Next Saturday is shichi go san – “7 5 3” – a traditional festival celebrating kids aged 7, 5, and 3 years old. (It's taking a will of steel to refrain from the pun of calling this festival “odd”.) Wikipedia has a short little writeup describing it, how often it's the first time for kids to dress up in fancy kimono (girls) or hakama (boys), and such.

Although it's not until next week, this past weekend found the Heian Shrine filled with kids all dressed up and cute as a button. My friend Thomas, in town just for the weekend, called my attention to the concentrated cuteness, and although we didn't have much time before I had to run him to the train station for his trip back to Korea, I stopped by the shrine for a bit and snapped a few pictures.

Generally speaking, the kids were cute because they were dressed up in adult styles, not dressed as if they were adults. Their “kidness” was allowed to remain. I've had Anthony dressed up in a suit and I thought it was cute because he was still a kid.

Some of the people we saw at the shrine didn't quite get the distinction, and way overdid it, piling on accessories and makeup in an apparent attempt to obliterate any last remnants of childhood left showing in their child. You could see it in their style choices, in how they interacted with their kid, and in the lack of joy in the kid. Sad.

I tended to not want to photograph such kids, but the shot above is one, dressed to the nines, sans cuteness, with painted face and all...

There was a large group of Chinese tourists who seemed like any tourists you'd see anywhere, except for the odd habit of running up in mobs to someone, taking dozens of pictures over the course of a minute or three, but never making eye contact or acknowledging that the subject they're photographing is a living object. Thomas and I, being pretty much the only white people around, were the subject of this slightly creepy behavior for a while. I tried to engage them with smiles or eye-contact or the one word of Chinese I know (“thank you”), but it's as if we were on the darkened side of a one-way mirror, and they never even knew we were there. Odd.

Actually, the little boy was full of smiles posing with his sister, but that one shot caught him with a look that reminded me of how I felt when we were forced to pose for family pictures back in the 70s. The one shot doesn't represent the reality of the scene, so it's totally unfair to pluck this picture out of context like this.... but it's fun. 🙂

(Of course, now as an adult I appreciate that my folks' forced us to pose for Christmas card pictures every year, because now as an adult I can treasure them. But boy, it was painful at the time.)

Back to last Sunday at the Heian Shrine, the cutest of all the kids was this German boy who seemed sort of big for his age...