What makes Coming of Age Day visually distinctive is dress rather than liturgy. Young women traditionally wear furisode, a formal kimono style with long swinging sleeves reserved for unmarried women, often rented for the day at considerable expense from specialist shops, styled with an elaborate hairpiece and worn only this once by most who own or hire one.
Young men more commonly wear Western suits today, though a minority wear hakama, the pleated formal trouser skirt associated with traditional Japanese dress, over a kimono. After the municipal ceremony, groups of newly recognised adults commonly gather for photographs, meet former schoolmates for the first time in years, and visit a local shrine such as Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, where January crowds in furisode are a familiar seasonal image even though the visit is a personal choice rather than part of the ceremony proper.
Participation has slipped over recent decades alongside Japan's falling birthrate and shifting attitudes among younger adults toward formal civic occasions, and some municipalities have responded by moving ceremonies to more convenient dates such as summer holidays, when university students living away for study are more likely to be home, adapting a mid twentieth century civic invention to a demographic reality it was not designed for.