Seijin-shiki

Seijin-shiki is deliberately a civic rather than a Shinto or Buddhist rite, though it descends from older coming of age customs, genpuku for young men and mogi for young women, that were performed within the household and marked with religious observance in earlier centuries. The modern ceremony began after the Second World War, formalised nationally by a 1948 law establishing Coming of Age Day as a public holiday, held on the second Monday of January, at which municipalities across Japan invite every young person who has reached the age of legal adulthood that year to a local hall for a civic ceremony of speeches, congratulation and, in most towns, no religious content at all.

The custom of visiting a shrine or temple afterward for a blessing is common but optional and privately arranged rather than part of the official ceremony, which keeps church and state, or in Japan's case shrine and state, cleanly separated in line with the country's postwar constitutional settlement. In 2022 Japan lowered the age of legal adulthood from twenty to eighteen, but most municipalities chose to keep Coming of Age Day ceremonies pegged to twenty, reasoning that eighteen and nineteen year olds are typically still in secondary education or newly arrived at university and less able to gather for the event.

What makes Coming of Age Day visually distinctive is dress rather than liturgy. Young women traditionally wear furisode, a formal kimono style with long swinging sleeves reserved for unmarried women, often rented for the day at considerable expense from specialist shops, styled with an elaborate hairpiece and worn only this once by most who own or hire one.

Young men more commonly wear Western suits today, though a minority wear hakama, the pleated formal trouser skirt associated with traditional Japanese dress, over a kimono. After the municipal ceremony, groups of newly recognised adults commonly gather for photographs, meet former schoolmates for the first time in years, and visit a local shrine such as Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, where January crowds in furisode are a familiar seasonal image even though the visit is a personal choice rather than part of the ceremony proper.

Participation has slipped over recent decades alongside Japan's falling birthrate and shifting attitudes among younger adults toward formal civic occasions, and some municipalities have responded by moving ceremonies to more convenient dates such as summer holidays, when university students living away for study are more likely to be home, adapting a mid twentieth century civic invention to a demographic reality it was not designed for.