Hina Nagashi Matsuri

Hina matsuri is also called the “Doll festival” or “Girls Day” … It’s celebrated all over Japan on 3rd of March. Tradition has it that the dolls manifest some spirit after living for prolonged time in the house. And you can’t just throw them away in the trash or that bad spirit is coming back to haunt you. So instead of throwing them into the trash they are properly exorcised and blessed by a priest and set afloat on a boat and sent down a river to the sea, hopefully taking troubles and bad spirits with them.

People have stopped doing this now because of fishermen catching the dolls in their nets. They now send them out to sea, and when the spectators are gone they take the boats out of the water and bring them back to the temple and burn them.

The festival starts at noon and only lasts for about 2 hours. The Awashima shrine is famous in the Osaka/Wakayama region mostly for the dolls nowadays, but there are also other quirky collectors objects there (from frogs, tanukis, beckoning cats,etc ) and from around edo-period the shrine has become popular amongst women. The shrine was found back in th 3rd century  dedicated to the god Sukunahikona-no-mikoto (god of medicine and good health).  Women began to make offerings of their underwear to Sukunahikona-no-mikoto, hoping that he would cure them of karyoubyou (literally ‘flower and willow diseases’, a euphemism for STDs) and various other women’s complaints. I actually didn’t knew about this before going and wasn’t looking, but people say you can still see those items at this shrine.

Transport: Take the Nankai express from Osaka Namba station. Get off at Wakayama station, and change trains to the local bound for Kato. The shrine is about twenty minutes walk down to the shore from the station.

Website: The website of the Awashima Jinja is the official one and contains some small information about this festival.