Happy New Year!

Praying at Yasakusa New Year's eve day

Or as the Japanese say, “shinnen omedetou gozaimasu”.  New Year (“shougatsu”) is a big deal here.  Japan’s most important holiday is a huge 3-day celebration.  Thousands of Japanese travel to spend time with their families and pray at temples and shrines.  Many shops are closed for the week.  Here in Kyoto, the main streets are clogged with people, more than I’ve seen at any time I’ve been here.  It’s been a fascinating window into Japanese traditional culture and customs.

Preparations for the New Year begin in December with a number of “memorial services” at various temples around town.  Many of the services focus on vegetables, since Buddhists are vegetarian.  One cold and misty day, I joined others at a memorial service for pumpkins (similar in shape to acorn squash), where we offered our prayers and ate delicious pumpkin served in hot broth to ward off summer illness.  Another service, for daikon, offered the ubiquitous tasty Japanese white radish to dispel misfortune.

The service I liked best, though, was for needles at Horin-ji Temple (above).  People who wanted to improve their sewing skills placed their old needles in an offering box as they entered the temple.  The building was packed:  everyone sat on the floor, listening to the music of traditional instruments and the chanting of monks.  At one point, four women in traditional costume got up and danced around slowly.  Then a monk signaled to the crowd that it was time to present a needle offering.  From a stack of long knitting-needle sized needles threaded with a bit of colored yarn, we each took one and put it into a whitish block of something like paraffin, said a brief prayer and turned to leave. 

There are special decorations for New Year’s, too.  The day after Christmas, the street decorations changed from bells with blue lights to gold and black circles around green pine boughs with a bit of red and white flowers.   At my last ikebana lesson, we made a traditional New Year’s arrangement of pine boughs tied with a gold and silver bow, which I later saw gracing the temples I visited.  Temples and shrines had long swags of rope made from rice thatch, often with white paper decorations (symbolizing one’s fortune, I think), at temple and shrine entrances.  In accordance with custom, I made a rice thatch rope to hang in my apartment.  Small shops and homes had little decorations, too, often of rice thatch rope and an orange.

Decoration at Heian shrine

Decoration ovre a home's entrance

Japanese thoroughly clean their homes and businesses to put a fitting end to this year and welcome the next one. The woodworker at my street corner had stacks of scrap wood and bags of debris waiting to be taken away.  The nearby calligraphy store had a brand new felt pad on its counter.  The owner was carefully taking bottles of ink off the shelves, dusting them, and putting everything back in neat rows.  People also join monks in cleaning the temples and statues of Buddha.  I like this tradition and decided to join in by thoroughly cleaning my little apartment. 

Yasuka Shrine, New Year's Eve day

My handiwork

On New Year’s Eve, I learned that people traditionally eat soba (long noodles to symbolize long life).  They also go to a Buddhist temple where at midnight the temple’s bell is rung by hand 108 times, once for each of the 108 human sins.  Buddhists believe the bell ringing rids people of their sins from the previous year.  To give you a sense of the strength of this tradition, the bell at Kyoto's Chionin Temple (which weighs 67 tons and takes several people to manage the wooden post used to hit it) has been rung each New Year’s for the last 1400 years.  After the bell ringing, the gathered multitude slowly moves forward to the front of the temple, prays, and departs.

New Years memento

Making mochi

Another New Year's tradition is making mochi, boiled sticky rice that is pounded to a paste and then formed into dumpling-size balls of candy.  Huge mochi balls, topped by an orange, are part of the traditional New Year’s decorations.  People mail New Year’s postcards (like our Christmas cards) that, with the aid of people hired for the purpose, the Post Office guarantees will arrive on January 1.  I can’t imagine the US Post Office managing that.

There are sales, too, but with an added twist.  Many of the stores I passed featured “good luck bags”, essentially a grab bag of goodies that you buy for a price considerably below the value of what’s inside.  Generally they are large paper bags, but my favorite clothing/textile store here had clear plastic bags so you could see the color of the top and scarves you could buy.  They were beautiful things and a great value!

People celebrate the "first" of everything they do after New Year's, beginning with watching the first sunrise of the year.  NHK showed the first sunrise over Mount Fuji.  On January third, the last official day of the holiday, I went to Yasaka shrine to stand with the packed crowd to watch “Karuta Hajime”, the first Karuta card game played in the New Year.  About two dozen women, girls and boys in colorful traditional costumes were seated in pairs on the stage, putting them at the crowd’s eye level.  In front of each person were 10-15 cards, each with the last two lines of a tanka, or traditional Japanese poem.   

The moderator read the first three lines of a tanka and you  tried to be the first to hit the card with the appropriate last two lines from your or your opponent’s cards.  If you succeeded, you took the card away; if it was from your opponent, you gave him/her one of your cards. The goal was to eliminate all the cards in front of you.  (All of this is explained in Wikipedia and YouTube if you want to understand more.)   As the game was being played, big video cameras were whirling, people were clicking their cameras extended high overhead, and the rest of us stretched up and peered around others to try to see what was going on.  It was all quite fascinating.