| Doll's Festival (Girl's Day)
Hina matsuri is an occasion to pray for young girls' growth and happiness. Most homes with girls display dolls for this Doll's Festival and dedicate to them peach blossoms. Hina matsuri is also called Momo no Sekku meaning festival of peach.
Hina is ancient word meaning doll and matsuri means festival. Momo means peach and sekku is another word for festival. Here you can see some dolls dedicated to this festival.
Full set of Dolls: Sitting at the top center are Emperor and Empress. At the next step three court ladies stand. At the 3rd step five musicians are playing. On the lowest two steps, are miniatures of tableware to serve these people.*1 | Small set with palace: Two warriors are guarding court people. They can be called "Samurai". The word "Samurai" came from "sumurau"=attend. "Samurai" is an attendant as guardian. On the right hand are peach blossoms.*2 | |
| Emperor and Empress: Empress is wearing twelve-layered ceremonial robe called juhni-hitoe. Why Doll's Festival is not a national holiday? The originally Boy's Festival was designated as common Children's Day. In some day, both Girl's Festival and Boy's Festival may become national holidays.*3 | | |
*1,*2,*3: The dolls exhibited here are the collection of Tanaka Honke Museum (Tanaka was a millionaire trader at Suzaka city in Nagano prefecture). Now they theirselves opened a web site. It is all in japanese. If you want to see in english. There was a free translation site by Arcnet Translation Page sangenjaya.arc.net.my/index-e.html. Recently I found this site was lost. Instead, I introduce the following site.
www.teletranslator.com:8060 (link was lost)
If you go there, click web translation and then write down or copy-paste "http://www.tanakahonke.org/" as URL and last, click translate above page and navigation is also possible. Unfortunately, menus are all shown by pictures and can not be translated. But other pages are well translated. The translation quality is fairly good. But there you will know the real meaning of "hina" as baby bird or chicken. The "hina ningyo"s (hina dolls) are so called as comparable to the loveliness of baby birds.
Furthermore, NTT Nagano prepared pages for the exhibitions of Tanaka Honke Museum. There you will find other beautiful pictures at following URL.
http://www.nagano.isp.ntt-east.co.jp/wnn-c/museum/tanaka/tenji-old/tenji3/tenji.html (link was lost)
I was taught that there is a similar festival in India called "Navaratri" (There, pictures from this page are used including the introduction for Hina Maturi of their own.) which has quite different origin but has a comparability of dolls being exhibited at a set-up of steps and being celebrated mainly by women. There is another sites describing of Navaratri at http://library.thinkquest.org/11719/vasishtfiles/navaratri.html.
And here is an enjoyable site created by German lady, Ms. Heike Andrea Grote who is a lover of Monchhichis, a Japanese idol character. She created a Hina Matsuri Decoration by Monchhichis. This page has most overall information because she collected them plural japanese created sites including this page.
One more, it is worth taking a look at the Hina display of THE HlNA DOLLS OF THE KUSANO FAMILY that can be said gigantic.
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) 3rd of March