Obsoleteness warning: the design of Karin-chan changed following the 2005 merger with the village of Miyamori: the magariya was replaced with the Miyamori megane-bashi and the flower was changed as well. I am keeping this page here as a shrine devoted to the previous design.

遠野市のイメージキャラクター :
「カリンちゃん」

SVG | EPS | PNG

The mascot of Tōno City:
"Karin-chan"

Karin-chan is the mascot of Tōno City, Iwate Prefecture, Japan. Her name is a combination of "Kappa", mythical creatures who haunt Tōno, and "rindō", the name of the flower she is usually carrying (which I think can be translated to "bellflower" or "gentian"). As for "chan", it's simply a "politeness" suffix that is added in Japanese to the names of cute/small/beloved persons.

It didn't take long for the sheer cuteness of Karin-chan to seduce me into wanting to put her everywhere: computer desktop backgrounds an login screens, fax cover sheets, report title pages, etc. Ever the perfectionist, I really wanted a scalable (vectorized) Karin-chan, so I spent about three hours re-drawing her with sodipodi. This drawing is based on a picture I took of the big Karin-chan who greets you at the base of the stairs of the overpass at Tōno Station. Close examination will reveal a few differences, and the colors are probably wrong... but at first glance they're quite similar!

Above is a 640x623 transparent PNG bitmap rendition of my original Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) drawing. If your word processing/desktop publishing software doesn't support using SVG (e.g. MS Word), I have also prepared an Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) version.

Personal use of this picture shouldn't be a problem, but obviously, you should ask Tōno City for permission before using Karin-chan for commercial purposes...