Seijin Shiki

Well, yesterday, the 14th, was a national holiday called Seijin shiki. Every year on this day people who turned 20 in the previous year after March (and those who turn 20 before April this year) gather to celebrate their coming of age. Usually women wear kimono and men wear a western suit. Apparently the cities hold assemblies in their town halls and have all sorts of guest speakers come and give speeches on growing up.

But since I wouldn't have understood most of what they were saying, my host-parents dressed Haru-chan and I in kimono and we took pictures. Here are some of the pictures:



My host-mom told us that this was a really easy way to wear the kimono. We didn't have any bottom layers underneath the silk. What happened was my host-mom gave us each a slip to put on and then she would come back into the room and she would dress us. The first thing she did was to fold a thick towel in two and wrap it around my waist because you're supposed to look, well, flat when you wear the kimono. So she put the towel on and then she put the cheating collar (instead of an under-robe) and tied some strings together and then started putting all sorts of belts around my waist.

Next I slipped the kimono on. My host-mom gathered the kimono around my waist until the hemline was around my ankles and then she tied a belt around the kimono so that the extra fabric hung around my waist. Then she made the extra fabric neat and tied another belt around it. Next came the obi, the big belt around the middle. She took some sort of pillow looking thing and put part of the obi through the hole in the bottom of it and stuck it, sort of like a chair back, against my back and tied it there. Then she started wrapping the obi around me, which was quite entertaining. She braced her foot against the outside of mine and yanked hard. It was so funny, I almost fell over every time! Then she did some complicated stuff with the obi and that was that. It was sort of like wearing a corset. But it was definantly a fun experience. Taking it off was much easier even though I had to have her help me with the obi.

But real silk kimonos are so expensive, though! The one I was wearing was around USD $6,000. And the obi alone was worth USD $2,000. The obi that Haru-chan was wearing was USD $5,000! If only I had that kind of money to spend on kimono....