Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Young children wearing their traditional clothes—boys wearing hakamas, and girls kimonos—stand before the altar of a Shinto shrine, accompanied by parents also wearing their traditional clothes, and bow in solemn prayer while clapping their hands. This is the scene witnessed in autumn every year all over Japan, especially on and around November 15. The occasion is known as hichigosan, which are Japanese pronunciations of the numbers “seven-five-three.” Although November 15 is not recognized as an official national holiday, with May 5 already recognized as a national holiday as “Children Day,” it is still one of the most celebrated days among the Japanese, especially those with young children.

What is the significance of hichigosan as an event that so many Japanese celebrate today by going to Shinto shrines? Why are the numbers “seven-five-three” chosen, and not other numbers? The second question is easier to answer: the numbers “seven-five-three” in hichigosan refer to the ages of children, seven for seven-year old girls, five for five-year old boys, and three for three-year old boys and girls. These numbers are chosen because they are odd numbers, which are regarded as lucky numbers, and these ages are chosen because they signify the three critical stages in the life of young children in Japan.

Why are these ages—three, five, and seven—regarded as the critical stages in the life of young children in Japan? We take it for granted today that having a baby is a joyous event for every family. However, not every baby was expected to live beyond infancy in Tokugawa Japan, with the infant mortality rate estimated to have been as high as 50%. In fact, hichigosan is said to have its origin when the Third Tokugawa Shogun Iemitsu (1604-1651), concerned about the poor health of his fourth son Tokumatsu, prayed for his health and longevity on November 15, one of the auspicious days in the old lunar calendar. Soon the custom spread among ordinary Japanese to celebrate when boys and girls reached critical stages in their early life: at age three when they are ready to start growing their hair, at age five when boys were allowed to wear their traditional hakamas, and at age seven when girls were allowed to wear their traditional kimonos. Hichigosan thus served as the occasion to remind the parents that their children had safely reached the critical stages of their development as human beings.

Things are very different in Japan today, with the infant mortality rate being among the lowest in the world along with such countries as Finland, Iceland, and Norway. While most children are expected to live beyond age seven, the custom of celebrating the rites of passage at ages three, five, and seven is still widely observed in Japan today. With the infant mortality rate as low as it is today, the meaning of hichigosan is quite different from that in Tokugawa Japan. No longer does it serve as a reminder to the parents that their children have reached the critical stages of their development. Rather, it has become a festive occasion for children and parents alike to visit Shinto shrines wearing their beautiful hakamas and kimonos and enjoy autumn leaves as beautiful and colorful as their hakamas and kimonos.

While hichigosan has become one of the most celebrated days by the Japanese, what tends to be forgotten are its cosmic implications. Age three carries a special significance in that children reach the critical age when they become like human beings, not helpless babies who are not much different from other creatures. As human beings, children are now expected to follow the way of life of humans, which in Eastern philosophy, needs to follow the way of heaven, and the way of earth. In other words, how we humans ought to conduct ourselves in life should be derived from the laws that govern in heaven and earth, namely, in nature. At age five, children acquire further characteristics of being human as they start to interact more fully with the environment filled with the energy of five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. At age seven, the energy of the sun and the moon are added to the energy of five elements, meaning that children are now cosmic beings supported by the energy that fills the whole universe. As long as they pay homage to Shinto shrines, parents who celebrate hichigosan with their children need to remind their children of these cosmic implications, for Shinto, as a folk religion that finds kami in everything in and around us, offers a promise of developing a worldview that sees the unity of all beings in the universe.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

July 14, 2015 will probably go down in the history of space exploration as the “encounter day”, the day a man-made spacecraft came closest to Pluto. At 7:50 am EDT, the New Horizons spacecraft launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral on January 19, 2006 came within 7,800 miles of Pluto’s surface as it flew past at the speed exceeding 30,000 mph. The day is a triumphant day for Alan Stern (1967- ), a planetary scientist and an aeronautic engineer, who has been pushing for a NASA mission to Pluto for nearly 25 years, recruiting scientists, senators, and even children to lobby the Congress for funding the mission.¹

At three billion miles from the Sun, Pluto is invisible to the naked eye, and was not discovered until 1930. The honor of naming Pluto, for the Roman god of underworld, goes to Venetia Burney, an 11-year old British girl, who suggested this name while she was discussing the discovery with her grandfather. The name was unanimously adopted by the staff at the Lowell Observatory, named after Percival Lowell (1855-1916) who had started searching for what he called “Planet X” as early as 1905 whose existence was finally confirmed by Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997) in February 1930.

Planetary scientists now know that Pluto is but one of many small frozen bodies at the far edge of the solar system circling around the Sun. With the discovery of so many similar objects in the Kuiper Belt—Quaoar, Haumea, Eris, and others—where Pluto is located, it became increasingly problematic to maintain that Pluto is a planet. With the size of only 1,430 miles across (found to be 1,473 miles across by the New Horizons spacecraft), it is clear that Pluto does not come close to Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune whose status as planets is well recognized. At a meeting held in Prague in August 2006, the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which is responsible for naming and classifying celestial objects, decided to adopt the name of “dwarf planets” for a class of objects similar in size as Pluto. The decision to demote Pluto’s status from a planet to a dwarf planet was a bitterly disappointing one for Alan Stern, for dwarf planets are a different category of celestial objects from planets. One of the arguments IAU scientists used against calling Pluto a planet was that increasing the number of planets in the solar system to 20 or more beyond the eight universally recognized ones would be inconvenient. Indeed, we are tempted to paraphrase Juliet’s words to infer what Alan Stern must have felt: “What’s in a name? that which we call a planet by any other name would look as planetary”.²

The controversy surrounding the naming and categorizing of a celestial object like Pluto reminds us of the importance we humans attach to our activity of naming and categorizing things in the world around us. To give a thing a name is important because having a name already suggests that we know something about that thing, for a name captures some property of a thing, be it its color, shape, or constituent substances. For scientists, naming a thing comes with the honor of having his/her name attached to it, as in Halley’s comet, Comet Hale-Bopp, and the Doppler effect. In some cases, it takes the poet’s imagination to give a name to a thing, as Shakespeare writes in his Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,/ Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;/ And, as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen/ Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name.”

The world where a thing has “a local habitation and a name” is, according to Buddhist thought, the world of conventional reality, or the world of “name and form”. A thing, which always appears as a composite entity called sankhara, or “that which has been put together”, is given a name for its form to distinguish it from other things. But a form, being subject to the laws of impermanence and non-self, comes and goes without any entity that can be called its own self. “Form is nothing other than emptiness, emptiness is nothing other than form. Form is but emptiness, emptiness is but form.” These lines are well known to Buddhist practitioners as they appear in the short yet profound sutra known as the Prajnaparamita, or the Heart Sutra. It reminds us of the illusionary nature of things in the world of conventional reality, behind which lies the world of ultimate reality, or the world of “airy nothing” in Shakespeare’s words, accessible only to the insight of an enlightened Buddha or a poet like Shakespeare. Since the world of conventional reality is the observable world for the rest of us, the debate about what name to give to a distant celestial object will continue as scientists keep pushing out the boundary of the observable universe we inhabit. As for Pluto, it will continue to have “a local habitation and a name” until a sankhara in the universe, that which we call the solar system, is reduced to “airy nothing”, when the Sun runs out of its energy and collapses itself to a dwarf. By that time, no scientists will be around to debate whether a dwarf planet is a planet or not.

1. For details about Stern’s involvement in the New Horizon mission and his passion for Pluto, see Lemonick, Michael, “Plutonic Love”, Smithsonian, June 2015.
2. “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II.