Happy Year of the Mouse

Happy New Year!

The past two New Years I've hung out in Japan and had the good fortune to experience the Japanese New Year with families of friends. For the 2006-2007 turn of the year, I was invited by my former Boston roommate, Saori Matsumoto (who is Japanese and now lives in Tokyo), to join her in Kobe to celebrate New Year at her family's house. For New Year 2007-2008, my neighbor, Futaba Nemoto, invited me for New Year at her family's house in Hachioji, a city that is part of the Tokyo-metro area. The style in which the New Year is celebrated in Japan, at least from what I’ve experienced so far, is nothing like the party/fireworks/general craziness that represents the U.S. New Year. New Year in Japan is much more reminiscent of the way we celebrate Christmas in the States. I’ll attempt to explain some of the aspects of the Japanese New Year here and now, but beware…this blog is EXTREMELY long (but hopefully interesting).

HOLIDAY TIMEFRAME AND PREOCCUPATIONS
I might have these days wrong, but generally December 29-January 3 is a national holiday period in Japan (all I know is I didn’t have to go to work these days). It's tradition for people in Japan to celebrate the New Year with their family. Regardless of what part of Japan they are currently living in, people return to their parents’ or grandparents’ homes for the New Year. If both sides of the family are nearby, both the mother's and the father's sides of the family are usually visited during this timeframe. For the New Year holiday week, families go shopping, watch TV, play card games, “youngsters” coming back from university or out-of-town lives catch up with their old friends….pretty much what we do for Christmas in the States – hang out and occupy ourselves with random activities.

TRADITIONAL NEW YEAR FOOD
Just as with Christmas in the States, there are traditional foods eaten in Japan for New Year.

At midnight on New Year’s Day, it’s tradition to eat long, thin “soba” (Japanese buckwheat) noodles. Apparently the long, thin aspect of the noodles represents a long and uncomplicated life.

On New Year’s Day, whenever everyone is up and functional, they eat something called “osechi.” It’s difficult to describe, so I’ve included a photo of the “osechi” the Nemoto’s had me make. :-)

The food put into the osechi boxes is representational also. There is a fish product (I’m not sure exactly what fishy stuff it’s made of and I probably don’t want to know) that is sold in two colors – white and (dyed) pink, and are supposed to go into the osechi box together in alternation. White and pink (it’s supposed to be red, really), are symbolic celebratory colors in Japan. The sweet black beans used in osechi represent hard-work/studiousness. I can’t remember the meaning behind any of the other osechi food, but I’m sure you get the point.

Arguably, the most famous New Year food in Japan is mochi. For lack of a better way to describe it, mochi is a pounded rice cake. And I mean pounded in the literal sense. On December 29 or 30, it's tradition for families to get together to make mochi. While it is popular nowadays for people to use mochi-making machines (which I have yet to see personally, but I assume they are quite easy to use), there are still some families who like to do it the traditional way. The traditional method requires at least one very large wooden mallet and a hollowed out tree stump that together more or less serve as a pestal and mortar. The first step to the process, rice cooking, starts roughly around 8am. 7 batches of rice are cooked in all. As the rice finishes boiling, one pot at a time is dumped steaming into the tree stump “mortar” where the wooden mallet is used to grind the rice into the initial stages of a paste. Once the paste has begun to take shape, the mallet is used to whack the begeezus out of the rice until it looks more like dough. It’s a heck of a workout, as the mallet has to weigh at least 10 pounds and it takes at least 10 minutes (probably more) to pound the rice into a proper paste.

The pounding process is a team effort. One person swings the mallet, in a fashion kind of like in the movies when someone is hammering railroad ties. The second person adds water to the rice and turns/mixes the dough. It takes some precision though. The person turning the rice dough has to try to do it in sync with the hammering so the person with the mallet can keep their rhythm. With every swing, it ALWAYS looks like the mallet is going to come down right on the turner’s head, but I suppose that’s half the excitement of the event.
(Mr. Kaneko taking his turn with the mochi mallet.)

My first traditional mochi-making experience was December 2006 with Mrs. Tanaka’s family (she’s the janitor at one of my junior high schools). Her family used 2 mallets at the same time for the mashing process (see photo), which seemed very dangerous for the hands of the turner, but Mrs. Tanaka’s daughter was an extremely skilled turner, even with 2 1st-timer foreigners manning the mallets.

This past December 2007, I joined Futaba and our other neighbor, Mr. Kaneko, at their co-worker friend’s house for the traditional mochi-making. I got to try my hand at the mallet again, and this year I had a chance to be the rice-dough turner. For some reason I hadn’t expected the rice dough to be so hot! Now I know why the turners move so fast…not out of fear of having the mallet smash their hands, but instead not to burn their fingers!

After the rice has been pounded into proper mush, it’s either pulled directly from the massive blob and rolled/pinched into smaller balls, or it’s dissected into quarters and rolled out in long rectangles for drying.

(Futaba and Mr. Kaneko rolling out the mochi for drying.)

The dried mochi can be eaten over a period of many days/weeks and is usually toasted in the toaster or boiled to soften it up again. The wet mochi balls are eaten the same day. Both styles are eaten with a variety of toppings or fillings. The most common toppings/fillings are sweet red bean paste, a sweetish soybean powder called “kinako” (my personal favorite), shredded white radish called “daikon,” or soy sauce.

(Drying mochi slabs.)

The mochi-making process is a lot of fun. It’s messy, it’s tiring (in a good way), it’s a fun bonding experience, and it’s basically just one big party. Food and drinks are served all day long. Even in the morning, those who enjoy beer or Japanese sake don’t hold back. Everyone has their job too, whether it’s rice cooker, mallet pounder, rice-dough turner, roller, radish shredder, drink-pourer or manning the post-mochi-making stew pot in the backyard.

(Enjoying udon noodle soup after mochi-making.)

TEMPLES AND SHRINES
It is common practice to visit a shrine or a temple sometime between midnight on January 1 and the end of the first week of the New Year. The idea is to pray for whatever it is in the New Year you want good luck. Most 3rd year junior high school and high school students pray to pass their high school or university entrance exams. Other people pray for good health, or a successful business year, etc. Everyone goes to a shrine or a temple for the New Year, regardless of how religiously active they are during the year or even what “denomination” they are, similar to the massively increased church attendance on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the States. Buddhists might go to a shrine (which are Shinto buildings of worship), Shinto-followers might go to a temple (which are Buddhist buildings of worship), and the minority of Christians in Japan make sure to visit either a temple or shrine for New Year too. And of course foreigners like me who have no idea what’s going on.

At the temple or shrine, there is a coin collection box into which you can toss any coin, but if you have a 5-yen coin, you should toss that in as 5-yen coins are considered good luck. On any old average day at any other time of the year, you can usually walk right up to the box, toss your coin in from close proximity, clap your hands twice or ring the bell at a shrine to make sure you have the gods’ attention, say your prayers for whatever (short) length of time you need, then be on your merry way. However, the story is quite different at New Year. If you go to a popular temple or shrine, or are in a highly populated area, you shuffle along as best you can with the pulsing crowd, and as soon as you’re close enough to the coin box to feel like your pitch will get the money near the funnel walls that have been built around the coin box to extend “access” to the coin box back to at least a 10-yeard distanced, you chuck your coin, say your prayer really quickly while trying to keep your balance against those pushing behind you then high-tail it out of there (that’s what I do anyway).

On the temple/shrine grounds, at the larger shrines/temples anyway, there is one main larger temple/shrine (where you can usually find the main coin box), as well as a couple of other temples/shrines of varying sizes. I think the smaller buildings are usually devoted to something in particular, like children or couples or good health or such. So if you’re in the mood to stand in line and pray for multiple singular things (ha ha), you have the option. For New Year, there are also many food and miscellaneous New Year trinket stands all over the temple/shrine grounds, so it’s kind of like a mini-festival/carnival (without the games or rides). One of the more common trinkets is a large, wooden arrow that has a wooden sign hanging from one end with a picture of the New Year’s Chinese animal branded into it. I finally asked about it this year, and I was told that the arrow represents hitting the target of something you wish for for the New Year. You keep the arrow in your house all year, and next New Year when you visit that same temple again, you bring the old arrow back, thank them for letting you “use” it, and get a new arrow. I’m pretty sure there’s still a purchase fee involved, but it’s kind of a cool concept.

It’s actually not uncommon for people to go to a shrine or temple in the evening on the 31st and stay all night until after midnight on the 1st. I think it’s at the temples (shrines and temples are so interchangeable here, and are often even built on the same grounds, that it’s difficult for me to remember the aspects that differentiate the two), one of the priests swings a giant log at a large bell 108 times, which is supposed to forgive or ward off the 108 sins of man according to Buddhism. This bell gonging either happens sometime during the night of the 31st or at midnight on the 1st.

NEW YEAR’S EVE TV COVERAGE
New Year is what feels like the one holiday in Japan where fireworks aren’t used. When I was in Kobe, at midnight on the 1st, on TV, instead of showing the fireworks displays around the country/world, they show scenes from shrines and temples all over Japan. Some shrines/temples hold local traditional dance performances. Of course there’s footage of the bell gonging. Other scenes are purely still shots of quiet shrines/temples resting in the snow in Hokkaido or northern Honshu, or shots of people praying or wandering about the shrine/temple grounds. It’s the quietest New Year TV footage I’ve ever seen.

On New Year’s Eve, there are a bunch of TV specials, but one in particular that is quite famous.; it brings together a boatload of famous Japanese musical talent and pits the men vs. the women. They rope in enough national talent to span a nearly 5-hour time slot, each singer or music group singing 1-3 songs at a time for a 1-off performance. I got the feeling that the show can be a bit boring for Japanese people, and I imagine they see the same people perform the same songs year after year. But for me it’s a great way to learn more about Japanese pop-culture. A list of the order of performers is printed in that day’s newspaper, so you can plan your TV agenda around the performers you actually want to watch.

With the Nemoto-family, we switched back and forth between the music show and a comedy show that was really pretty funny, even thought I couldn’t really understand the verbal aspect of it. The comedy show took 5 or 6 male comedians, dressed them up as female nurses (old fashioned pink nurses dresses, white hats, shoes and all) and ran them through a comical “day-in-the-life” of a hospital, but they never knew when a gag was coming or what to expect around the next corner or in the next room. They were simply told where to go and what route to take to get there. The challenge was that they were not supposed to laugh. If they did laugh at a gag, ninjas would run into the room and whap them on the rear with “bats.” The ‘spankings’ were supposed to look like they hurt, but I’m pretty sure the bats were made of foam (can’t fool me, ha ha). Of course the comedians failed miserably at keeping a straight face and the highest ‘spanking’ tally at the end of the show was ironically for the most famous comedian at something like 276 whaps.

Another annually televised New Year event are marathon relay races run on January 1, 2 and 3. The January 1 marathon relay is for company employee teams. The January 2nd and 3rd marathon relays are for university teams. We watched the January 2nd marathon relay. The 4 universities attended by the 4 members of the Nemoto family were all in the race this year (15-20 teams total participated), so the family had a fun time keeping track of who was ahead, who was falling behind, and giving each other crap about their university’s performance compared to the other family members’ universities. The university marathon relay is run around/near one of the 5 lakes near Mt. Fuji, so the backdrop for the race is stunning. I think there were 5 members to each team and each member ran roughly a half-marathon for a team total of 108km. The last group of runners had the misfortune to have to run uphill for their entire ½-marathon portion (basically up a small mountain). No thank you. Although I have to admit, the lead runners made it look so easy I caught myself thinking more than once, “I wonder if I could do that?” HA! Double HA at that!

That’s the Japanese New Year holiday in a nutshell! A rather large nutshell, but nonetheless. I have to say, I enjoy the relaxed-style of the Japanese New Year more than the crazy atmosphere surrounding the U.S. New Year. If I ever move back to the States, I might have to start my own Japanese New Year tradition there…eat some soba, build a shrine in my backyard, do some Japanese traditional dances, gong the shrine bell 108 times at midnight on the 1st….you'll all be welcome. :-)