My Neighbor Totoro and the Katori Senko: The Meiji Invention That Gave Japanese Summer Its Smell

Spoiler-Free Cultural Analysis

This article explores the real history behind Japan's mosquito coil and the ceramic pig that holds it — a Meiji-era invention, a wife's idea that took seven years to reach the shelves, and a household object that became a season. It contains no plot details from となりのトトロ (Tonari no Totoro: My Neighbor Totoro); only the material world the film depicts.

Key Takeaways

• The spiral mosquito coil is not an ancient folk object. It was invented commercially in the Meiji period, and the company that made it can name the year, the person, and the plant it came from.
• The spiral shape was conceived by the founder's wife in 1895 and did not go on sale until 1902. Seven years passed between the idea and the product, which tells you how hard the manufacturing problem was.
• 蚊遣豚 (kayaributa: the ceramic mosquito-coil pig) is a genuinely uncertain object. Its origin is debated, and the honest position is that nobody can point to a single documented inventor.

Key Terms Explained

• 蚊取線香 (Katori Senkō) / Mosquito Coil — Literally "mosquito-catching incense." A slow-burning spiral of powdered insecticidal plant matter.
• 除虫菊 (Jochūgiku) / Pyrethrum Daisy — The flower whose dried heads contain the natural insecticide the coil was originally built around.
• 蚊遣 (Kayari) / Mosquito Smoking-Out — The older practice of burning green wood or leaves to drive mosquitoes away, predating the coil by centuries.
• 蚊遣豚 (Kayaributa) / Mosquito-Coil Pig — The round, pig-shaped ceramic vessel that holds a burning coil.
• 縁側 (Engawa) / Veranda Strip — The narrow wooden platform running along the outside of a traditional house, between the interior and the garden.

The Smell That Meant the Windows Were Open

I grew up in a 平屋 (hiraya: single-storey house) in 足立区 (Adachi Ward: a working-class ward in north-east Tokyo), and summer in that house had a smell before it had a temperature.

It came from a green spiral sitting in a metal dish, usually on the 縁側 (engawa: the narrow wooden veranda strip along the outside of the house), sometimes just inside the sliding door. Somebody lit it in the late afternoon and nobody mentioned it. By evening the smell had settled into the room the way humidity does.

I did not experience it as pleasant, exactly. It is a slightly acrid smoke, and if you sat too close your eyes stung. But it meant the windows were open, which meant the season had turned, which meant the evenings would be long. Smell attaches itself to circumstances rather than to preference.

What I remember most clearly is that nobody in my family thought of it as anything. It was simply what you did in summer, the way you put out the 風鈴 (fūrin: a small glass wind chime) or switched the futon covers. Objects that operate at that level of ordinariness leave no explanation behind them. You have to go looking.

From a Seed Packet to a Spiral

The Plant Came First, and It Came from Abroad

The story starts with a plant that was not growing in Japan.

In 1885, 上山英一郎 (Ueyama Eiichirō), a young entrepreneur from 和歌山 (Wakayama Prefecture), met an American plant company president named H. E. Amoore and agreed to exchange unusual seeds and seedlings. The following year Amoore sent a package that included 除虫菊 (jochūgiku: the pyrethrum daisy), a flower whose dried heads contain a natural insecticide.

Ueyama harvested his first crop in 1887 and experimented with milling it into powder. In 1888, while staying in 本郷 (Hongō, a district of Tokyo), he happened to lodge with an incense maker, and tried packing the imported powder into a bamboo tube. That accidental pairing — an insecticidal plant and a craftsman who made things that burn slowly — is where the object begins.

The stick came in 1890. Ueyama's company, 大日本除虫菊 (Dainihon Jochūgiku), records it as the world's first mosquito-repellent incense stick, invented and put on sale that year.

The Spiral Was His Wife's Idea

Here is the detail that changes how the object reads.

A stick burns for perhaps forty minutes. A Japanese summer night does not. The problem was duration, and lengthening a straight stick is not an option — it becomes fragile and unwieldy.

In 1895, Ueyama's wife 上山ゆき (Ueyama Yuki) conceived the coiled form. Company records name her directly for the idea and date the beginning of prototyping to that year.

Then comes the part that gets left out. The patent application for the spiral was filed in 1900. The spiral coil did not go on sale until 1902.

Seven years separate the idea from the product. Anyone who has tried to make something knows what that gap contains — a shape that will not hold, a material that cracks while drying, a burn rate that runs unevenly around a curve, a wooden mould that has to be cut and recut. Company material preserves a prototype mould and a dryer from that period. The idea was the easy half.

What the Coil Replaced

The coil did not invent the practice. 蚊遣 (kayari: smoking out mosquitoes) is much older — burning damp wood, leaves, or sawdust to produce smoke that drove insects out of a room.

What the Meiji product changed was reliability. Green-wood smoke is uneven, smells strongly of whatever you burned, and requires attention. A manufactured coil burns at a known rate, produces a predictable amount of smoke, and can be sold in a box. The innovation was standardisation, not chemistry.

That is a very Meiji kind of achievement. A folk practice was not replaced by a foreign one; it was industrialised into something repeatable.

The Pig Nobody Can Fully Explain

The 蚊遣豚 (kayaributa: mosquito-coil pig) is the part of this story where I have to stop making claims.

The object is unmistakable — a rounded ceramic pig with a hole in its side, the coil sitting inside where the smoke drifts out of the snout. It is one of the most recognisable summer objects in Japan, and its origin is genuinely disputed. Explanations circulate involving pottery towns, cylindrical vessels that gradually acquired features, and older animal-shaped censers, but they are accounts rather than documented history.

I would rather say plainly that I do not know than repeat a tidy version. What can be said is that the pig is a container, not the invention. The coil was the technology; the pig is what a culture did with it once it existed.

What Survives When the Reason Goes

Modern Japanese homes are sealed, air-conditioned, and screened. The mosquito problem the coil solved has largely been engineered away, and the coil is no longer the standard answer even where mosquitoes remain. Plug-in devices and sprays do the work with no smoke and no ash.

The coil did not disappear. It moved sideways, into the category of things that are kept because of what they signal rather than what they do. You will find it at outdoor stalls, at old houses, at summer events, on the shelf beside the wind chimes — the same shelf, essentially, where the culture stores its evidence of the season.

I have lived outside Japan for a long time now, and one of the odder effects of distance is that smell became the most reliable trigger I have. Not photographs, which I look at deliberately. A particular smoke drifting past can put me on that veranda without warning, and I am never prepared for it.

I think this is why the object outlived its necessity. It was installed during years when I was not evaluating anything, and it recorded the whole surrounding situation — the open windows, the long light, the fact that nobody was in a hurry. The mosquitoes were never really the point. They were just the reason it was there.

FAQ

Q: Are mosquito coils a traditional Japanese invention or a modern product? A: Both, depending on which part you mean. Smoking out mosquitoes is a very old practice in Japan, but the coil itself is a Meiji-period commercial invention with a documented company, founder, and dates. The plant it was built around, pyrethrum, was imported from the United States in 1886 and was not growing in Japan before that.

Q: Why is the holder shaped like a pig? A: Nobody can say with certainty, and I would treat any confident single answer with suspicion. Several explanations circulate about pottery origins and older vessel shapes, but they are competing accounts rather than settled history. What is clear is that the pig is a later container for an existing product, not the origin of the practice.

Q: Do Japanese households still use them? A: Less than they once did, since modern housing is sealed and air-conditioned and other products exist. They remain common outdoors, at older homes, and at summer events. The coil has shifted from being the standard tool to being a seasonal marker, which is a different kind of survival.

Key Insights to Remember

• The invention that mattered was not the insecticide but the burn time. A stick that lasts forty minutes does not solve a summer night, and the seven years between the spiral's conception in 1895 and its sale in 1902 measure how difficult it was to make a curved shape burn evenly and survive drying. Innovation is often located in the unglamorous half of a problem.
• The spiral was conceived by the founder's wife, and the company's own records say so plainly. It is worth noticing how easily that fact could have been lost. Household objects tend to be credited to firms rather than to people, and the ones who solved the domestic problem are frequently the ones least likely to be named.
• An object can outlive the problem it was built for and become something else entirely. The coil no longer has to defend a Japanese house, and it is still lit — because at some point it stopped being a tool and became the thing that tells a household the season has changed. That transition happens without anyone deciding it.

Sources

• 金鳥のあゆみ 創業～明治時代 — 大日本除虫菊株式会社 (KINCHO)
• 皆様の暮らしの中にいつも 金鳥の渦巻 — 大日本除虫菊株式会社 (KINCHO)
• となりのトトロ (1988) — スタジオジブリ