Coming-of-Age Day and Kimono Photography in Japan

Coming-of-Age Day, known in Japanese as "Seijin no Hi", is a national holiday held on the second Monday of January (fixed by law, so the date itself is not something visitors need to hedge about, even though the exact day naturally shifts from year to year). It honors young people who are marking the transition into adulthood, and it is one of the most visually striking days on the Japanese calendar because so many of the people celebrating step outside in formal traditional dress, typically for the only time in their lives.

The holiday traces back to a local celebration held in Saitama in 1946, in the aftermath of the Second World War, meant to encourage and reassure a generation of young people facing an uncertain future. It became a nationwide national holiday in 1948 and has been observed in some form ever since, though the exact date has moved around as Japan's "Happy Monday" system shifted several holidays onto Mondays to create long weekends.

Municipalities across the country, from big-city wards to small towns, organize local Seijin Shiki ceremonies for residents who are reaching this milestone, which means the event is fundamentally a community and family occasion rather than a centralized spectacle staged for outside viewers.

This is worth clarifying because it trips up a lot of visitors and even some guidebooks: Japan officially lowered the legal age of adulthood from 20 to 18 in April 2022, a change to the Civil Code that affects things like signing contracts and getting a passport without parental consent. That might suggest Coming-of-Age Day ceremonies would shift to honor 18-year-olds instead, but in practice the vast majority of municipalities have continued to hold Seijin Shiki for people turning, or who have recently turned, 20.

The reasoning tends to come down to a few practical points. The legal drinking, smoking, and gambling age in Japan stayed at 20 even after the adulthood threshold changed, so a ceremony built around that milestone still lines up with when people can legally take part in the toasting and socializing that often follows. On top of that, Japanese 18-year-olds are typically deep in university entrance exam season in January, which makes that age an awkward time to ask an entire cohort to take a day off for formal ceremonies and family photos. Many local governments surveyed residents after the law changed and found a strong preference for keeping the tradition tied to age 20, so they simply kept the ceremony as is while just adjusting the official name in some places to something like "Ceremony to Celebrate Twenty-Year-Olds" rather than "Adulthood Ceremony," to avoid implying it confers legal adult status.

So if you are visiting Japan in January and see references to Coming-of-Age Day, it is safe to assume the ceremonies and the furisode-and-hakama crowds you might encounter are almost entirely twenty-year-olds, not eighteen-year-olds, even though the latter are technically the legal adults now.

The core of Seijin no Hi is a formal ceremony organized by each participant's home municipality, usually held at a city hall, community hall, or convention center rather than at a shrine or temple. Local officials give speeches, honorees are recognized as a group, and there is often a keepsake or small gift handed out. It is closer in spirit to a graduation ceremony than to a festival, and attendance is generally limited to the honorees and sometimes their families, not open to the general public.

The morning of the ceremony is a production in itself for many young women. It typically starts hours earlier with a visit to a hair and makeup salon, since styling an elaborate updo and applying formal makeup to go with a furisode is a specialized, time-consuming process. Many families book these appointments and kimono rentals many months in advance, since salons get fully booked around this date every year.

After the ceremony wraps up, the rest of the day tends to be social rather than official: honorees regroup with childhood friends they may not have seen in years, families gather for photos and sometimes a special meal, and it is common to see groups in furisode and hakama out and about in parks, near shrines, or at photo studios in the hours before or after the formal proceedings.

The visual signature of the day is the furisode, a style of kimono with long, flowing sleeves that is reserved for unmarried young women, typically worn only once or twice in a lifetime, for occasions like this one and sometimes a graduation ceremony. Furisode are famous for being some of the most elaborate and colorful kimono made, with bold patterns, bright dyes, and often gold or metallic accents, paired with an ornate obi sash, a decorated hair ornament, and sometimes a fur stole for warmth given the January chill.

Young men tend to appear in either a formal hakama and kimono combination, similar in spirit to what is worn at graduation ceremonies, or increasingly in a standard business suit, which has become common enough that plenty of male honorees skip traditional dress altogether. Because renting a furisode and booking the accompanying hair, makeup, and photography can be expensive, some families instead rent a simpler kimono or reuse one passed down within the family.

Professional photography is a big part of the tradition. Many families book a formal portrait session, either at a studio beforehand or with a photographer on the day itself, and it is common to see honorees posing for family photos outside their ceremony venue or at a nearby park or shrine.

Because Seijin Shiki ceremonies are organized locally and are not really designed as tourist attractions, there is no single central event to attend, and visitors should not expect to walk into a ceremony hall. What travelers can realistically encounter is the atmosphere around it: clusters of furisode-clad young women and their families near city halls and community centers on the morning of the holiday, and a noticeably higher concentration of formal kimono around popular shrines that week, since many honorees and their families also make a shrine visit as part of the milestone.

Meiji Jingu in Tokyo is probably the best-known example of this secondary effect. It is not hosting an official Seijin Shiki ceremony, but its scale and popularity as a shrine mean that on and around Coming-of-Age Day, and sometimes for the surrounding days, visitors are likely to see many young women in furisode and young men in hakama coming through for shrine visits, family photos, and general celebration. Other major shrines in large cities can show a similar, if smaller, effect.

If you want to experience this as a visitor, the respectful approach is to treat it the way you would any family milestone you happen to witness in public, such as a wedding party or a graduation. Enjoying the color and atmosphere from a distance is fine, but photographing specific individuals or families up close without asking first is not appropriate, since this is a deeply personal and often emotional day for the people involved, not a costume event staged for onlookers. If you would like a photo with someone in furisode, a polite request in simple English or Japanese, together with an understanding that "no" is a perfectly normal answer, goes a long way.

It is worth being clear that Coming-of-Age Day itself is not something tourists participate in, since Seijin Shiki ceremonies are tied to residency and age rather than being open events. However, wearing a kimono while sightseeing is a completely separate and very accessible activity available in most major tourist areas year-round, including places like Kyoto, Asakusa in Tokyo, and Kamakura, where rental shops offer everything from casual cotton yukata to more formal kimono, often bundled with hairstyling and sometimes photography.

These rental experiences are aimed at visitors and are generally treated as a fun, low-stakes part of sightseeing rather than anything tied to a specific milestone, so there is no need to wait for January or to conflate the two. If seeing the Coming-of-Age Day crowds sparks an interest in wearing kimono yourself, booking one of these separate rental experiences during your trip, at any time of year, is the appropriate way to do it, rather than assuming any overlap with the Seijin Shiki season.