New Year in Japan

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Happy New Year's, everyone!

New Year's in Japan is quite different from Western traditions. Instead of parties and standing in the street, it's a family-oriented holiday, where most people travel to their home town to spend the holidays with their families (usually the parents). There is special food eaten during the holidays, as well, and a few other traditions to ring in the new year. As this was my first NYE in Japan (I was in America last year for it), I got to do a lot of fun things for the first time.

For NYE, we decided that instead of going out and being surrounded by strangers, in the cold, without a guaranteed way home since trains ran later but not all of them and still ours didn't run all night, we would have a party in the social apartment and cook traditional Japanese food. Our friends Yuka and Keiko helped us, and explained a lot of what we were making. We made soba, and daikon salad (with carrots and daikon, it's "red" and white, which means celebration, and we put cucumbers in there so we decided that the green was for money, haha). And we also made mochi and cut flowers into carrots for "osechi", traditional New Year's food. We toasted with champagne when it clicked over to the New Year!

Today, on the first, Rani and I took advantage of the WARM, warm, beautiful weather and walked around Tokyo Dome City (an amusement park slash shopping mall), Ikebukuro, and then journeyed to a shrine to follow Japanese tradition of praying on the first of the year (many people do this at midnight on NYE). We decided to go to Gokokuji, because it was close to where we were, and we had never been there before. There were still many people there, and food vendors, and we arrived just around sunset.

First, we threw in our good luck coins at the shrine (after waiting in line) and prayed for what we want to happen in 2014. Then we went and gave offerings to get our fortunes. You take a hollow box with many thin wooden sticks inside and shake it, until one of the wooden sticks comes out the small hole. That stick has a number on it, and that number is your fortune. Our fortunes were in both Japanese and English, which was LUCKY!, and Rani and I both got GOOD FORTUNE for this year!! There were specifics to many areas (such as love, money, moving, etc.) and we were very happy. It was really fun to go and take part in the Japanese traditions for New Year's. 😊

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