Hinamatsuri The Japanese Doll Festival

 Here's an oldie but goody.  Tomorrow is the Japanese Doll Festival, aka The Girls' Festival.  Enjoy.

If you have read Rumer Godden’s Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, you know that The Girls’ Festival in Japan, also known as The Doll Festival, takes place on March 3d.  Today, the Hina Matsuri celebration is also celebrated in the United States. We receive an ad from a Japanese Grocery Store each week, and the week's ad for the first of March featured sweets and special foods for the Doll Festival celebrations. These foods include shirozake, fermented rice sake, tiny crackers flavored with sugar or soy sauce, a salty soup with clams, and rice cake.  Culturally, this is a holiday apparently alive and well among Japanese Families. For information on the Hina Matsuri and other dolls, I recommend The Yokohama Doll Museum site, and works by Scot Alan Pate and Lea Baten. Pat Smith also wrote a book on Asian Dolls.  If you have not read Rumer Godden's Miss Happiness and Miss Flower and Little Plum about the Festival and the lives of three Japanese dolls, you must. Godden liked dolls and actually had the Japanese doll house built and landscaped to inspire her.  Huguette Clark, the famous reclusive heiress and collector, had a master craftsman create special Japanese doll houses for her as well.

 

The festival dates to the Heian period (794-1192).  Ornamental dolls are taken out once a year and arranged on steps covered in red cloth.  Dolls representing the lord and lady of the palace are arranged on the top shelf.  Other dolls representing their attendants and musicians are arranged on the steps along with miniature accessories. According to Japanese-city.com, the origins of The Girls’ Festival date from an ancient custom of floating Hina dolls of straw to the ocean.  The belief was that the dolls contained evil spirits and that as they floated away, the carried the spirits with them out to sea. This custom was called Hina nagashi or doll floating.

 

Lea Baten is one of my favorite doll historians, and her specialty is Japanese dolls.  Carl Fox in The doll also addresses many interesting examples.  See our Pinterest Boards on Japanese Dolls, Doll Collection, and Nepalese Dolls for more examples. According to Alan Scott Pate in his article Hina Matsuri; Dolls from the Japanese Girls’ Day Festival, dolls have been important to Japanese culture for over 13,000 years. Pate has pointed out that the doll on the top tier of the Hina display are the lord and lady, and are not referred to as emperor and empress dolls in Japan.   Other dolls and related items important to Japanese culture are Bunraku puppets, Kokeshi dolls of wood, Hakata dolls made of clay from the city or Hakata, Kabuki actors and actresses, netsuke meant to be tied at the end of sashes, and tiny dolls made of painted rice kernels.  Paper dolls are another Japanese tradition as are mechanical figures called Karakuri that are small, realistic robots that serve tea.  Samurai and other mythic figures celebrate The Boy’s Festival, held May 5^th. Friendship dolls were went to the United States during the 1920s, and American dolls were sent to Japan in exchange.

 

Artist R. John Wright has created beautiful Japanese children as featured in The Toy Shoppe, and French automatons were inspired by Japanese Geisha. German makers also created their versions of Asian and Japanese dolls.  Some Vintage Italian dolls represent Madame Butterfly and wear the traditional Kimono.  Effanbee made a vinyl version of Madame Butterfly in the late 80s.

 

As a recent Theriault’s auction of rare antique Japanese dolls has shown, there is still a brisk interest in these dolls.  The Takara Barbie and Japanese robots and Manga dolls are popular, inspired by their vintage cousins.  Morimura Brothers made bisque dolls in the style of German bisque babies and children, and stone bisque penny dolls made in Japan were very popular during the 30s and 40s.  Celluloid dolls nad toys rr4om Japan are very popular with collectors, as are bisque dolls and figurines marked “Occupied Japan,” made while the Untied States occupied the country just after World War II.  Ball jointed dolls are currently made in Japan, and there is an active community of doll collectors there, including temples devoted to cremating worn out dolls.  Shirley Temple’s life sized Japanese doll retuned home after the 2014 auction of her collection.  Temple had a large number of Japanese dolls in her collection, which were among her favorites. 

Dolls marked Nippon, Occupied Japan, or Morimura Brothers delight many collectors. Tiny rice Kokeshi dolls are great fun, as are tiny Geisha dolls made from Rice Crackers.  At Mitsuwa Shopping Center, Arlington Heights, there is a Japanese doll on display at the grocery store.

Japanese Friendship dolls tell their own story; we even had one at Audubon school, till the school closed and a teacher took it with her.

Friendship dolls at Putnam.  Photo by Ellen Tsagaris

Memoirs of a Geisha; Putnam Museum Literary Heroines. Photo by E. Tsagaris

This March 3d, take out your Japanese dolls, and if you don’t have an actual set of Hina dolls, arrange them around a good picture, serve miniature foods, and honor a tradition that dates to the 9^th century.