Today, March 3rd, is the day when people celebrate girls, and I went to a town called "Makabe" where people were displaying "Ohina-sama", or cute female dolls that are dressed the old-fashioned Japanese way. Makabe is renowned as a town where the shops display their own "Ohina-sama", and they sell their merchandise while letting people to take a look at the cute dolls.
This "Hinamatsuri" has been held since February 4th, and it ends today. This poster says the people in Makabe want visitors to feel their warmth through this festival.
Makabe is situated beyond Mt. Tsukuba, which I showed in this posting last week. The town has a population of about 19,000 and is also known for its stonework that uses "Mikage stone (granite)".
Some of the shops in this town looked so old-fashioned as this. The sign on the left of the green signal says "clock shop", but when I got inside, it was selling sweets related to Hinamatsuri. When people throw a Hinamatsuri party at home, they offer something sweet for kids.
You can see three plates on your right. Each sign indicates which period the style of the dolls on each row belongs to. From top to bottom: the Edo period(1603-1868), the Meiji era(1868-1912), and the Taishou period (1912-1926) . This festival started in the Heian period(794-1185) among the aristocrats to repel evil but later it was changed in the Edo period to the one that let girls to play with the dolls.
There was a Japanese-styled restaurant that was displaying this "Ohina-sama". I saw many dolls while I was walking around in this town, but this one was definitely the best among them. In Japan, the peach trees start to bloom in the beginning of March, so this festival is associated with peach.
And this is what I had at this shop. This is called "Sansai soba" , and "Sansai" means "wild vegetables". The yellow stuff atop the soba is called "Ebi ten" and it is a fried shrimp. This tasted really good but cost only 6.7 us dollars (or 5 euros).
The main stuff of this festival is basically a pair of a male (left) and female (right) doll. The former is called "Odairi-sama (prince)", and the latter "Ohina-sama (princess)". As you can see, the left one was made in 1971, and the right in '09.
This is called "Byoubu" and it is used to separate a room in two. We can trace its origin to China, and the oldest "Byoubu" in Japan came from the Korean peninsula in 686. People put this behind the dolls on the top row like some of the pictures I showed above.
Hinamatsuri is considered to be a festival for girls, and basically only families that have at least one girl celebrate it. But nowadays people enjoy it whether they have a girl or not and the department stores in Japan are out to sell things related to this festival from February up to this day.
