I'm generally not one to pick up trinkets and such on my travels. My cameras are more than enough baggage to deal with, and I'm extraordinarily good at misplacing and/ or breaking just about everything I come across.
This was just too cute to pass up though. It's a pottery rendition of a mudskipper, which I was given by a pottery shop in Okinawa. The nice woman behind the counter saw me staring at the cute little mudskippers in the front of her shop and took pity on me. Or perhaps she just wanted me to get out of everyone else's way.
I have a special affection for mudskippers (yes, I realise this isn't normal) because of the many hours I spent crawling around stinky, rotten mud in the mangroves of Singapore trying to get good photos of these unusual fish, which live much of their lives above water.
In Okinawa, they're called "ton ton mi" (トントンミ), often with the last syllable extended for cuteness effect.
"ton ton" in Japanese is onomatopoeia for the hopping locomotion that mudskippers prefer. "ton" also happens to be one of my nicknames, so I've named my little mudskipper "ton ton".