One of my mother’s friends recently sent this musical card to me:
March 3rd – in addition to being my mother’s birthday – is Girls Day in Japan.
Girls Day is usually called “Hina-Matsuri” (hee-na mat-soo-ree), which literally means Dolls Festival in Japanese. Around this time of the year, girls display a set of dolls on a red staircase-like stand. At the top are the Empress and the Emperor, and below are their attendants, musicians, sake bottles and cups, chests, and other props. The dolls are dressed in the elaborate style of the Heian period (794 – 1185), a time when Japanese art was greatly influenced by the worship of Amida Buddha and a period that some historians call Japan’s “golden age” of arts.
Most Japanese families celebrate this day with a nice dinner, sometimes a visit to a local shrine or temple to pray for their daughters’ happiness. The doll display usually goes up in the living room one week before Girls Day and is taken down a few days after. My grandmother told me that well before her time (she was born in 1900), people marked this day by making simple dolls out of paper. They deliberately made the paper dolls simple, even crude-looking because they believed that in the process of making these unattractive figures they transferred their illnesses or problems to the dolls. They then tossed them into the nearest river with the belief that they were casting away the things that ailed them.
I didn’t grow up celebrating this day, probably because it’s my mother’s birthday which my father thought was infinitely more important, and also because we moved around from country to country. Unpacking the dolls, setting them up and taking them down was probably too much trouble. I didn’t really learn about the tradition until I moved to Japan and lived there after college. My aunt invited me over to see her display, then fed me a nice helping of her home cooking. She’d send me home with some cash and traditional sweets called wagashi.
Happy Girls day to all of you girls. Have a good one!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
What a perfect holiday, I love this!
Happy Girls Day! Never heard of this tradition before. Very interesting. And Happy Birthday to your mom. I trust she had a wonderful day.
Paz
Lily! It IS a great holiday. I love it. And it hasn’t gotten ridiculously commercialized – at least I didn’t think that when I lived there.
Happy Girls Day to you, too, Paz.
What a wonderful card, and I hear your girl in the background!
“They deliberately made the paper dolls simple, even crude-looking because they believed that in the process of making these unattractive figures they transferred their illnesses or problems to the dolls. They then tossed them into the nearest river with the belief that they were casting away the things that ailed them.” —I LOVE this.