Japanese doll festival

In opening our home to exchange students seeking to learn American English, customs and traditions, we also learn bits and pieces about their culture, customs and traditions.
Through Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mardi Gras we enjoyed holiday treats and sweets in abundance. We thought the festivities had ended – only to receive a package from Japan introducing us to the Doll Festival.
Celebrated on the third day of the third month, the Doll Festival – or the Girl’s Festival – is a time when parents wish their daughters a successful and happy life. Beginning in February, festival dolls are displayed in the house together with peach blossoms. Before the boys begin to scream “No fair the girls have a special day!”, let me add that the Boy’s Festival is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month. On that day, parents wish their sons a good future and decorate with carp streamers outside and samurai dolls inside to symbolize strength, power and success in life.
Several weeks prior to March’s Doll Festival, families set up their Emperor and Empress dolls with boughs of peach blossoms. The dolls are served porcelain rice cakes cut in festive diamond shapes. A gold painted screen stands behind the royal couple with paper lanterns beside each member of royalty.
Our doll festival package contained the basics in porcelain: a paper screen, two dolls, two lanterns, two dishes of food, a green plant and a pink plant.
However, just as the Christmas nativity scene with its three basic figures of Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus in a manger, it can expand to include more figures; the doll festival display can also incorporate much more – as funds, space and interest allow. The exchange student showed us pictures of her grandmother’s elaborate display for the Doll Festival.
Her grandmother’s display included the traditional seven tiers covered with rich red cloth. Each level held a different theme of items: The royal couple at the top, three court ladies, five musicians and other members of the royal palace on subsequent levels, a miniature kitchen and hearth for cooking, and other levels holding chests, shelves and other furnishings with a horse-drawn carriage at the base. Although the dolls are dressed like court nobles from 794-1185 A.D. the Doll Festival did not begin until the 17th Century. No earlier records of doll displays on this day exist, according to the Kyoto National Museum website.
Because it is fun to learn new foods, I am researching traditional foods served during the Doll Festival. One dish is chirashi sushi – seafood, mushroom and vegetables spread over sushi rice. This is my latest cultural exchange. Thanks to a visit from a local woman who is originally from Japan and her American-born husband, I learned last week, that sushi does not mean only raw fish. Sushi is a dish containing rice prepared with sushi vinegar. Oh, the sushi vegetables were delicious. My cultural exchange continues.
To experience another culture first hand, call a travel agency. To experience it through an exchange student, give me a call and I’ll put in you touch with an exchange program. But, if you can’t do either, you can still have a cultural exchange from 9 to 11 a.m. this Thursday when South Arkansas Community College holds its second International Day in the college gymnasium.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)