An American Icon, Made in Japan
Barbie has a secret: she may have been dreamed up in the US, but she came to life in a Tokyo hotel room.
The Barbie doll is inextricably associated with ideals of fashion and femininity in modern society. She’s “both a relic from another era, and a bellwether of changing ideas about women and work, sex, and men,” as the The New Yorker once put it. In other words, she’s a character as American as apple pie.
So you might be surprised to learn that she was, in fact, made entirely in Japan.
Ruth Handler, co-founder of the toy company Mattel, came up with the idea for Barbie in 1956, but at the time the firm lacked the know-how to manufacture it. Mattel engaged a Japanese company called Kokusai Boeki Kaisha (“International Trading Company,” or KBK for short.) KBK served as a middleman, linking Mattel with local factories capable of manufacturing dolls to their specifications.
The bodies were plastic, popped out of molds in batches. But each and every one of Barbie’s outfits needed to be sewn by hand. Eventually, an army of Japanese needleworkers would be enlisted for this task. But first, they needed samples from which to work. The task of creating them fell to American fashion designer Charlotte Johnson and her Japanese assistant, the seamstress Fumiko Miyatsuka.
Despite the key role she played in helping launch Barbie, Miyatsuka’s name has never appeared in any English history of the dolls. In fact, Japan seems to have been written entirely out of the official history altogether. “Ruth and her designers worked hard on the doll until she was just right,” explains a 2017 picture-book sponsored by Mattel on the topic. “Mattel introduced Barbie at the 1959 toy fair… She sold out everywhere!” Ruth is even portrayed cutting doll-clothing patterns in the 2023 “Barbie” movie, which doesn’t mention Japan, either.
In reality, Barbie’s story starts in 1956, when Handler encountered a doll called Bild Lili while on vacation in Switzerland with her family. The doll was based on a sexy starlet from a popular German newspaper cartoon and intended purely for grown-up fans. But Handler’s teenage daughter said she wanted one to decorate her room. This triggered an epiphany. The conventional wisdom was that girls only wanted toy babies to nurture. Handler believed that there was an untapped market for a doll that was older than the consumer – a doll, in other words, that was aspirational. Only maybe not quite so sexy. In fact, she should be downright wholesome. So Ruth really did work hard transforming naughty Lili into nice Barbie. But she didn’t actually make Barbie. Japanese artisans did.
First, let me set the historical stage. It is no coincidence that Germany and Japan play roles in Barbie’s birth. Toys have been big business globally since the late 19th century, when Germany took the lead in supplying the children of the world with dolls, rocking horses, and cast-iron soldiers. But the chaos of World War I knocked them out of the game.
Japanese toy companies swooped in to replace them. They proved so adept that by 1934 US toy companies were petitioning the government for tariffs to help stem the “invasion of the American market by Japanese toys.” Soon after, the Second World War put an end to Japan’s designs on the global toy industry, seemingly forever. But then something interesting happened. The Allied occupation forces enlisted Japan’s toymakers to help rebuild the nation’s war-battered economy, transforming makers of playthings into unlikely saviors.
This is, not coincidentally, where the story of Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World begins. Toys and silks were the first products that America allowed Japan to export after war’s end. The very first shipments weren’t sold; they were shipped as compensation for desperately needed American grain. In other words, toys literally helped keep the nation from starving. As Japan slowly recovered from war, toymakers once again began flooding US marketplaces with their products. They may not have been as well made as those of their American rivals, but they were made well enough, and far cheaper than American toys to boot.
It was one of these toys that attracted the attention of Mattel staff: a baby doll made by the Japanese firm Masudaya, spotted in a Japanese department store on an early research trip. It was essentially a cheaper version of the “Betsy Wetsy” doll, capable of “drinking” from a bottle and then “urinating” the contents out. (Side note: if I told you that Betsy Wetsy was next on the Hollywood movie development slate, would you believe me? Hold on to your diapers: it’s true.) What most impressed them about the baby doll was the quality of its clothing. This was key, because Barbie was a fashion doll, and precise sewing would be required to make her clothing fit in a stylish way.
In her 2011 memoir Baabii to Watashi (“Barbie and Me”), Miyatsuka writes with great pride of her role in Barbie’s genesis. In the winter of 1957, Mattel sent a three-person team to Japan, consisting of the engineer Seymour Adler, the bilingual Frank Nakamura, and clothing designer Charlotte Johnson. KBK dispatched Miyatsuka, then twenty five years old, to meet them at Haneda airport.
