Hinamatsuri : The traditional girls’ festival converging to beauty

March 3rd is “hinamatsuri” in Japanese, the girls’ festival. The full set of the current hinamatsuri dolls contains a noble female doll, a noble male doll, three court lady dolls, five musician dolls, two high official dolls, three attendant dolls and furniture and equipments for the noble female doll.

The hinamatsuri is held in each private family which has a girl.

They set hina-dolls out of boxes which were stored for a year and adorn them with blossoms or sweets from two or three weeks before the day, and they eat “chirashi-zushi”, vinegar rice with cut fresh fish and shrimp which is covered with yellow thread-like grilled-egg. The hinamatsuri is an annual event where people hope their girls grow up healthy.

Public hinamatsuri festivals have been held across Japan recently. Shiga prefecture, which is next to Kyoto and has Biwa-ko Lake and traditional cultures of the samurai and merchants who were called “ohmi-syonin”, hold a lot of festivals in many places. My wife and I went to the hinamatsuri festival in a traditional Japanese sweets shop, Kanou-syojuan. Even though we started from our house in the gentle and subdued light of early March in the morning, on arriving there the weather turned good. It was surrounded by plum trees, and warm sun light and red curpets, “mousen” in Japanese, gave us relaxing. In the house there were a lot of old hina-dolls. What we were surprised at were two things primarily, one was the face of the dolls and the other was that there were no court lady dolls.

The face of the old dolls which were made in the Edo period(1603-1868) is different from current hina-dolls. Their face-line is kind of long and narrow and their eyes are long slits. It might be that the popular face at that time about three hundred years ago was narrow with slit eyes.

And though we couldn’t understand the reason why there were no court lady dolls, I figured out that there was no custom of court lady dolls in the Edo period after googling it.

The history of the hinamatsuri

The history of the hinamatsuri stems from the time of the Heian period (794-1192). Noble females in the Emperor’s court played with dolls. Moreover, since ancient times there had been the custom that people floated their paper dolls in the river. In the ancient Shinto thoughts people needed a way to get rid of their impurity in their daily lives. So they transferred their impurity to the paper dolls and by floating them in the river they believed their soundness would come back.


In addition, March 3rd is one of the five important days in a year as the change of the season. In the Heian period March 3rd was a day in our present April, Emperor’s Court people seemed to enjoy looking at peach blossoms. A prominent essay by Seisho-nagon says:” The third day of the third month is full of the soft sunshine of spring. Now is the time when the peach trees begin to bloom, and of course the willows too are particularly lovely at this time. It’s charming to see the buds still cocooned in their sheaths like silkworms –but on the other hand, once the leaves have opened they’re rather unpleasant.”

In total, the hinamatsuri began from the Edo period at the latest.

The Japanese culture converging to beauty

There were many original elements which were contained in the hinamatsuri, and these were independent from each other. There was the custom of performing a ritual on the change-day of seasons, the custom of the transferring impurity to paper dolls and the noble female habit in the Emperor’s court. However how the hinamatsuri had developed from the independent old elements is just Japanese style, I think. The core of converging to the hinamatsuri is beauty. Japanese people think that rituals should be beautiful. They think the custom of hoping for good health should be beautiful. And they think naturally that dolls have to be beautiful. The beauty which Japanese people want to make subconsciously is one part of the fundamental Japanese heart. Accordingly, the hinamatsuri is beautiful.


If I add a word on the beauty for Japanese people, it is not from a conception, for example the conception from a religion. How Japanese people recognize the beauty is from their feelings. In addition, Japanese people have found the beauty in changing scenes. In one case, they found it in the rust on iron sheets on the door of old temples. In another case, they found it in decayed wooden poles of old houses. If they had obeyed under the thoughts of Shinto, the rust and the rotting of wooden poles have to be just impurity which they should get rid of.


The forms of the hinamatsuri sets and faces of hina-dolls have been changing for a long time. It is Japanese style as well.