But no, your old “Tickle Me Elmo” and Molly McIntire won’t cut it. These dolls are often handed down from generation to generation, and are displayed in a very ritualized manner once a year.
A full set of “Hina Ningyo” dolls can cost anywhere from $400 to $10,000, and consists of roughly 15 pieces—“figurines” may be a more accurate term. The main two dolls are the O-Dairi-sama and O-Hina-sama, an Emperor and an Empress/Princess, both dressed in fine silk.
Hina Matsuri display
The other figures include
3 Ladies of the Court, or kanjo, often depicted serving sake
2 Ministers or Guards
and 5 or more Court Musicians or Servants
Tradition dictates that prior to the third day of the third month (March 3) families of young girls set up the dolls on a tiered platform covered in a bright red cloth.<
On the top step sits the Royal Couple.
On the next step are the 3 kanjo with banquet trays.
And displayed on the lower steps stand the figures of musicians, ministers, guards, and servants, as well as miniatures of household furnishings and two toy trees. (see photo)
Hina Doll Set at Kansas City Japanese Festival
The holiday is also called Momo no Sekku, meaning Festival of the Peach. In the old calendar the day coincided with the blossoming of the peace trees in Japan.
An example of Hina Matsuri is shown in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams:
In the beautifully surreal scene, life size figures tell a little boy:
“…Doll Day is for the Peach Blossoms. It is to celebrate their arrival. We dolls personify the peach tree. We are the spirits of the trees, the life of the blossoms…”
In American culture there is no equivalent to Hina Matsuri, but it might be compared to a chess set meets a nativity scene, although the dolls do not refer to any specific personages.
Written references to the holiday date back a thousand years. It grew out of the belief that these human representations could absolve oneself from sin. Traditionally, people would make dolls of folded paper or straw, rub them against oneself, and set them in the water, to carry away their sins with the tide. Even today many towns in Japan carry on this tradition.
March 2 is the first day of the last month of the Baha’i calendar. The calendar consists of 19 months of 19 days each for a total of 361 days. Between the 18th and 19th months are 4 “intercalary days” from February 26 to March 1.
Each 19-day month begins with a “Feast.” It’s not the kind of feast we think of where folks pig out on big fat chicken legs, guzzle wine, and someone plays the lute. The Baha’i “Feasts” are monthly meetings/services.
The Feast consists of three parts. The devotional part when sacred texts are read. The consultative part when the congregation conducts administrative affairs and discusses anything from upcoming events to the situation of the Baha’i Faith around the world. And the social part, when the host serves refreshments and members share their thoughts on the previous two portions in a more casual atmosphere.
There are no clergy. A chairman conducts the meeting, but portions of the service are “led” by different members each month.
Today is the Feast of Ala (Loftiness). It’s a special “Feast” because it actually marks the beginning of the annual 19-day Fast of Ala. Born in the same tradition as the Jewish High Holy Days and the Christian Lent, the fast of Ala is more similar to the Muslim Ramadan in the sense that Bahais can eat at night, but must refrain from eating from sunrise to sunset.
At the end of Ala, Bahais usher in the New Year (Naw Ruz) which coincides with the Spring Equinox on March 21.
Baha’i at a Glance
The Bahá’í Faith has no official “home country”. The largest populations are in India (2 million), Iran (350,000), and the United States (150,000). [Other polls count 750,000 in the US, 500,000 in Iran, 350,000 in Vietnam, and 300,000 in Kenya.]
Shoghi Effendi, the head of the Baha’i Faith from the 1920’s to the 1950’s, summarized the essential elements of the religion as:
the independent search after truth, unfettered by superstition or tradition
the institution of a world tribunal for the adjudication of disputes between nations
the exaltation of work, performed in the spirit of service, to the rank of worship
the glorification of justice as the ruling principle in human society and ofreligion as a bulwark for the protection of all people and nations
and the establishment of a permanent and universal peace as the supreme goal of all mankind…”
Lofty, yes. But the Bahá’í Faith is currently the fastest growing major religion. It counts among its prophets Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad and Krishna, as well as Bahá’u’lláh.
In the 1890s, Italy, once the seat of an Empire that stretched through three continents, held only two small colonies on the Horn of Africa, which it had won with aid from Ethiopia.
Apparently the amity treaty between Ethiopia and Italy, signed by Menelik II of Ethiopia in 1889, contained a discrepancy in the Amharic and Italian translations, the latter of which established Ethiopia as an Italian protectorate.
Menelik denounced the treaty, prompting Italy to invade. Menelik had built up an arsenal of weapons from Britain and France, and even Italy over the previous years. Menelik appealed to France for support, but France refused to negate Italy’s territorial claims.
Battle of Adwa
It was at the Battle of Adwa on March 1, 1896 that Menelik’s forces of approximately 100,000 met with a surprisingly outnumbered Italian army of 17,000 under Oreste Barratieri. Barratieri had completely underestimated the opposing army’s numbers as well as their armed capabilities. Due to this and tactical mistakes on part of Barratieri, Menelik’s army completely obliterated the Italian forces in one of the most stunning defeats of any European power in Africa. After news of the humiliating battle hit Rome, the Prime Minister was forced to resign, and Italy forsook further territorial ambitions for 4o years.
Ethiopia would not be successfully invaded until 1936 when Benito Mussolini, anxious to prove Italy a superpower to its European neighbors, set his sights on Africa’s yet unconquered nation. Mussolini had seen the League of Nations’ impotence at handling border clashes between Italian Somalia and Ethiopia, and European powers were vying for Italian support against Adolf Hitler and Germany. This time the Italian army was much better equipped and had no qualms in using chemical weapons.
The League of Nations Geneva Protocol (signed by Italy) banned the use of mustard gas, but “on 10 October 1935, Rodolfo Graziani first ordered his troops to employ chemical weapons against Ras Nasibu’s troops at Gorrahei.” Italy continued to do so throughout the Italian-Ethiopian war. British and Ethiopian troops forced Italy out of Ethiopia in 1941. Two years later “London created the United Nations War Crimes Commission, but excluded Ethiopia for fear it would initiate proceedings against Pietro Badoglio,” who, as Italy’s new Prime Minister, had become a valuable asset to the Allies when Italy switched sides.
“In the 12-year period from 1946-1958, when the Marshall Islands was a United Nations Trust Territory administered by the United States, the United States conducted 67 atomic and hydrogen atmospheric bomb tests in islands, with a total yield of 108 megatons, which is 98 times greater than the total yield of all the U.S. tests in Nevada. Put another way, the total yield of the tests in the Marshall Islands was equivalent to 7,200 Hiroshima bombs. That works out to an average of more than 1.6 Hiroshima bombs per day for the 12-year nuclear testing program in the Marshalls…“
Over a tenth of that 12-year yield was delivered in a single day: March 1, 1954.
The hydrogen bomb known as Castle Bravo was expected to yield a 5 megaton blast, equivalent to over 300 Hiroshima sized blasts. The starter alone on Castle Bravo (Hydrogen bombs required the detonation of a smaller atomic device known as a ‘primary’ to kick-start the fusion process) was itself twice the size of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima.
A miscalculation of the reactive properties of the lithium isotope present in the fusion fuel resulted in a runaway chain reaction that created an explosion three times larger than scientists had predicted.
The Castle Bravo explosion was visible from 250 miles, it left a mile-wide crater on the atoll, and the mushroom cloud stretched 60 miles across. It remains to this day the largest nuclear weapon the U.S. ever tested.
The high yield, combined with shifting winds, resulted in hundreds of residents of the nearby atolls receiving dangerous doses of radiation. A Japanese fishing vessel was also in the path of the radiation fallout; the crew became ill and one member died. Japanese and English scientists were able to use radiation samples from the vessel to determine that fallout caused by thermonuclear tests in the Pacific was much higher than the U.S. had claimed.
According to the Marshall Islands’ Report, “The Bikinians have been exiled from their homeland since 1946, except for a brief period after President Johnson announced in 1968 that Bikini was safe and the people could return.”
That announcement, it turns out, was premature. The residents were moved off the island permanently 10 years later.
You may be aware of the United States’ 13-year experiment with prohibition back in the, well, Prohibition Era (1920-1933).
But it is a testament to the stout-hardiness of the Icelandic people that they kept up their beer ban for over five times that long: a full 75 years. Iceland was beer-free between 1914 and 1989 — a time period that roughly mirrors the entire existence of the Soviet Union.
The beer ban was finally repealed on March 1, 1989.
Nine months later the Berlin Wall fell, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If you doubt the causal connection between these events, it is a clear indicator that you have not sufficiently participated in the celebration of Beer Day, a ritual which entails consuming your weight in the hop-filled elixir.
Just to clarify, the Icelandic people did have some help during the dark days of prohibition, and from an unlikely ally. The Spanish and Portuguese declared they would not import Iceland’s salted cod unless Iceland imported some Iberian red wine. Thus, wine was legalized while beer remained taboo.
Twenty years after the repeal, Iceland boasts one major brewery for every 100,000 people.
Which means three.
Yes, Iceland has about 300,000 people, less people than the L.A. School District, grades 7 through 12.
Iceland’s low population growth has be attributed to the fact that — in case you haven’t been paying attention — beer was illegal there for 75 years.
How Can I Do My Part to Celebrate this Historic Holiday?
Every year thousands of Americans stand in solidarity with the Icelandic people, commiserating their tragic 20th century beer drought by imbibing a round of Icelandic beer, or whatever beer happens to be nearby.
However, Americans don’t celebrate Iceland Beer Day on March 1, but whenever they get around to it, usually in April.
I won’t be able to blog this holiday for another four years, so I better make this one count.
Leap Day is the day that keeps our calendar in line with the sun and the seasons in whack (as opposed to out of whack). The addition of a regular Leap Day every for years as opposed to a lunar calendar or an “intercalary month” added at arbitrary intervals, is what made the Julian calendar (pardon the expression) Leap Years ahead of its Roman predecessors. The rules of Leap Year also necessitated the change to the Gregorian calendar 1500 years later.
But I’ve already blogged about the history and transformation of Leap Day and the calendar at length in Are You Bissextile?“, “Why January 1 Marks the New Year,” and “Secrets of Dating.”
Instead, just random facts for Leap Day:
For centuries in Western culture Leap Day has been known as the day when women can legally propose to men. One legend has it this is because of a deal St. Brigid made with St. Patrick.
Leap Day hasn’t occurred on a Friday in 28 years.
The Gregorian calendar repeats its cycle every 400 years. During that cycle Leap Day is more likely to fall on a Monday or Wednesday than any other day.
Leap Day has come to be known as Sadie Hawkin’s Day in the U.S., because both holidays allow women to ask out men. But Sadie Hawkins Day, which began in the 1930s, was originally celebrated on November 15.
Sadie Hawkins Day grew out of a comic strip called “Lil’ Abner” by Al Capp. In the comic strip the annual Sadie Hawkins Race had been established by Sadie’s father. He was afraid she’d never find a husband, so he started a foot race between the town’s unmarried girls and beaus. If a woman caught up to the man of her choice, he would be required to marry her. (A good way to keep boyfriends in tip-top shape!)
Today Leap Year Babies celebrate one hell of party, since they won’t have another birthday until 2012.
The great-grand-daddy of our February 29th Leap Day goes back to the ancient Romans. I know what you’re thinking: Don’t we have anything that doesn’t go back to them? Uh, yes: numbers, and thank god for that, or taxes would be an even bigger drag. Also the dates of the month aren’t Roman—for which you’ll be grateful in a minute.
See, back in the day, when the Romans used a lunar calendar, the full moon fell directly in the middle of each month and was called the Ides. And the new moon at the beginning of the month was called the Kalends (from which we get the word calendar). And somewhere in between those two were the Nones. (From which we get the word nine. The nones were nine days before the Ides.)
Instead of saying it’s March 13th, the Romans would say It’s two days before the Ides of March. (Actually they’d say it’s three days before the Ides because they counted funny and that’s another reason you should be glad for Arabic numbers, but that’s neither here nor there.) Instead of saying it’s March 25th, they’d say it’s six days before the Kalends of April, or ante diem IV Kalends Aprilis.
March marked the beginning of the new year. To make up for the fact that the lunar calendar was only 355 days long, every few years a mensis intercalaris, or intercalary month, was tacked onto the end of February. February 23 was the annual Terminalia holiday, in which Romans celebrated Terminus—no, not the god of airports—the god of boundary stones and property disputes. Kind of like the ancient Judge Judy.
Whether a year would have a mensis intercalaris tacked on was determined by the Pontifex Maximus. The problem with this system is if Ponty’s friends were in office, he would have reason to extend the calendar year, whereas if an opposing party had power, he would have reason to shorten it. As a result of this friction and the chaos of the Punic Wars, the intercalary months were added or forgotten for decades at a time. Soon the calendar drifted into entirely different seasons.
Julius Caesar formalized the calendar. Each month was lengthened a certain number of days so the whole calendar would mirror the solar year, not the cycles of the moon—365 days. Instead of a whole month, a leap day was inserted after February 23 (or February 24) every four years.
Only they didn’t call it the 23rd or 24th. Remember we were talking about the Kalends and the Ides?
Since they were counting backwards from the beginning of March—excuse me—from the Kalends of March, they called it “doubling” the day six days prior to the Kalends of March. Or if you really want to get technical, “ante diem bis sextum Kalendas Martii.”
Bis sextum literally translated to doubling or splitting of the sixth day. Hence, leap years were known throughout the Middle Ages as “bissextile years.”
When Roman dating was replaced by the trusty 1-31 system, Leap Day was moved from February 25th to February 29th. Today, even though February is the 2nd month, we continue the 2000 year-old Roman tradition of placing the intercalaris at February’s end.
In simple English:
“When there is the double sixth day before the first day [of March], it matters not whether a person was born on the first or on the second day, and afterwards the sixth day before the first [of March] is his birthday; for those two days are regarded as one, but the second day is intercalated, not the first. And so he that was born on the sixth day before the first [of March] in a year in which there is no intercalation has the first day as his birthday in a leap year. Cato is of opinion that the intercalated month is an additional one, and he takes all its days for a moment of time, and Quintus Mucius assigns it to the last day of the month of February. But the intercalated month consists of twenty-eight days.”
“Cum bissextum kalendas est, nihil refert utrum priore an posteriore die quis natus sit, et deinceps sextum kalendas eius natalis dies est, nam id biduum pro uno die habetur; sed posterior dies intercalatur non prior: ideo quo anno intercalatum non est sexto kalendas natus, cum bissextum kalendas est, priorem diem natalem habet. 1. Cato putat, mensem intercalarem additicium esse, omnesque eius dies pro momento temporis observat, extremoque diei mensis Februarii attribuit Quintus Mucius. 2. Mensis autem intercalaris constat ex diebus viginti octo.” –D. 50, 16, 98
February 27, 1947: Lin Jian-Mai was peddling black market cigarettes at a portable stand on Taiping Road in Taipei, Taiwan (then Formosa), when she was caught and arrested by anti-smuggling police from the “Kuomintang” (Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Chinese government). During the arrest she yelled and struggled with the agents, who had taken her wares and her cash. As a gathering crowd watched the commotion, an overzealous agent pistol-whipped the woman, hard.
The angry crowd surrounded the officers, who then fired warning shots to make an escape for themselves. One of the shots hit and killed a pedestrian.
Word of the incident spread. People were already angry at the corruption of the Chinese government, and the living conditions that had necessitated the black market.
A mob gathered outside the police station, demanding the guilty officer be brought out. When their demands were refused by the captain, the crowd grew angrier and set fire to a police vehicle.
The next day, February 28, amid anti-government demonstrations, the Governor’s security force fired upon the demonstrators with machine guns. Formosans rebelled, attacked mainlanders, and took over part of the city’s infrastructure. On March 7 Chiang Kai-Shek’s army arrived from mainland China for back-up. That’s when the slaughter really began.
The beating of the cigarette vendor may have triggered the 228 Incident, but tensions leading to something like this had been brewing for two years, ever since Chiang Kai-Shek’s government won back Taiwan in 1945 after a half-century of Japanese control.
Corruption and nepotism grew rampant. Taiwan was treated like a colony of the mainland. The Governor Chen Yi controlled the island’s economy and forced Formosans to pay unimaginable amounts for common goods. The Taiwan Company, for example, was run by Governor Chen’s nephew. The company bought coal at 200 yen a ton and sold it to the people for 4,000.
“With his Chinese aides and ‘monopoly police’ [Chen] took over and expanded the Japanese system of government industrial and trade monopoly (sugar, camphor, tea, paper, chemicals, oil refining, cement). He confiscated some 500 Jap-owned factories and mines, tens of thousands of houses.”
Chen ran everything from “the hotel to the night-soil business.” And that included the cigarette factory.
It was in this crucible that Chen’s monopoly police beat a woman vending non-sanctioned tobacco—cigarettes that weren’t manufactured by Chen’s government-run companies. It was the spark that set the island aflame.
When Chiang Kai-Shek’s troops arrived from mainland China, they engaged in:
“‘three days of indiscriminate killing and looting. For a time everyone seen on the streets was shot at, homes were broken into and occupants killed. In the poorer sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead…There were instances of beheadings and mutilation of bodies, and women were raped,’ said one American witness.”
Witnesses estimated as many as 10,000 people were killed. But there are no official tallies. The government banned Formosans from even mentioning what came to be known as the 228 Incident.
The riots and massacres would trigger the era of “White Terror” in Taiwan. The violence was further fueled by the Chinese Civil War between Mao Zedong’s Communist army and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist forces. The Communists eventually won everything but the tiny island of Taiwan, which calls itself, the Republic of China.
Even so, martial law in Taiwan didn’t end until 1987.
…I am reminded of the brief note I put down on my diary after seeing the movie, The Last Emperor. The note simply says, “A good and interesting movie, but a wrong title.” By a wrong title I meant that Pu-yi was not the last Emperor of China; there have been many since…One would include among them, Yuan Si-kai, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Each of the them certainly behaved as emperor and wanted others to so treat him. The tradition of authoritarianism of the ruler is still deeply engrained in the minds of both the rulers and the ruled in Chinese culture. A forceful example can be found as recently as June 4, 1989 at Tienanmen Square. For the rulers, only glory and power count. Human rights, freedom of equality or respect for the lives of people have to surrender to the might of the rulers.”
—Tsung-yi Lin, from the Preface to Formosa Betrayed, by George Kerr
