'Coming of Age' Day

'Coming of Age Day' here today - a day just for you if you are twenty years old because officialdom has set it aside as a special holiday to mark your reaching of the age of majority. When I first came to Japan it used to be held on the 15th January but under the 'Happy Monday System' introduced in 2000 so that we would benefit every year from the unimaginable luxury if three days off in a row it was moved to the second Monday in January.

The routine is that if you have reached your twentieth birthday by this date and so 'come of age' then you get dressed up and attend a ceremony at the city office and the mayor gives you a pep talk about being good citizens, remembering to vote and not drinking too much beer now that you can at last legally do so. It is a rite of passage I guess. And bizarrely the ceremony around here is held on the Sunday so that everyone in city hall can get the Monday holiday as a holiday.

Anyway this year it was my younger Japanese daughter Mi-chan's turn to wear the bright kimono that has been handed down through the family for this event and go and listen to the mayor. We went down to collect her from the 'Plaza' when the ceremony was over and the place was buzzing with a couple of hundred twenty year old's enjoying the sunshine in their best kimonos and 'recruit suits'. As you tend to live at home and travel long distances to study during your high school and university years here in Japan your best friends tend to remain the ones you made locally at 'Junior High' before you were sixteen, and that was evident from the noisy crowd milling around on the pavement. We headed off to a local temple garden for a few family pictures.

Japan has changed hugely even in the decade that I've been here and nowhere is it so obvious as in this generation who sometimes seem to share none of their elders' values. But to see this event is to appreciate the other side of that coin, there is still a relaxed deference shown to, if not exactly respect for, institutional authority. Can you imagine all the twenty year old's in an English town getting dressed up and going off for a couple of hours to hear the mayor's opinions on life and youth?