Katsuura Big Dolls Festival: Here, There, and Everywhere

Part three in photos of the Katsuura Big Dolls Festival. The beautiful hina dolls were ubiquitous all around the town. Here they are, lining the windows of the post office.

Spotting the dolls was fun, and it was hilarious to see them placed in increasingly incongruous environments.

Dolls sitting on big shells in front of a barbershop. Katsuura faces the Pacific Ocean, with a fishing port not 10 minutes from the station, so shells were an oft-seen decorating device.

It was one of the fanciest barbershops I'd ever seen.

Still in front of the barber's.

In a clothing store for old ladies.

The florist's.

Sushi restaurant.

Dolls positioned in the fish store, among raw fish. Slightly wacky.

On top of the post office box.

However, no dolls were seen in the sewing machine shop.

Katsuura Big Dolls Festival, Part Two

For the Katsuura Big Dolls Festival, the whole city of Katsuura got into the spirit. One family had even opened their house to the public, manned by a lovely grandma who made small talk with visitors. The house was built so that the hallway was at one end of the house, with sliding doors covering the length of it.

Slide open all the doors and you have one long (but narrow) space dedicated to Girl's Day decorations, hand-crafted by the locals.

Check out these dolls, with shell faces colored in with felt-tip marker!

Because of the bad weather, the decorations weren't complete. Ideally, a doll would have been placed in each hole carved into the bamboo.

Katsuura Big Dolls Festival

Katsuura Station

Katsuura, Chiba, a small city along the Pacific Ocean that goes all-out for Girls' Day (March 3) every year. They gather hina dolls (a traditional set of dolls that are gifted to girls for Girls' Day), and exhibit them throughout the city, in public spaces, shops, and even shrines. 

The delicate dolls were covered up that day, to protect them from the rain.

Named the Katsuura Big Dolls Festival, this year's festival took place from February 19 to March 3. Visitors can walk around the small city and spot literally thousands of dolls decorated everywhere. The total number is around 25,000. 

Peeking inside the shroud.

Where do they get these dolls? They are all donations: from families whose daughters are grown up, by people who don't have enough space in their house to display the dolls, and people who simply found that their dolls were languishing in their closets.

A cafe uses its staircase to display the dolls.

This ingenious idea was actually born in Katsuura, Tokushima Prefecture, in southern Japan. It gives the dolls a second life, and since hina doll sets are incredibly expensive, people can undoubtedly rest easier knowing that they are being appreciated by a sizable audience. (For a seven-tiered set, such as in the photo above, even a cheap version costs around $2400 dollars, and prices get infinitely higher if you opt for quality.) 

The big draw of the festival is the display of dolls on the 60 steps of Tomisaki Shrine -- 1,200 in all. Because hina dolls are extremely fragile, they have to be put out every morning, and stored away carefully in the evening. Since the weather on the day that I went was iffy, the city didn't risk putting the dolls out at all. It was disappointing, for sure, but as you can see in the following posts, there was still much to see.

Dolls Float on Polluted Water

Hina nagashi ("doll floating"), a Girls' Day ritual where hina dolls are sent down rivers or to the sea. This is an act of transference: impurities or illnesses are transferred from girl to doll, thereby keeping the girl safe from harm.

Some famous hina nagashi festivals use real hina dolls; at Nihonbashi Jogakkan, a girls' school in Tokyo, dolls were made out of paper and sent them down the Kanda River.

Since the school is located alongside the river, students crammed into the narrow space between the building and the river to watch.

Representatives from each class got to ride on the boat and release the dolls into the river.

Alas, the floating didn't go as well as planned. After several minutes, a cleanup crew went after the drifting dolls and rounded them up, one by one. This provoked the ire of the teenage girls, who protested over everything from the use of a mop to "catch" the dolls, the passing commercial boat that capsized an unfortunate doll, and the length of the ritual, which was admittedly anticlimactic.

Why the Hurry?

(A JR train station.)

It's that time of year again -- setting up the hina dolls for Girl's Day, otherwise known as the Japanese Doll Festival.

But not quite: Girl's Day isn't until March 3rd.

Unappreciated

(A JR train station.)

Weird, innit?

Those dolls are expensive. They should not be placed out there to gather dust bunnies and be ignored.