Kirk here with some links related to an NHK article about how a “pottery workshop in the Amakusa region of Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan, has recently begun producing figurines of next year’s Chinese zodiac sign, the tiger.”
The first URL will take you to the English article and the second URL is to a Japanese article on the same topic. I got the photo from the Japanese article. The third URL takes you to a page with an NHK video (in Japanese) about how the figurines are made. It seems that one reason that this is news is that Amakusa ware has been designated a “national traditional craft.”
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20211007_18/
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20211007/k10013295171000.html
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/lnews/kumamoto/20211006/5000013624.html