One of the city’s most internationalized districts hits a cultural milestone on Coming of Age Day.

Last Monday was Seijin no Hi in Japan. Also known as Coming of Age Day, it’s a holiday on which cities celebrate their residents who recently turned, or are about to turn, 20 years old, considered the traditional start of adulthood in Japanese culture.

However, with the age of legal adulthood in Japan having recently been revised from 20 down to 18, there’s been some shifting of the perception of Coming of Age Day, and adding yet another new societal aspect is the growing number of foreign nationals living in Japan. Generally, municipalities count anyone who turns 20 between April 2 of the previous year, or who will turn 20 by April 1 of the current year, as those who should be celebrated on Coming of Age Day, and this year in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, almost exactly half of them were foreigners.

Shinjuku has one of the largest clusters of foreign students in Japan, as the ward has a number of Japanese-as-a-foreign-language schools, vocational schools, and cram schools, and it’s also where you’ll find the main, cultural, and engineering campuses of Waseda University, one of the country’s most internationalized institutes of higher learning. Thanks to that combination of factors, out of Shinjuku’s 4,268 new/about-to-be 20 year-olds for Coming of Age Day this year, foreign nationals account for 2,114, or 49.5 percent of the total.

That ratio wasn’t fully represented at Shinjuku Ward’s Coming of Age Day ceremony, held in a ballroom at the luxurious Keio Plaza Hotel on Monday afternoon, despite being open to anyone within the age group. There still were, however, a number of foreign residents in attendance, dressed in either suits or the formal, long-sleeved kimono customarily worn by women to mark the occasion. With Japan’s foreign population continuing to grow, especially in younger demographics, it’s encouraging to see new arrivals from overseas taking an active, participatory interest in continuing the country’s cultural traditions.

Source: 47 News via Hachima Kiko, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Shinjuku Ward
Top image: Pakutaso
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