Hinamatsuri, the "Dolls' Festival" or Girls' Day, is kept on the third day of the third month, 3 March, and is dedicated to the health and happiness of girls. Its emblem is the hina-ningyo, a set of ornamental dolls representing the emperor, empress and their court in Heian-era dress, displayed at home on a tiered stand covered in red cloth, with the imperial pair on the top step and attendants, musicians and furnishings below. Families with daughters set out the dolls in the days before and, by custom, put them away promptly afterward, a superstition holding that a late-cleared display delays the daughter's marriage.
Behind the elegant dolls lies an older and quite different rite. The festival descends in part from a purification custom, nagashi-bina, in which paper or straw dolls were rubbed against the body to take on a person's impurities and misfortunes and then floated away down a river or out to sea, carrying the ill away with them; the display dolls are, in origin, a courtly and domestic refinement of these scapegoat figures. Special foods belong to the day, coloured diamond-shaped rice cakes (hishimochi), sweet rice crackers (hina-arare), clam soup and a mild sweet sake (shirozake). Hinamatsuri thus joins a charming domestic celebration of daughters to an ancient logic of transferring misfortune onto a figure and sending it away.