Saturday 24 September 2016

Fall Colours

September 24, 2016

For this Blog Party Link-Up, the theme is "Fall Colours".

I have decided to show a couple of the themed mailbox Gotochi cards from Japan.  Every season a new card appears with new artwork.  I always look forward to these interesting little cards.

Japan is always very proud of having four distinct seasons!


 This is the card from 2014.  My husband tells me that mushrooms and some types of dragonflies are thought of as Autumn items.


This is the card from 2015 which features a squirrel with an acorn.  It's rather sweet!



This is the Autumn card for 2016, which to be completely honest, I haven't bought yet. (Edited October 14, 2016 to say, I have this card now!) The animal on the front of this is a tanuki, or raccoon dog. Tanuki are quite prominent in Japanese folklore. You can read more about them on Wikipedia.  



6 comments:

Scriptor Senex said...

That mushroom is a Fly Agaric and is very symbolic of autumn in the UK.

Helen said...

Thank you! I had no idea.

There are many things here that Japanese people just take for granted that everyone knows, but I'm afraid I have no idea about so many things here!

Maria said...

This is an educational post for me on what are the things/symbols for autumn. All I knew before are pumpkins and spooky costumes!

Joy said...

How interesting I'd never thought of dragonflies and autumn although I've seen some giant ones recently. I liked the description of the raccoon dog in folk tales, what a curious creature.

Mail Adventures said...

It seems that there would be Gotochi postcards for every theme... I'm never tired of looking at them, they are great designs, in general.

The only Gotochi I've received isthis red mailbox :D

Helen said...

Joy, the tanuki is quite a common symbol here. The postcard's version is very "clean". One of my ex-student's grandmother made and then gave me an amigurumi version of a tanuki that was fairly anatomically correct. The stuffed creature was quite big...I had no idea what to do with it!

Maria, I didn't know what was thought of as autumn items either until I did this.There are some food items that are thought of as fall things in Japan, but other things I didn't know. Always happy to learn new things :-)

Eva, there are some amazing Gotochi cards. I was at a post office in another prefecture this morning, so stay tuned, you never know what you'll see on my blog in the future!