This morning, a few of us rented a car and drove out to Katsuura in Chiba (about 3 hours from Tokyo) to see the Big Hinamatsuri. Hinamatsuri is a doll festival that’s held on March 3. It’s a tradition where families with daughters display a set of traditionally dressed dolls in hope for their daughter to be healthy and get married. The festival in Katsuura has displays of thousands of Hina-ningyo is different places around the town. It’s one of a few festivals held in this otherwise quiet onsen town.

I took a lot of pictures but only uploaded a dozen or so..

The first place we checked out was the display of hina-ningyo on the steps leading up to a shrine.
Thank god it didn’t rain today. I wonder how long it took them to set up all the dolls.

Two other major spots were outside near different intersections.
Will they guard these display at night? Won’t someone come and vandalise them?

The whole town gets into the hinamatsuri spirit, everywhere you go you can hear the hina-matsuri song and you can see hina-ningyo displayed everywhere, on a street corner, in this ra-men shop..

Even the local post office..

The main displays were located at the city hall, there were a few rooms where you could take you picture as hina-ningyo, and some dolls made by primary school kids.

The big display was in the main room of the city hall. This room was quite impressive and must have had over 30,000 dolls on display! I would hate to be in this room alone because to be honest, the faces of these dolls kinda freak me out.

Here are some close ups

These 2 dolls were the oldest ones in the collection, over 150 years old from the Edo era.