. So, everybody start life, it's accepted their environment, their fortune.
Stacy (as narrator): As she evolved in Canada, and accepted her fate, as she calls it, her art evolved too.
These dolls start in the Japanese tradition, but they have her own unique spin on them, forged from her departure from Japan over 50 years ago. These dolls are unlike anything else in the world.
She starts each one by combining paste, rice paper, and wood shavings to create the basic form. Later, once that’s hardened, she brings out the form by carefully carving and sanding, and then adding white pigment made from powdered seashells. Then she sands it again, then she paints it using the powder and watercolor. The finished piece is a little over a foot tall.
In a way, I wondered if this process itself was a lesson on acceptance.
Kimiko lived her life in Canada, raising her children, making her art, and then in 2017 Jim passed away, and then tragically, her oldest son passed away soon after. She was without family in Canada and in poor health, so she decided to move again, becoming an immigrant in a new country once more, this time to live with her younger son in California.
Once there, she began to feel better, and continued making her art, reflecting on a new acceptance of her circumstances and expressing that through in her dolls. She even began exhibiting in the U.S., with her most recent exhibition wrapping up just a few months ago.
She said people come back to see her art, and they tear up. But, she adds
Kimiko: This doll is not crying but bearing their existence proudly.
Stacy (as narrator): She says that she might be slower now, but she’s still sculpting her dolls, exhibiting her work, and even writing her memoir. She's also recording her doll-making process, since no one else in the world makes a doll like she does. She's the one crazy doll-maker, she says, and that she’s lucky to be alive to do it.
When I asked her my favorite final question, it was this luck that she talked about:
Stacy: After 92 years on this earth, what do you know for sure?
Kimiko: Oh. I'm lucky, but I don't know, to wake up every morning. Oh, still I am here. Lucky. I don't know when, I have next day, or after this, nobody knows what happens. Till then, I'm lucky I had left living here, still.
Stacy (as narrator): She told me that she's lucky to be with her son and his wife, her grandchildren, the dog and cat, with new constraints that fuel her passion to create. That she doesn't want to live if she can’t create, and how lucky we are as humans.
Kimiko: We could create. We could make. We could think. We could live. We can draw. We can write. Wonderful things. Just time is limited. When end comes.
Stacy (as narrator): She's spent her life working to understand her circumstances, and evolve within it, contemplating her existence, making dolls and infusing her understanding of acceptance and resilience into them. She said at 92, she may be old, but she's still growing and learning every day. She doesn't know how much time she has left, but she can still create. And for her, that’s what matters.
Kimiko: Well, every day I wake up because I know my time is, I'm luckiest in the family, 92. Still, not very much pain, I could see, I could hear, I could use my arm, not strong, but I could create. So, I really thank you to this, this life. I, I have to say thank you to my, my life, 92 years life. My, my fortune.
Stacy (as narrator): That was Ms. Kimiko Koyanagi. I hope you learned something from her reflections and the wisdom she shared. Thank you to Ms. Koyanagi for being on this show. In the next episode, you'll hear from Mr. Herbert Sweat, a Vietnam veteran from New York.
Stacy (as narrator): If you have a guest suggestion, or just want to share your thoughts, head over to wisdomofagepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this episode and want to support the podcast, you can follow the show in your favorite podcast app, leave a rating and review, and share it with a friend. Wisdom of Age is a Raine Media production produced by me, Stacy Raine, with editing and sound design by Sandra Levy Smith. To discuss how we can help you bring important stories to life through sound visit rainemediaco.com.
Thanks for listening.