Japanese Girls and Women: Revised and Enlarged Edition

								

observed, and over which the wave of foreign innovation had passed so
slightly that even the calendar still remained unchanged, and the feast
took place upon the third day of the third month of the old Japanese
year, instead of on the third day of March, which is the usual time for
it now. At this house, where the dolls had been accumulating for
hundreds of years, five or six broad, red-covered shelves, perhaps
twenty feet long or more, were completely filled with them and with
their belongings. The Emperor and Empress appeared again and again, as
well as the five court musicians, and the tiny furnishings and utensils
were wonderfully costly and beautiful. Before each Emperor and Empress
was set an elegant lacquered table service,--tray, bowls, cups, saké
pots, rice buckets, etc., all complete; and in each utensil was placed
the appropriate variety of food. The saké used on this occasion is a
sweet, white liquor, brewed especially for this feast, as different from
the ordinary saké as sweet cider is from the hard cider upon which a
man may drink himself into a state of intoxication.[*30] Besides the
table service, everything that an imperial doll can be expected to need
or desire is placed upon the shelves. Lacquered norimono, or
palanquins; lacquered bullock carts, drawn by bow-legged black
bulls,--these were the conveyances of the great in Old Japan, and these,
in minute reproductions, are placed upon the red-covered shelves. Tiny
silver and brass hibachi, or fire boxes, are there, with their
accompanying tongs and charcoal baskets,--whole kitchens, with
everything required for cooking the finest of Japanese feasts, as finely
made as if for actual use; all the necessary toilet apparatus,--combs,
mirrors, utensils for blackening the teeth, for shaving the eyebrows,
for reddening the lips and whitening the face,--all these things are
there to delight the souls of all the little girls who may have the
opportunity to behold them. For three days the imperial effigies are
served sumptuously at each meal, and the little girls of the family
take pleasure in serving their imperial majesties; but when the feast
ends, the dolls and their belongings are packed away in their boxes, and
lodged in the fire-proof warehouse for another year.
The Tokugawa collection, of which I have spoken, is remarkably full and
costly, for it has been making for hundreds of years in one of the
younger branches of a family which for two and a half centuries was
possessed of almost imperial power, and lived in more than imperial
luxury; but there are few households so poor that they do not from year
to year accumulate a little store of toys wherewith to celebrate the
feast, and, whether the toys are many or few, the feast is the event of
the year in the lives of the little girls of Japan.[*31]
Beside the regular feasts at stated seasons, our little girl has a great