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George Yepes, La pistola y el corazón (The Gun and the Heart), 1989

Helioflores, !!Votos arriba!!

Fisher Girl, Frans Hals

Handcrafted Geometric Glass Lamps By AlexaWorkshop On Etsy

Vista la fachada principal, Mercado de la Merced, Rosario 180, Merced Balbuena, Venustiano Carranza, Ciudad de México 1957

Arq. Enrique del Moral

Foto. Guillermo Zamora

David Bacon, En los campos del norte

Burt Glinn

In Japan, Children’s Day, formerly known as Boy’s Day, is celebrated by flying a windsock in the shape of giant carp. As the wind blows, the fish looks like it’s swimming upstream. Carp or koi are celebrated in East Asian cultures for their strength and persistence, qualities that parents hope their children will have.

The festival originated with the samurai, or warrior elite class, as a way to promote military values and protect young sons from the many ills that endangered children. Samurai families would fly banners with depictions of Shoki the Demon-Queller, a mythic character who combatted evil, in hopes that Shoki would guard the family. If you look carefully at the cityscape in the background of this print, you can see vertical white Shoki banners fluttering above the rooftops: that’s because the neighborhood depicted was where the Samurai lived, just north of Edo Castle in the city that would soon be known as Tokyo.

The practice of flying carp windsocks came when non-samurai families wanted to celebrate Boy’s Day as well. In a vain attempt to protect their traditional ways of life, the samurai elite had passed many laws forbidding commoners from adopting samurai customs, so in this as in many other customs, the commoners had to develop their own version of the festival. When Hiroshige made this print, nonsamurai families had only recently taken to flying carp windsocks on Boy’s Day.

The idea of broadening the festival to include girls was introduced in the mid-20th century. Japanese girls still have their own festival, called Hina-Matsuri, on March third, when households install elaborate displays of traditional dolls. There are a few other days of the year that are recognized internationally as Children’s Day, including June 10 and November 20, and then there are those who would argue that every day is Children’s Day. 

by April