Japanese New Year
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In ancient times, the Japanese New Year (正月 shōgatsu) followed the same lunisolar calendar as the Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese New Year (at the beginning of spring). Since 1873, Japan has followed the same months as the Gregorian calendar, so January 1st is the official New Year's Day for Japan. It is one of the most important festivals of the whole year. The Japanese New Year is a traditional festival which has been celebrated for centuries and has its own unique customs.
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Traditional Japanese New Year's Food
Japanese people eat a special selection of dishes on New Year's Day called osechi. Some of the popular foods included in osechi are miso soup with mochi (sticky rice cakes) and vegetables (ozōni, zoni soup), sweetly boiled seaweed wrapped tuna fish (kobumaki), jellied fish paste (kamaboko), mashed sweet potato with chestnut (kurikinton) and sweetened black beans (kuromame). Many of the traditional dishes are sweet or sour because they kept better — when they were invented, most stores used to close for about a week and the refrigerator had not yet been invented. There are many variations of osechi foods, and some foods eaten in one place are never eaten in other places (or are even banned) on New Year's day. Today, sashimi and sushi are often eaten, as well as food like pizza, fried chicken, and ice cream. To let the overworked stomach rest, Nanakusa gayu (seven vegetable rice soup) is prepared on the 7th or 15th day. The special food prepared for New Year's Day is a joy for many Japanese.
New Year's Day Postcard
The Japanese have a custom of sending New Year's Day postcards (年賀状, nengajō) to their friends and relatives. It is similar to the European custom of sending Christmas cards. Instead of sending Christmas cards, Japanese people send these postcards so that they arrive on the 1st of January. The post office guarantees to deliver the greeting postcards on the first of January if they are marked with the words nengajo and are posted within a time limit, from mid-December to near the end of the month. The end of December and the beginning of January are the busiest times for the Japanese post office.
It is customary not to send postcards when one has had a death in the family during the year. In this case, a simple postcard is sent instead to inform friends and relatives that they should not send joyful New Year's cards, in order to show respect for the dead in Japan.
Although these New Year's cards have become a widely-observed custom, their original purpose was to give your faraway friends and relatives tidings of yourself and your immediate family. In a manner of speaking, this custom exists for people to tell others whom they do not often meet that they are alive and well.
Most of the postcards have the Chinese zodiac sign of the new year as their design. This has a cycle of 12 years. Each year is represented by an animal. The animals are, in order: mouse, cow, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and boar. The order cannot be changed; for example, year 2005 is the rooster and new year 2006 the dog. Because a gregarious individual might have several hundred letters to write, printing services offer a wide variety of sample postcards with short messages so that he or she only has to write addresses. The custom may be in decline, as young people tend to send emails nowadays, and not letters or postcards, but it is still very popular in Japan.
Otoshidama
On New Year's Day, Japanese people have a custom of giving pocket money to children. This is known as otoshidama (お年玉), which is probably a custom from China. It is handed out in small decorated envelopes called 'pochibukuro', descendants of the Chinese red packet. In the Edo period, large stores and wealthy families gave out a small bag of mochi and a Mandarin orange to spread happiness all around. The amount of money given depends on the age of the child but is usually the same if there is more than one child so that no one feels slighted.
Mochi
Another custom of the Japanese is making rice cakes. Boiled mochigome (sticky rice) is put in to a wooden shallow bucket-like container and patted with water by one person while another person hits it with a large wooden hammer. By mashing the rice, it gets sticky and forms a sticky white dumpling. This is made before New Year's Day and eaten during the beginning of January.
Mochi is also made into a New Year's decoration called kagami mochi, formed from two round cakes of mochi with a daidai (bitter orange) placed on top. The name of the daidai is supposed to be auspicious since it means "several generations".
Japanese New Year and poetry
The New Year traditions are also a part of Japanese poetry, including haiku and renga. All of the traditions above would be appropriate to include in haiku as kigo (season words). There also haiku that celebrate many of the "first" of the New Year, such as the "first sun" (hatsuhi) or "first sunrise", "first laughter" (waraizome — starting the New Year with a smile is considered a good sign), and first dream (hatsuyume). Since the traditional new year was later in the year than the current date, many of these mention the beginnings of spring.
Along with the New Year's Day Postcard, haiku might mention "first letter" (hatsudayori — meaning the first exchange of letters), "first calligraphy" (kakizome), and "first brush" (fude hajime).
See also
- Etiquette of Japan
- Japanese festivals
- Japanese calendar
- Japanese cuisine
- Ōmisoka: Japanese New Year's Eve
- New Year
