Hinamatsuri

Hinamatsuri, the "Dolls' Festival" or Girls' Day, is kept on the third day of the third month, 3 March, and is dedicated to the health and happiness of girls. Its emblem is the hina-ningyo, a set of ornamental dolls representing the emperor, empress and their court in Heian-era dress, displayed at home on a tiered stand covered in red cloth, with the imperial pair on the top step and attendants, musicians and furnishings below. Families with daughters set out the dolls in the days before and, by custom, put them away promptly afterward, a superstition holding that a late-cleared display delays the daughter's marriage.

Behind the elegant dolls lies an older and quite different rite. The festival descends in part from a purification custom, nagashi-bina, in which paper or straw dolls were rubbed against the body to take on a person's impurities and misfortunes and then floated away down a river or out to sea, carrying the ill away with them; the display dolls are, in origin, a courtly and domestic refinement of these scapegoat figures. Special foods belong to the day, coloured diamond-shaped rice cakes (hishimochi), sweet rice crackers (hina-arare), clam soup and a mild sweet sake (shirozake). Hinamatsuri thus joins a charming domestic celebration of daughters to an ancient logic of transferring misfortune onto a figure and sending it away.

A full, elaborate hina-ningyo display, with the complete court of fifteen or more figures across several tiers along with their miniature furnishings, musical instruments and accessories, can cost several thousand dollars from a specialist doll maker, and Japanese custom generally holds that the set for a newborn daughter is given by her maternal grandparents as a significant and specifically gendered family gift marking her birth, a substantial one-time expense that many families budget for well in advance and that has supported a continuing specialist craft industry of doll makers producing sets ranging from simple single-tier displays to elaborate heirloom-quality collections.

Space and cost pressures in modern Japanese housing, particularly smaller urban apartments, have driven a documented shift toward smaller, simplified doll sets, sometimes just the imperial couple alone rather than the full attendant court, and toward compact storage designs, so that the tradition has adapted its material form considerably to fit contemporary housing and family budgets while keeping the core custom, a doll display specifically for a daughter's health and happiness put up and promptly taken down each year, essentially intact.