Season 123 (2008), 2nd of Yayoi (March)

Instant Hina Dolls Popular

What is the object of demand at the Hina Festival?

The Plum Festival is often spoken of as a seasonal festival for girls. On this day every year, the Hina Festival is held where people boast their wealth by decorating extravagant Hina dolls. Some people spend more than what they're worth on the Hina dolls, and end up going bankrupt as a consequence. This "Hina Bankruptcy" and the ability to be grateful for objects over substance is something that is most likely distinctive to humans.

However as of recently, these traditional Hina dolls are starting to slowly go out of fashion. Instead extremely cheap instant Hina dolls have become popular.

Instant Hina dolls are made by cutting and folding paper, a simple article one would not consider to be a doll. These paper dolls appear to be taking the place of the extravagant and traditional Hina dolls.

The individual setting out to do this, Hina Kagiyama (Misfortune God), explains as follows.

"Extravagant Hina dolls being a tradition is just plain nonsense. Sturdy dolls made by the poor to last many years are what became the extravagant Hina dolls you see today. The truth is that bad luck is stored into the doll, where it becomes a discarded item."

The new Hina dolls are made to be dispensable. Once the Hina Festival is over, the dolls simply float off into the river.

"Humans who thought 'Letting them float off into the river is such a waste' are the ones who made Hina dolls into what they are now. Unfortunately because of this they no longer accomplish the original goal of cleansing. This has caused bad luck to slowly gather in the Human Village. If that's not discarded quickly, my power will..."

With this in mind the Instant Hina dolls were created with the purpose of gathering misfortune from the Human Village. People tend to put a lot of money and effort into tradition, but once they learn that letting them float off into the river is the true goal, perhaps they will be happy to move to using the cheaper version. There is especially no reason to be extravagant about disposable goods. Cleverly seizing opportunity on this state of mind is good business.

If too much misfortune is accumulated, it will without a doubt turn into a negative aura of bad luck. It's worrying that misfortune is flowing down the river like that, so she attempts to recollect them as soon as possible. However it is known that she overlooks a few sometimes. Downstream leads to the outside world, which is somewhat concerning...

(Hatate Himekaidou)




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