F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-014

Awashima Shrine Hina-nagashi (Doll Float Ceremony)

淡嶋神社 雛流しあわしまじんじゃ ひなながし

On March 3rd — Hinamatsuri, the Girls' Festival — most of Japan displays its Hina dolls on tiered shelves and eats tri-colored rice cakes. At Awashima Shrine in the fishing port of Kada, the dolls are carried to the sea and floated away. Awashima is the shrine to which Japanese families from across the country have donated unwanted Hina sets for generations: the resulting accumulation of dolls — tens of thousands of them — occupies every surface of the shrine precincts in a visual density that bypasses whimsy and enters the territory of the genuinely uncanny. On March 3rd, white-clad priests load the year's most recently donated dolls onto straw boats and push them into the sea in a ceremony that returns the dolls' accumulated feminine power and human memory to the divine realm. The image of a fleet of doll-laden boats moving slowly out into the harbor below a Wakayama winter sky is one of the most strikingly strange things the Japanese ritual calendar produces.