Coming of Age Day (成人の日, Seijin no Hi?) is a Japanese holiday held annually on the second Monday of January. It is held in order to congratulate and encourage all those who have reached the age of majority (20 years old (二十歳, hatachi?)) over the past year, and to help them realize that they have become adults. Festivities include coming of age ceremonies (成人式, seijin-shiki?) held at local and prefectural offices, as well as after-parties amongst family and friends.
Read more about Coming Of Age Day: History, Coming of Age Ceremony, Declining Attendance
Famous quotes containing the words coming, age and/or day:
“Gloucester. Nor further, sir, a man may rot even here.
Edgar. What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)