Japanese families set up Hina dolls in early March to pray for the healthy growth of daughters. One root of this ritual, known as the Girls' Festival, is said to go back 1,000 years or more to the Heian Period. The theory is that a tradition of using dolls as surrogates to take on their daughters harm merged into doll play, and then took its present form in the Edo Period, which lasted from the 17th to 19th centuries. The Hina dolls vary greatly from one region of Japan to another. We feature the beauty of several local versions of Hina dolls.
