Holidays are golden

Golden Week

Golden week is a series of public holidays at the end of April – early May. With the weekends, you only need take a day or two off work to get a 10 day holiday. The weather is usually lovely: warm but not yet humid (except this year, we had freakish storms), and for everyone who started a new job or school in April, it’s prefect timing to get a little breathing space. You see, it truly is a golden week.

The main holiday is children’s day or “kodomo no hi” on May 5th. Originally it was ‘boy’s day’, but it was renamed in 1948 to be more inclusive. However, the main focus is still boys: families with sons display replica samurai helmets or dolls, or other figures of strength like Kintaro, in the hope that their sons will grow up strong and healthy. It’s very similar to the girls’ doll festival in some ways.

This is our "Kintaro" doing a sumo pose, while his bear friend flies the carp flags.

There’s an amazing doll shop near Asakusabashi station in East Tokyo, which displays all the traditional warrior dolls, but this year they also had “Darth Vader” and “Storm Trouper” heads; a nice reference to the way the Star Wars costumes referenced samurai armour.

The glass was too reflective, but you can just see the Storm Trouper, for about $1,800

This is the traditional style with helmet, sword, arrows and irises

Japanese Irises - “Hanashoubu”  - are just coming into season and often feature in displays, thanks to their straight, sword-like leaves and proud purple flowers. The Japanese word “shoubu” also sounds like “victory”. Some people put the leaves in the bath, to hopefully make their kids strong and ward off bad luck.

It's too early for the spectacular iris displays in parks like Horikiri Shoubuen, but you'll find random clumps of irises growing around the neighbourhood.

One of my favourite things about Golden Week is seeing all the carp streamers. Families put up “koinobori” or carp streamers, which symbolise the energy and strength of carp swimming and jumping upstream, overcoming any obstacle. Usually there’s a large black carp for Dad, then a red one for Mum, followed by smaller ones for the kids, in order of age. We went up to Tatebayashi in Gunma to see the famous koinobori strung across the river. There are over 5,000 carp streamers! If you time it right and go in early April, you can see the carp and the cherry blossoms together.

These koinobori were set up as tunnels for kids to play in

The spectacular carp streamers flying over the river in Tatebayashi

These are sembei- rice crackers - wrapped up like koinobori, with a plastic iris.

The traditional treat for Children’s Day is kashiwa mochi – mochi sweets wrapped in oak leaves. The story is that oak trees don’ t drop their old leaves until new leaves appear, symbolising the strength and continuity of the family. Anyway, kashiwa mochi is delicious! It comes filled with sweet bean paste or a mix of bean paste and miso. You shouldn’t eat the oak leaf, but you can enjoy the imprint it leaves on the soft mochi. One of these days I’m going to try to make some mochi sweets. We have a few kilos of mochi rice here, thanks to our relatives up in Tochigi who send us a couple of big bags of rice every year (though they stopped sending them last year due to radiation concerns; we got local tofu and yuba instead). I almost cooked the mochi rice by accident once, which would have made a gloopy mess of my curry! 

Kashiwa mochi wrapped in fresh oak leaves. They smell sweet and "green".

Inside: this one is a mix of miso and white bean paste.