Casting A Spell

Several Bo-Jo-Bo dolls are seen here in various stages of production and completion. [Photo: Arin Greenwood]

Yuki's dolls came in a pair - a male and female. The female wore a coconut-fiber skirt and a pistachio nut hat (the male was bald and nude). According to a small blue card attached to the dolls, the Bo-Jo-Bos grant wishes: "If you need some of my strength, love or money you can have all I've got but you need to fold my arms for strength, cross my legs for love and if you need money, tie my hands behind my back. Then all you need to do is hang me up where you can see me and have faith."

Obviously, Yuki crossed the doll's legs.

Yuki got a call from a boy she'd known in Osaka nine years earlier. Yuki and the boy got married; they opened a flower shop together. They were happy.

All this, said Yuki last May on a Japanese news program, because of the Bo-Jo-Bo dolls.

In June, 2005, Japan's emperor visited Saipan and was photographed holding Bo-Jo-Bo dolls that wore pistachio hats. Japanese demand for Bo-Jo-Bo dolls went wild - by one estimate, a million dollars worth of Bo-Jo-Bo dolls have been sold every month since June of last year. The dolls made Yuki happy but all that money had to lead to trouble.

The story of the Bo-Jo-Bo dolls, as far as anyone can recall, goes like this: Bo-Jo-Bo dolls were invented in the early 1960s by a then-Trust Territory employee, Dr. William Vitarelli, who wanted to illustrate that local materials could be used to create a marketable handicraft. Dr. Vitarelli's dolls were made of large bayogo beans, which inspired the doll name. They came in pairs connected with coconut fiber string. The dolls didn't wear clothes or hats, their mouths were cut into the beans, their noses were made of flame tree seeds.

Dr. Vitarelli offered to teach anyone who wanted to learn how to make the dolls. Two people - Manuel Kisa and Gus Camacho - took him up on it.

Manuel Kisa and his family started making the dolls in 1966, and earned a nice living. In 1967, Kisa - inspired by a Hawaiian hula girl doll he'd seen in one of Saipan's first cars - put a coconut fiber skirt on his dolls. He made a hat from half a large bayogo seed, and attached a card written by his father that said the dolls possessed mystical powers.

Manuel moved to Guam in 1976. Gus Camacho started making the dolls, then stopped in 1979. One of Gus's employees, Rodrigo Capati, went into business making Bo-Jo-Bos - these were made from the smaller bayogo seeds.

Rodrigo married Adela in 1983, and in 1984 opened Saipan Woodcraft Enterprises, which sold Bo Jo Bo dolls and woodcrafts. Ten years later Rodrigo's employee Tirzo Adriatico started Micronesian Woodcraft Enterprises. Micronesian Woodcraft made and sold products identical to Saipan Woodcrafts's.

Rodrigo and Adela stopped making woodcrafts and they changed their business's name to Saipan Handicraft so it wouldn't be confused with Tirzo's company. Rodrigo and Adela also changed the Bo Jo Bo's look: Adela noticed her employees eating a lot of pistachio nuts, and decided to make the pistachio nut shells into hats.

For the next ten-odd years, there were a handful of Bo-Jo-Bo manufacturers which made dolls in various forms. None but Saipan Handicraft used the pistachio nut hat. Rodrigo and Adela made around 200 Bo-Jo-Bo dolls a day which they sold for around $10 per doll.

And then Yuki went on television chalking up her good fortune to the pistachio-hatted Bo- Jo-Bo doll.

Sales, prices, and nastiness soared: Copycat manufacturers put pistachio nut hats on their dolls, trying to pass their dolls off as the Bo-Jo-Bos that got Yuki a husband. Letters in the local newspapers argued that Rodrigo and Adela had no right to make the dolls since they are ethnic Filipinos and Bo-Jo-Bo dolls come from the Marianas. People started claiming that their families had invented the Bo-Jo-Bo dolls years before Dr. Vitarelli was on the scene.

Meanwhile, both real and counterfeited Bo-Jo-Bo dolls with pistachio nut hats were selling for more than $45 a pair in Japan.

On January 17, 2006, the United States District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands ordered Micronesian Woodcraft Enterprises and 40 other unnamed defendants to stop putting pistachio nut shells on their Bo-Jo-Bo dolls. (While the court did not enjoin others from using the name 'Bo-Jo-Bo' doll or other common features of the dolls, Adela and Rodrigo plan to ask the court to prevent other Bo-Jo-Bo manufacturers from using other doll features including their red noses and white mouths.)

Adela says the knockoffs haven't stopped - in fact, she says, they're increasing, with fly-by-night companies on Saipan, Rota, and Korea making and selling Bo-Jo-Bo dolls with the pistachio nut hat.

Adela says counterfeiting companies aren't just cutting into Saipan Handicraft's share of Bo-Jo-Bo sales - they're also cutting into already depleted bayogo supplies. Further, Rota, which had provided a lot of Adela and Rogrigo's bayogo seeds, passed a law forbidding the exportation of bayogo seeds - the law was passed explicitly to cut off supplies to non-Rotanese Bo-Jo-Bo manufacturers.

"We've increased productivity by one hundred dolls per day. We could sell more but the seeds are now scarce," says Adela. "We're now making around three hundred per day. Selling every one of them."

Adela says she doesn't know how long the Bo-Jo-Bo craze will last, but she intends to keep with Bo-Jo-Bo dolls once prices come back to earth. "Me and my husband have been through a lot but we never separate," Adela says. "Why? Because we're tied together. Because of the Lord and my Bo-Jo-Bo."

Manuel Kisa also wants to get back into the Bo-Jo-Bo business. He's planning to make dolls in the old style - mouth cut into a smile rather than painted; coconut-fiber rope rather than store-bought twine; no pistachio hat. Parting with tradition, he'll make his dolls out of wood.

"I want to make the original one," Manuel says, "But it's very hard for me to find the seeds."