The demons were staying home.

That was the religious logic of 鬼宿日 (kishukunichi), the day named for auspiciousness: malevolent spirits did not wander on this particular day, making it safe — safer than any other — to ask the gods for a child's survival. November was already the lunar harvest month, the season of thanksgiving to the gods. The full moon of the 15th added further weight. Everything pointed to this morning as the right morning to pray.

In November 1681, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi — the fifth 将軍 (shogun) of the Tokugawa dynasty, who had assumed power just the previous year — took his son 徳松 (Tokumatsu) to a Shinto shrine in Edo. The ceremony was 髪置き (kamioki): literally 'leaving the hair.' Since infancy, the child's head had been kept shaved, as was the custom. At age three — three by traditional East Asian reckoning, which counted the year of birth as year one, making Tokumatsu two by Western count — the hair was finally permitted to grow. This was the moment a child began, formally, to exist as a full person in the world.

The rite had roots that stretched back centuries. In the Heian period, court nobles had performed similar ceremonies for children at significant ages. In the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, the custom moved into the samurai class. But the date had never been standardized. Tsunayoshi's choice of November 15 — publicly, ceremonially, as the shogun — set a precedent that filtered down through the entire social hierarchy.

Tokumatsu died in 1683, approximately four years old. He was Tsunayoshi's only son, and no heir followed. Tsunayoshi's daughter Tsuruhime also died in childhood. The shogun who had performed the prayer that defined a children's festival could not save any of his own children.

The grief altered history. A Buddhist monk named Ryuko advised Tsunayoshi that his inability to produce a surviving heir was karmic punishment for having taken lives — sentient lives — in a previous existence. The remedy, Ryuko suggested, was compassion for living creatures. Tsunayoshi was born in the Year of the Dog. The inference was clear.

Starting in 1687, Tsunayoshi issued a series of laws known collectively as 生類憐みの令 (Shoruiawareminorei) — the Edicts on Compassion for Living Beings. The laws began modestly but expanded to remarkable extremes: abandoning sick animals became a crime; killing a dog could be punishable by death. At the height of the edicts, the shogunate constructed facilities in the Nakano area of Edo to house an estimated 50,000 stray dogs, maintained at government expense, fed at a cost that staggered the treasury. Citizens who called a dog a 'dog' rather than the officially preferred term were fined. The nickname 犬公方 (Inu Kubo) — Dog Shogun — spread through Edo's streets and would follow Tsunayoshi across the centuries.

Tsurayoshi died in 1709. His successor immediately repealed the edicts. The 50,000 dogs of Nakano were released or dispersed. But the date he had chosen on a November morning to pray for his son — November 15 — remained.

The three ceremonies that form 七五三 (Shichi-Go-San), Seven-Five-Three, mark the ages at which children in traditional Japan were considered to have genuinely survived: three years for both boys and girls (髪置き (kamioki), the hair ceremony), five years for boys (袴着 (hakamagi), when a boy first wore formal 袴 (hakama) trousers), and seven for girls (帯解き (obitoki), when a girl began wearing a proper 帯 (obi) sash). In a society where childhood mortality was devastating — where parents commonly held that a child was 'among the gods' until age seven and might be called back at any time — surviving to these milestones was not taken for granted. The candy given to children on this day, 千歳飴 (chitoseame), 'thousand-year candy,' says everything: these parents wanted a thousand years, and they were grateful just to have today.

Every November 15, families across Japan still dress small children in kimono and carry them to shrines. The tradition outlasted the shogunate, the samurai class, the Meiji government, the Second World War, and every social earthquake of the three and a half centuries since. The line runs unbroken from a grieving father's prayer to the photographs being taken this morning in shrine gardens across the country.