Happy Hina Matsuri!

The Japanese festival Hina Matsuri (Dolls Festival), like many other Japanese festivals, has both a spiritual and an aesthetic quality. The spiritual significance of Hina Matsuri is to purify and to ward off the bad luck, and its origins are in a very old tradition called Hina-Nagashi. The old belief was that by rubbing the body with a human shaped paper doll, the bad luck was transferred to the doll, which was then thrown in a running stream of water.

Over the years, as the tradition evolved, the dolls were made more and more sophisticated and the Hina Dolls are now the epitome of Japanese refinement...