City wants to learn more about kamikaze mascot doll

The mysterious journey of a small cloth doll sewn together by a young Japanese girl more than 60 years ago to protect Japan’s soldiers during World War II has ended, for now, in Olathe.

The doll is only the second mascot doll known to have survived a kamikaze attack on an American warship.

The doll, which was part of the estate of the late Bob Enright, will be on display beginning at 7 p.m. Nov. 6 at the Olathe American Legion, 410 E. Dennis, Olathe, as part of a PowerPoint presentation and fact-finding effort by Kevin Corbett, Olathe Parks and Recreation director.

Little is known about the doll. Before Enright died, he told Corbett that someone had given him the doll several years ago because of Enright’s interest in collecting memorabilia dealing with Olathe, Johnson County and World War II.

“Bob told me that the plane crashed into the ship and (the doll) slid across the deck and the sailor picked it up,” Corbett said. “Who gave it to him? We don’t know and unfortunately Bob’s gone now.

“By talking about it at the Legion, I hope to trigger the memory of somebody who knows something about it, which would be great because that would give us a better context on the whole thing.”

The doll’s authenticity has been verified by Ellen Schattschneider, a cultural anthropologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

“Other mascot dolls have survived either with Japanese families who have kept them and then given them to a museum, or by American or Australian servicemen who collected them and they would find their way into the flea market circuit,” Schattschneider said. “But I know of only one other doll whose story corresponds to this one; that it was retrieved by an American serviceman in the context of a kamikaze hit on the vessel.”

Corbett said a handwritten note accompanied the doll. It said the doll had been retrieved in 1944. Kamikaze missions didn’t begin until October 1944 in the Philippine Islands, so that information has given Schattschneider a window in which to try to determine what ship was hit and possibly identify the pilot.

“In the last year of the war, particularly the battle of Okinawa and the battle of the Philippines, the dolls were being made for pilots, but there was a shift in the sense that people knew that some of these pilots, especially the kamikaze pilots, were not going to make it; that their mission was to die,” she said. “So the function of the dolls changes to not to protect (their lives) but to enable them to complete their mission and in that sense be protected.

“The problem is I don’t know much about this story. I have a number of friends in Japan, historians and amateur historians of the war, who have an amazing capacity to, if I can garner more details on this end, I think they will be able to figure out the pilot on their end.”

That’s the reason for the Nov. 6 presentation, Corbett said.

“We’re hoping somebody knows something about it; who gave it to Bob,” he said. “If we knew who it came from then we could cross reference to what ship he was on.”

With so many aspects connected to the doll, Schattschneider said it was almost a true-life “Great Expectations.”

“There are so many, many stories that intersect this small object,” she said. “There’s the young woman who made the doll, the young man, the pilot who died, and the American serviceman and then everyone else; it’s kind of a wonderful historical object lesson.”

And it’s a story and a journey Corbett and Schattschneider want to see end appropriately.

“My goal is to find its rightful place,” Corbett said. “Culturally, it’s bigger than all of us. Does it help to put it into the Smithsonian, into a World War II museum? Sure it does, but where does it mean the most in the big scheme of the world.

“If it was my uncle, if it was my brother, if it was something of one of our (soldiers), how powerful would that be (to get it back)? If we could find more information on this, I could go through the records and end up figuring what planes hit the ship and narrow it down to a few pilots.”

Schattschneider said she would like to see the doll returned to Japan, either to the family of the pilot or to the woman who made it, and then placed in a museum.

“I think it is so important that this object find its way into a public museum, either in this country or Japan, so that other people can see it and use it as an object to think about the war,” she said. “In cases where the survival of such objects is relatively rare, it seems to me there is a great social civic need to preserve these in a public setting.

“It’s always a danger that if the object is kept privately, that as succeeding generations come along, the connection to the object is sort of loosened and it just becomes a thing and maybe doesn’t survive. And that happens so quickly.”

Neither she nor Corbett said they could place a monetary value on the doll.

“It’s such a unique artifact, I have no idea and I don’t want to know,” Corbett said. “I’m not the owner of it, I’m only the carrier of it and I’m trying to find the right home for it, whether that’s in an American museum or back in Japan.”

Schattschneider said she thinks the monetary value of the doll would be minimal, but the greater value is in its historical and cultural significance.

“Historically, academically and in terms of public civic knowledge about these events and what happened during the war, and these smaller stories in a way, they are invaluable in that sense,” she said. “And I think they are objects that belong in museums and in public contexts where they can be appreciated by lots of people.”

Anyone with historical knowledge of this doll or of any other mascot doll is asked to contact Corbett at 971-6263 or Schattschneider at (617) 955-0517.

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