Hina Matsuri And A Painful Encounter With The Tea Ceremony

“Hina Matsuri, huh?” Tachibana-San asked himself as we walked out to the car on Friday morning. “Yeah, I think it’s the doll festival,” I replied. “Oh right, with all the dolls on the tired stage, now I remember.” It’s really true that Japan has so many holidays and festivals that sometimes even Japanese people can’t keep track of them all. But I can’t really blame Tachibana-San for forgetting about Hina Matsuri (sometimes known as “Girls' Festival”), since he’s too young to have daughters and that’s really the only situation in which the holiday would be relevant to him. You see, although Hina Matsuri is technically a doll festival, it is generally only families with daughters that buy and display a set of dolls (hinaningyo) in their house. While the custom originated in the Edo period (back when dolls were thought to possess the ability to contain evil spirits), the prevailing belief nowadays is that a set of dolls should be displayed on the day of the festival (March 3rd) and then promptly taken down. Otherwise, it is said that the family will incur difficulty in marrying off their daughters.

The actual dolls themselves are customarily displayed on a multi-tired stage lined with red cloth. The top tier houses two dolls, representing the emperor and empress and the tiers below contain members of the court and sometimes various pieces of furniture or household items. Doll sets can range from the small, plastic Hello Kitty versions that they sell at rotating sushi restaurants for about $4 USD to the far more elaborate sets that feature a full compliment of dolls in real silk kimono and generally cost a few thousand dollars (one such set, which was on display at Koyoh Elementary School, can be seen above). Most parents with daughters will own the latter type; luckily, a family generally has only one set of dolls that is handed down from generation to generation. For those who haven’t been lucky enough to inherit one, every department store (not to mention Toys R Us) sells them starting in about December.
Well, having nothing better to do on Hina Matsuri, I spent my morning at Momoishi Kindergarten where, as you can see, they had a full set of dolls. They also have what appears to be a working prototype for a break-dancing robot.

Since there isn’t that much to do on Hina Matsuri aside from displaying and looking at dolls, Megumi-Sensei, the Vice-Principal of the school, decided that it would be a good opportunity to teach the children about sado, the Japanese tea ceremony. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the tea ceremony, it is a highly codified, formal tea party, dating back to the 13th century. It shares a number of regulations with zen meditation (you have to walk, sit and stand in certain ways, you can’t step on the seams of the tatami, etc.) and applies similar ideas of discipline to a social event. During feudal times, some samurai were even known to participate in the tea ceremony before engaging in battle, as a means for reminding themselves of the level of discipline that they were expected to embody both on and off the battlefield. As Megumi-Sensei put it, “This isn’t tea time.”

At any rate, teaching discipline to a bunch of 3-5 year olds is anything but an enviable task (trust me, after half a year I’m still trying to teach them things like “how to pay attention for 3 minutes” and “how to not bite your neighbor”). Megumi-Sensei had a rather brilliant idea though-to have the older kids (most of whom are somewhat familiar with the ceremony) teach parts of the ceremony to the younger kids. This kept the older children busy and prevented them from getting bored and made the younger students pay closer attention. Since I had never participated in the tea ceremony before, I was assigned a 4-year old “buddy” who helped walk me through.
For the purpose of teaching the ceremony, a number of tatami mats were laid out on the floor of the main hall and at the head of the room a flower arrangement was displayed, featuring flowers that bear some special significance on Hina Matsuri.
As you can see here, Megumi-Sensei went all out, wearing a full kimono (as is customary for the host) and procuring all of the necessary tools to brew tea by hand in the traditional manner associated with the ceremony.
If I had to describe the tea ceremony to you using an economy of words, I would probably say something like “It involves sitting in the extremely painful seiza style for a really long time and lots of bowing.” Now I’ve got no problem with bowing but the sitting is another story. As it is, I can’t really sit in seiza to begin with as my legs are quite long and I’m not very flexible. But the kids didn’t know that, so they just kept telling me that I wasn’t doing it correctly while I kept replying “But I can’t do it!” while attempting to bear the dull pain with a grin. Compounding this problem was the fact that you’re not supposed to touch either the seam in front of or behind you. Of course, I’m large enough that when I sit in pseudo-seiza, my knees hang over the front seam and my toes brush against the rear. This meant that throughout the entire ceremony I had kids yelling either “Move forward!” or “Move back!” at me from both sides. My “buddy” seemed very disappointed with my performance.

Anyway, enjoy these photos of the tea ceremony. Megumi-Sensei was quite right; tea time it aint.