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| Traditional new year decorations |
Don't expect many stores or anything else to be open from around the 28th of December to the 7th of January.
Run-up to New Year's Eve
This is not the time to attempt to go anywhere in Japan, especially via Shinkansen (the bullet train). Just give up all hope and stay wherever you are.
I have braved riding the bullet train to Osaka and back in the run-up to the new year a few years back, and I spent the entire bullet train ride (about two hours) standing in the aisle.
Everyone is trying to get to their hometown for the new year, you see. It's like Thanksgiving and Christmas all rolled into one. Married couples split their time between families just like in America, and everyone braces themselves for the moment when they have to be around their relatives for a few days.
New Year's Eve
I noticed just this year that many people go absolutely berserk trying to get what is called "osechi." Osechi is a New Year's obentou lunchbox of extravagant proportions, and it's traditionally bought to give the women one day off from cooking.
If you like a lot of sea food in your life and you don't mind putting things you've likely never seen before into your mouth, then osechi is for you.
Many of my Japanese friends tell me, however, that osechi is way overpriced and not that delectable.
Avoid going to places like Mitsukoshi on New Year's Eve unless you want to be swallowed alive by a massive crowd of people trying to pull together a good osechi box.
After you've got your osechi, though, you go back home and disappear into your kotatsu (see previous entry), switch on your TV, and start powering through clementine oranges.
Japan has the equivalent of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade - something incredibly lame but incredibly traditional for no other reason than the fact it's been on forever.
It's called the Kouhaku Uta Gassen. I downloaded an app for this, and the app told me that this show was originally a radio program lasting one hour that first ran on January 3, 1951.
The show pits male and female singers against one another, with men being called the white team and women being called the red team. (Kouhaku is a combination of kanji for red and white).
Red and white: You'll maybe note lots of red and white in New Year's decorations. Wikipedia suggests red means life and/or victory in war while white means death and/or defeat in war. It's a nice balance to see victory and defeat, life and death interwoven as we bring in the new year.
What once was a one-hour show is now a behemoth running about four hours right up until 11:45 p.m. It runs on NHK, which is Japan's PBS without commercials, so it's four hours of nonstop singers who can't sing well and really scripted banter.
While Kouhaku is pretty awful, it's also tradition to have it on in the background as you talk with your relatives, providing noise to fill all silence in conversations and a reason to strike up another one. ("Oh my God that singer's still alive?")
Before midnight, you must eat at least a little bit of soba noodles. The tradition holds that you will have a long life if you eat these noodles, which are also long. It's a symbolic gesture. I'm not sure why you're like Cinderella and only have until midnight to eat soba, but there you are.
After NHK's Kouhaku, the station does something I wish most of the world would consider doing - it rings in the new year very quietly.
While New York City goes crazy after the ball drops and fireworks go off all over the place, NHK shows people lining up in the cold at their nearest shrine to pay respects in the new year come midnight. It's all quietly shown, with the narrator telling you about the particular shrine being shown and how it relates to this year (For example: A shrine near Mt. Ontake, a volcano which unexpectedly erupted last year and killed a ton of people).
You kind of get sucked into this documentary-style viewing of various shrines all over Japan, and then suddenly you see a monk hitting a wooden plank against a massive metal bell, and at the upper left-hand corner of the screen are three number: 0:00 - midnight. And that's it. Suddenly it's 2015.
I don't think I've ever greeted another year so peacefully before.
New Year's Day
No one goes out and does anything on the first. You sit in your kotatsu (if you ever left it) and eat osechi and talk with your relatives more, or you just sleep. And you watch a ton of TV. Every single channel has an entire lineup of New Year's Day specials just waiting for you to zone out on.
Of course, before dawn is a whole other story on New Year's Day. At midnight, like I wrote above, many people are out braving the cold at their nearest shrine. You wait in a long line, throw in a 5 yen coin (apparently 5 yen coins are lucky because you say 5 yen coin as "goen" which also means an endless circle), and pray for what you want to have happen in the new year.
You also get your fortune on a piece of paper (omikuji), which tells you how your luck will be for the entire year.
You can also get charms and amulets to ward off evil for a year (I love the arrows with no death-inducing ends to them. You hang them up in the highest part of your house, and they act as a weapon against evil demons. I think they look cool. You trade your arrow in every year for a new one - for a price of course).
When you're done, you either pass out back at home or find a good spot to watch the first sunrise, which you should do at least once in your life. There's nothing, for example, quite like seeing the sun rise over Mt. Fuji on New Year's Day.
Anyway, you spend New Year's Day either eating, drinking, watching TV or sleeping.
That's why I recommend taking the time on the first to go to a shrine during the day. We went to Kamakura, and it was nearly empty because we were the only ones foolish enough to go out in the middle of the day on the first to pay our respects.
After the New Year
Now is the time to go out shopping. There are jaw-dropping sales all over the place in Japan starting from the second and lasting until maybe January 4th, if you're lucky.
A ton of people also go pay respects at shrines now if they didn't do it around midnight on the first. Don't try to go to a shrine now unless you don't mind waiting in the biting cold for long periods of time.
Yes, now is the time for shopping in Japan. Forget Black Friday, this is Black Weekend in Japan, and I'm about to go out and be part of it.
