comma-like

Updated: May 14, 2025

But the ornament may also have taken its comma-like shape from the Yo and the Yin, the positive and the negative principles which by Chinese cosmographists were accounted the great primordial factors, and which occupy a prominent place in Japanese decorative art as the tomoye.* The cylindrical jewels evidently owed their shape to facility for stringing into necklaces or chaplets.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era