Hyottoko

Common card · No. 377765

Hyottoko (火男) is a comical Japanese character, portrayed through the use of a mask. His mouth is puckered and skewed to one side. Some masks have different eye sizes between the left and right eyes. He is often wearing a scarf around his head (usually white with blue dots). There is a similar character for women called Okame (阿亀) or Otafuku (阿多福). The origin of the name comes from "fire" (火, hi) and "man" (男, otoko); this could be because the character is blowing fire with a bamboo pipe, hence the shape of the mouth. Local dialects transformed it into Hyottoko (ひょっとこ), palatalizing hio to hyo and geminating the /t/.

Read on Wikipedia · Image Gyokkō (Japan, dates unknown), Public domain