Shichi-Go-San

Shichi-Go-San (seven-five-three) is the Shinto rite of passage for young children, observed in mid-November, marking the ages of three, five and seven, traditionally three for both boys and girls, five for boys and seven for girls. Families dress the children, often in formal kimono, and visit a shrine to give thanks for the child's growth and to pray for continued health and a long life.

The ages reflect older understandings of childhood milestones, and the festival is popularly associated with a distinctive sweet, the long red-and-white chitose-ame, thousand-year candy, whose name expresses the wish for longevity. Though its origins lie in court and samurai customs of earlier centuries, its present nationwide form took shape more recently, and it is today one of the most familiar family occasions in Japan, valued as much for the marking of a child's growing up as for its religious observance at the shrine.

The specific ages the rite marks, three and five for boys and three and seven for girls by the most common convention, are generally traced to a set of separate coming of age customs practiced among the court and samurai classes of the Edo period, which were gradually combined into a single shrine visiting custom rather than beginning as one unified rite from the start. The underlying occasion for thanks was, for most of the custom's history, genuinely uncertain survival rather than a purely symbolic milestone: child mortality in premodern Japan was high enough that reaching each of these ages represented a real statistical accomplishment, and the shrine visit functioned as thanksgiving for having cleared a specific dangerous threshold rather than as a purely ceremonial rite of passage disconnected from actual risk.

As child mortality fell sharply over the twentieth century, the rite's practical urgency faded while its social and commercial elements grew, most visibly in chitose ame, thousand year candy, a long thin sweet given to children at the shrine and understood as a wish for long life, and in the now widespread practice of professional photography sessions in formal kimono or Western dress arranged around the shrine visit, a modern commercial layer added to a custom whose original occasion was considerably more anxious than festive.