Season’s Greetings and Welcome 2014!
2013 has been a very busy year for SPOT Report Magazine. We launched our magazine in August this year, including this website(in September). So we’ve all been looking forward to a few well-deserved days off. Although you might be surprised to hear that, here in Japan, we don’t get Christmas off… the 25th of December is just a normal working day.
Since I moved here 8 years ago, Christmas has become more popular but it’s celebrated in a rather strange way. Christmas Eve is actually more important than Christmas itself, where young couple go on dates, families dig into buckets of Kentucky fried chicken, and Santa seems to skip past Japan on his whirlwind present delivery world tour.
So we’ve all been at our computers, hard at work on new stories & ideas for everyone to enjoy, much like Santa’s little helpers at the North Pole.
The New Year is where it’s at in Japan. It’s not a New Year like most of you will celebrate, with fireworks and champagne. Actually, a typical Japanese New Year, everything closes down and everyone returns to the far-flung corners of Japan to their family’s home towns. New Year’s Eve starts with an old tradition of eating soba noodles late at night. This is followed by a cold trip to the local shrine at midnight to thank the gods for the previous year, and also wish for a prosperous and healthy New Year. This is called Hatsumode, literally the first visit to a shrine.
Then, at Temples across Japan you can experience a festive atmosphere with food stands and many people lining up for a prayer at the main hall, purchasing lucky charms for a fortunate new year and disposing their lucky charms of the past year. Most atmospheric is a visit to a temple around midnight on New Year’s eve, when the temple’s ring their bell 108 times repeatedly for each sin of humankind, everyone heads home for a cup or two of hot sake and bed. Why to bed? Because it’s up early to watch the sun rise on the first day of the New Year. This is called Hatsuhinode, and is meant to bring you good luck.
Then, on New Year’s Day, the celebrations begin. Normally, New Year’s Day is full of drinking and eating traditional foods such as osechi ryori, a three-layered wooden box full of delicious delights. And ozoni, a clear broth soup with mochi (pounded rice) is slurped down and then usually sashimi or sushi. In fact, so much is eaten and drunk that there’s a special soup that’s consumed on the 7th of January called nanakusa-gayu, seven herb soup. This is meant to calm your poor overworked stomach.
The New Year’s Day shopping experience in Japan is reminiscent of Black Friday in the United States, includes an increasingly popular tradition: shopping for fukubukuros, or “fortune bags.” The scenes outside popular department stores look more like a concert on this day. Lines of shoppers spilling out into the streets as security guards watch closely. Department store employees wear colorful Jinbeis (a Japanese traditional short jacket) with megaphones in hand, while the sound of traditional taiko drums echo through the shopping center.
There is one tradition that all children look forward to, and that’s Otoshidama. Here, children receive money from their relatives in small envelopes. Let’s hope they use it wisely and buy something useful.
From everyone at SPOT Report Magazine, we wish you a Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year – Welcome 2014!
