The Tanabata series following the previous blog “The Star Festival“. This time for the second time is “Five Colors of Strips (Tanzaku)”.

In the ancient Chinese ancestral event “Kikoden”, they were decorating the five colors threads, and after being transmitted to Japan, they have been changed to strips to decorate Japanese poems (Waka). And from the Edo era when ordinary people spread to wishes and the “Milky Way” and other words and pictures wrote down on the strips, turning to hang them on bamboo leaves. Incidentally, Tanabata remains as a custom in China, Korea, Taiwan, etc., but only in Japan, writing a wish in a strip and hanging it on the bamboo leaf. I thought again that Japanese culture likes to write songs and write something.

There are also meanings for the five colors, and the color based on the Chinese Yin-Yang five-line theory is derived. The Yin-Yang five-line theory is that everything has two conflicting aspects of “yin and yang” and has five elements of “Tree / Fire / Earth / Gold / Water” which is the root of all of this world. The color applied to these five elements is “Blue / Red / Yellow / White / Black“, each of which has its own meaning.