Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
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May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
64
websites of photo studios, rental shops, clothing retail shops, restaurants, entertainment parks,
hotels, travel agencies and gift shops, all actively involved in the celebration of the ritual.
Another important part of my data comes from field trips in 2009 and 2010 during
which I interviewed employees of institutions involved in the organization of Shichigosan.
These were semi-guided interviews with priests and employees of two major shrines in
Tokyo (Meiji and Hie shrines), and with employees of photo, beauty and rental studios.
Unstructured interviews were done with families that experienced Shichigosan first-hand, as
well as with families planning to perform the ritual in the near future.
Historical origins of Shichigosan
Even though exact data on observance rates are not available, indirect data suggests that
Shichigosan is among the four most popular rituals observed by contemporary Japanese
families.
10
Families with small children dedicate great care and time to the preparation of the
event. The ritual has a significant presence in magazines, on the Internet, in advertisements of
several business activities, as well as in shop windows and shelves. While the ritual has
numerous local versions with their own distinct path of development, in this paper I will
focus on the urban context, with an emphasis on the Tokyo area. By doing so, I will pay less
attention to other aspects such as the continuity of traditional patterns in non-urban areas of
Japan. Shichigosan has its predecessors in various ritual observances that were associated in
the past to certain ages seen as milestones in the child’s life. Accordingly, the ritual is
conventionally categorized in the literature under the heading, rites of passage. The category
of ‘rites of passage’ has been first described as such by the French scholar, Arnold van
Gennep in his seminal work published in 1909,
The Rites of Passage
(van Gennep 1960). The
term labels rituals that mark important thresholds or transitions in human life which are often
perceived by the community as moments of crisis. A number of theorists built on and further
developed van Gennep’s approach.
11
Among the most influential, Victor Turner drew
attention to the liminal and transcendental aspects of the transition and broadened the
applicability of van Gennep’s theory to modern societies (Turner 1969).
Any social form is necessarily conditioned by socio-cultural factors of the given
period. Past, pre-urban patterns of Shichigosan were determined by the traditional, close-knit
10
These data come from surveys conducted by Japanese governmental, academic and other private
institutions on observance rates of various traditional and modern celebrations.
11
For an overview of authors and theories see for example Bell 2009.
