 | On Hina Matsuri ("Girls Day"), Japanese families with young daughters set out displays of dolls such as this from the Peabody's Anthropology Division. |
Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History will celebrate the annual Japanese festival of Hina Matsuri -- also known as "Girls Day" -- with an exhibition of dolls.
The dolls are part of a special collection donated to the museum's Anthropology Division in 1955 by Evangeline Johnson Merrill (1897-1990), daughter of Robert Wood Johnson, co-founder of the Johnson & Johnson Company.
During Hina Matsuri -- which falls on March 3, the day the exhibition opens -- the Japanese pray for happiness and the healthy growth of girls. Families with young daughters mark the day by setting up a display of dolls inside the house.
Hina Matsuri has its roots in an ancient Japanese custom known as Hinanagashi -- literally, "doll floating" -- a practice that dates back to the Heian period (794-1192). The third day of the third month, originally calculated by the lunar calendar, was believed to be the best time to prepare the earth for new life to grow. Farmers and villagers would make simple paper dolls to which they would "attach" their troubles and fears. They would then float the dolls down rivers beginning to swell with melted snow.
By the 17th century, dolls made by townspeople were so beautifully crafted that the thrifty-minded merchants of Edo (now Tokyo) decided it was a shame to let them float away. The merchants began to save the dolls, displaying them each year in lieu of sending them downstream. There are still a few places in Japan where Hinanagashi is still practiced.
The Peabody exhibit features 15 dolls set out in a traditional fashion, as they would be in a Japanese home, on a tiered platform covered with red felt. Dolls are typically the heritage of a household with each set reflecting the fashion of its era. The hand-made dolls in this collection, from around 1900, have costumes of brocaded silk and faces covered with gofun, or white paste made from ground seashells. Included are miniature domestic items, known as Dogu, which are made from the time of a daughter's birth, representing things the family might expect to include in her wedding dowry.
The exhibit, which is on view through Memorial Day, was organized by Robert G. Wheeler, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science, professor of physics and a curatorial affiliate in the Peabody's Anthropology Division. Yoko Karato served as a consultant.
The Peabody Museum of Natural History, located at 170 Whitney Ave., is open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon-5 p.m. Admission is $7 for adults, $6 for seniors age 65 and over, $5 for children ages 3-18 and free to members of the Yale community with valid I.D. Admission is free for everyone on Thursdays 2-5 p.m. The museum is wheelchair accessible. For further information, call (203) 432-5050 or visit the website at www.peabody.yale.edu.
T H I S
Doll exhibition marks Japanese
celebration of 'Girls Day'
This doll depicts a court lady
with a long-handled sake holder.
The dolls' donor was a woman who pursued feminist causes long before it was popular to do so. Merrill was a lieutenant in New York City's Ambulance Corps and was decorated by President Woodrow Wilson for her services in the Red Cross in World War I. In the early 1920s she waged a one-woman war against the city government in Palm Beach, Florida, which refused to allow the new abbreviated women's bathing suits to be worn in public. Merrill had a large number of handbills printed in protest and flew over the beach tossing them from the cockpit of a plane she had recently learned to fly. A collector of art and anthropological artifacts, she traveled worldwide with each of her three husbands, the first of whom was renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski.
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