Happy New Year everyone!
To celebrate, I wanted to share some cherished New Years experiences I have had in Japan over the years. Here are three stories which will hopefully get you on the plane to Japan for next year.
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New Years in Japan is something special.
It isn’t just about any particular part of the festivities, the spectacular parties, the throngs of people, or even the spiritual side of the holiday indigenous to Japan.
Some heady mix of all of it comes together and takes you away. Think of visiting a Christmas night market in Vienna or celebrating independence day at Pearl Harbor, there’s just something special you can feel in the festivities which transforms the experience into something magical.
Japanese New Year combines traditional and modern elements together with some amazing food and fun along the way. Thinking back, I can remember three New Year’s traditions in Japan which made a deep impression on me.
A New Year’s Eve in Tokyo would not be complete without Hatsumode (初诣), or the first visit to a shinto shrine for the New Year. Shinto (神道) is the native spiritual system of Japan. The name translates to the ‘way’ or ‘path’ of the spirits, and is still widely respected throughout the country.
All cities and towns will have a local shinto temple or shrine, and throughout the year many festivals are held in celebration of these deities. Local residents volunteer to be a part of a team of devotees who host the celebration, dressing up in colorful costumes and marching to the beat of traditional drums while hoisting a heavy shrine on a palanquin. These celebrations can be huge, noisy processions, announced by the clanging of symbols, drums and flutes as the crowds form to enjoy the parade.
On the New Year people celebrate with Hatsumode by visiting major shrines in addition to participating in local processions. The most popular of all of these shrine visits is the Meiji shrine (明治神宮) at the center of Tokyo, which plays host to a gigantic festival. Thousands upon thousands of visitors, starting around sundown New Year’s eve, will walk to the central shrine buildings on the temple grounds through paths that are decorated with lanterns and way stations for food and fortune telling. Fortune telling at New Years is an ancient tradition, with some stands offering little games or other rituals which you can participate in to acquire intricately crafted paper fortunes for the coming year.
One year I was lucky enough to be invited by my close friends Rei and Kei to join them in a march to the Meiji shrine. The experience was breathtaking. We started late in the afternoon with crystal winter skies and the buzz of energy emanating from everyone on the streets enjoying the holiday. Slowly we started to make our way from Shibuya district’s fashionable shopping outlets towards the temple grounds. We entered the huge park encompassing the Meiji shrine where already happy families and couples were coming together and enjoying themselves. The paths leading to the center of the shrine and the surrounding roads play host to food and drink stalls all along the way, with intermittent pop-up dining areas to service hungry New Years celebrations. Yakisoba, mochi cakes with red bean, even roasted chestnuts, all of the Japanese winter specialties are there, waiting for you to enjoy.
We wandered slowly, enjoying the park and stopping every chance we had to sample a seasonal treat. After what seemed like hours, we arrived at the main temple just as the last bit of daylight faded against the stunning backdrop of the temple itself. Kei had just finished telling me about the traditional fireworks in his hometown, but since he and his wife just had their first baby they wouldn’t be able to return home this year to celebrate. We approached the open temple to pay our respects to the temple gods, dropped some coins in the donations trough and clapped our hands at the foot of the statues inside, earning some good fortune for our troubles.
By now it had started to get crowded, but we still needed to walk through the lantern garden in order to leave. There were so many people on the pathways leading back to the city we couldn’t walk out of turn, and instead just wound along the line with the crowd, snaking through the glowing backdrop of traditional lanterns until we were able to fund the exit. The holiday mood was affecting everyone, and even though we were packed uncomfortably together, shoulder tightly tucked against strangers shoulder, everything flowed together under the New Year’s night sky. We walked with the flow of the crowd, going where it took us, losing ourselves completely in the final moments at the end of a long year.
There are many other New Year traditions as well, some of which have even managed to follow the Japanese diaspora to lands overseas. Two of my favorite traditions that made it to Hawai’i have become a part of our own local customs, extending beyond the Japanese community itself to make a home on the islands.
To celebrate the New Year and spread good fortune, Japanese retailers have a tradition called Fukubukuro (福袋). Fuku (福) means good fortune in Japanese, and Fukuro (袋 conjugated as ‘bukuro’) means bag, so the tradition can be translated as ‘Lucky Bag’. The tradition started in the Edo period in the 18th and 19th centuries in Japan when the first department stores were beginning to grow in major cities like Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto. To celebrate, department stores or other merchants design specially printed “lucky bags”, usually printed red color with golden letters for extra good-fortune, and seal inside special gifts and items from their catalog.
On New Year’s Day shoppers try their luck and randomly pick from a pile of these bags at the front of the store. Each bag costs the same fixed price, and everyone is eager to try their luck and buy a bag with that unexpectedly hard to find special prize. Judged by the excitement of the frenzied crowd of shoppers assured each year, it might be better to translate this tradition as ‘Lucky Grab’ instead!
My most memorable Japanese fukubukuro experience in Japan was in Osaka at the Hanshin shopping mall. Osaka is famous for a few things in Japan, most notably baseball and a practice called ‘Osaka no Kuidaore’, or ‘eat until you drop’. This foodie tradition was formed when merchants from Osaka grew rich but because of Japan’s traditional feudal social classes there was nothing these low born owners of wealth could spend their earnings on except food and drink. During New Years in Osaka people flood the streets searching for the best snack foods, especially Takoyaki, or fried Octopus balls in sweet sauce.
Osaka’s baseball tradition is unique, a hybrid of the New York versus Boston rivalry and the Chicago Cubs famous curse. The largest developer in the city, Hanshin group, owns the Hanshin Tigers baseball franchise, whose run of hard-luck makes them a perennial hometown favorite for die-hard fans. Their rivalry with the Tokyo Giants franchise is legendary in Japan, and every game brings scores of fanatical followers to their favorite dedicated Hanshin tigers team bar. They celebrate in support of their beloved teams ‘never-say-die’ spirit against their arch rivals with food, drinks and of course a unique fight song for every player on the Tiger’s roster. The Hanshin shopping mall is a part of the festivities as well, and special Hanshin Tigers fukubukuro were on offer on my Osaka shopping excursion. My lucky day arrived, and in my Hanshin mall fukubukuro I was excited to receive some Tiger’s gear.
In Hawai'i, we also celebrate the tradition of eating mochi, or rice cakes, at New Years. There are a few forms of celebratory mochi during the New Years, and for those of us who are not ethnically Japanese the most familiar is pounding mochi from fresh rice. Whole neighborhoods get together to steam and prepare the rice, then a team of two work in tandem with heavy wooden mallets to pound the rice into a sweet, sticky cake. If you visit the islands during New Years and are fortunate enough to visit with local friends and families outside the main tourist areas you can be sure someone will break out some locally made mochi to share with you. Be sure to try some of the more unique flavors like butter mochi, lilikoi, or even chocolate chip for a taste that is a unique hybrid of eastern tradition and local tastes.
In Japan mochi typically comes in two forms that are customary at New Years. Mochi soup, or Ozoni, is a miso soup with vegetables and mochi cakes cooked together until soft and savory. Kagami Mochi are shaped mochi cakes with lucky emblems adorning them. These are placed around the home or business to welcome good fortune for the coming year.
My favorite experience eating mochi during the New Years happened completely by chance. I was traveling in the city of Kobe, famous for the beef that carries its name, but even more infamous for the local Jazz scene.
Kobe was the first foreign port to open in Japan after the country reversed its isolationist policies under the shogunate, opening the doors to the reforms of the Meiji era. Americans and Europeans alike flocked to the city, building a small town on the hills overlooking the harbor and avoiding the summer heat. These stately manors, complete with German and British style architecture, were some of the first examples of foreign design and lifestyle everyday Japanese people were able to witness.
Jazz, which defined the avant garde culture of post war Japan in the 1950s, made its first entry into the country in this city. There is even today a Jazz street and back to back piano bars featuring all types of Jazz and Latin selections for your enjoyment.
The night before this particular New Years celebration, I had been up late at a fantastic mini-Jazz bar. The owner had played piano in a well known Tokyo trio for years, then moved back to his hometown. Like so many of the best hideaways throughout the country, his bar was very small and designed to keep the preferences of his loyal regulars in mind.
Being a Jazz-centric establishment, the owner, and his regulars, welcomed anyone from around the world who loved the same music they did. This welcoming attitude is not always the case in many of these specialty bars and lounges, but for this specific place most of the patrons were also musicians and were always willing to swap stories or even set-up a jam session or two.
The bar was extremely elegant despite its size, and actually wrapped around the owner’s prized baby-grand piano. The effect was incredibly clever, helping crystallize the focus of the room’s musically themed decor back to the main show, the owner and his pure, unabashed love for the music. Behind the piano was an entire wall of vinyl collections, classic releases telling a story of the history of Jazz from its humble beginnings in New Orleans to the beatnik generations which influenced Tokyo’s modern intelligentsia.
Above the top left and right corners were two lo-fi speaker systems that looked as if they were from the 70’s, but with the smoke and colorful characters sitting around the bar there was no point to dive in any further. Within a few minutes I was trading drinks with a group of older horn players about their exploits touring Asia on a cruise liner's big band show. We laughed until late in the evening, talking in broken English augmented with the help of google translate, before the owner called last rounds. Lights out, it was time to drift back to my hotel and the open air on-sen that awaited me on the roof.
The next morning was, to put it politely, a little bit hazy.
I decided to go for a wander across the JR line dividing the city between the historical old foreign section of town and the busy harbor port district. Crossing the line brought you into a more working class neighborhood, which on any other day probably would have been an exciting change of scenery. This was the second day of the three-day New Year holiday however, and I wasn’t the only zombified individual stumbling through the chilly morning air. The entire city of Kobe had erupted in New Years festivities the night before, and most of those on the street like me were slowly, painfully, regathering their sensibilities.
In my wandering I happened across a nondescript office building where a group of men out front boiling something in a big pot. I stopped to watch, and even though I can’t speak Japanese, the group called over to me to say hello. Once again google translate came to the rescue, and they explained to me that they were boiling mochi to celebrate New Years. They asked what I thought of Kobe, and laughed when I got to the point about the hangover.
The ‘boss’ of the group, I couldn’t tell if he was a manager of some kind or just the oldest one among them, went inside and came back with what looked like a homemade bottle of liquor and some sake cups. He pushed one of the delicately cast cups into my hands and with a ‘Kanpai!’ welcomed in the New Years. The drink was medicinal and tasted vaguely like Chinese herb steeped Cantonese rice wine I’d had before in the Pearl River Delta. Someone in the group mentioned the name ‘O-toso’ to me, which I later learned is a New Years sake drinking tradition to steep medicinal herbs in good quality sake and drink up. We finished the cheers with some freshly boiled mochi, and the hazy world resolved itself with some clarity, at least it did for me.
Rejuvenated, with my headaches and exceeded from the night before long behind, I walked back to the hotel and prepared to head up into the mountains.