The Japanese New Year, Oshōgatsu, is the country's most important holiday, a fortnight of set customs built on food, sound and a home made ready for a visiting deity. In Kyoto it turns late on the thirty-first of December, when a temple bell begins to sound across the rooftops, struck once, left to fade, then struck again. It will ring a hundred and eight times, once for each of the worldly desires that Buddhist teaching holds to be the cause of human suffering, greed, anger and delusion among them. The custom is called joya no kane, and it is kept at temples across the country on the same night, the sound arriving from bell towers a street or a valley apart.
Winter in Japan is a season of bare branches and clear, hard light, and the turn of the year is the most ordered week in it. Ōmisoka, New Year's Eve, and Oshōgatsu, the days that follow, run through a sequence of small acts, each with its own meaning, kept in much the same order in households from Hokkaidō to Kyūshū.
the last bowl
The year's last bowl
The evening's first custom is a bowl of noodles. Toshikoshi soba, year-crossing soba, has been eaten on the last night of December since the Edo period, and the reasoning is in the noodle itself: soba is long, for a long life, and it breaks cleanly when bitten, for cutting away the hardship of the old year. The bowl is plain by the standards of a Japanese meal, a clear broth, a scattering of spring onion, sometimes a piece of tempura, and it is eaten without ceremony, before the household sets out for a temple or settles in front of the television for the last hour of the year.
The bells begin at about the time the soba bowls are cleared. At some temples visitors queue to take a turn on the rope; at others only the monks ring, and a crowd gathers in the cold to listen. Most temples strike the last of the hundred and eight just after midnight, so that the old year is rung out and the new one rung in.
The most famous bell in Kyoto hangs at Chion-in, a bronze of some seventy tonnes cast in 1636. On New Year's Eve it is swung by seventeen monks hauling together on ropes, the lead monk throwing himself backwards with each stroke, and the deep note carries across the Higashiyama hills.
stacked in lacquer
A year stacked in lacquer
Osechi ryōri, the food of the first days of January, is cooked before the year turns and packed into jūbako, lacquer boxes stacked in three or five tiers, so that good fortune, like the boxes, is piled one layer on another. Everything is ready before the first of January, so that no one in the household need cook in the first days of the year.
Each dish is chosen for what its name sounds like or what it resembles. Kuromame, black soybeans simmered until glossy and almost black, carries a pun: mame means both bean and hard work, and the beans are eaten for a year of health and diligence. Kazunoko, herring roe, is eaten for the thousands of eggs packed into a single skein, a wish for many descendants. Ebi, prawns cooked until their backs curl, stand for a life long enough to end with a back bent by age. A guest who knows even three of these puns can read the box as the family does.
the deity at the door
The deity at the door
Before any of this, in the last week of December, homes and businesses set a kadomatsu beside the entrance, an arrangement of pine and bamboo cut on the diagonal, often with a sprig of plum. It is a marker, meant to be seen from the street, telling toshigami, the deity believed to visit each home at the turn of the year, where to find the door. A shimenawa, a twisted straw rope hung with zigzag paper streamers, is strung above the doorway to mark the space inside as clean enough for the deity to enter.
The post that arrives on the first morning belongs to the same idea of a household in order. Nengajō, New Year cards, are written and posted in December, and Japan Post keeps them back to deliver on the first of January, so that the whole country's greetings land on the same morning. Children receive otoshidama, gifts of money in small decorated envelopes, from parents, grandparents and visiting relatives.
Then comes hatsumōde, the first visit of the year to a shrine or temple, the most public of the customs. It is made in the last hours of the old year, the first hours of the new, or on any day of the first week, and it need not be at a famous shrine. In Kyoto, Yasaka Shrine fills on New Year's Eve for okera mairi, when visitors carry home a flame from the sacred fire on a twist of rope; Fushimi Inari and Kitano Tenmangū draw their own crowds through the first three days of January. Many Japanese also watch hatsuhinode, the first sunrise of the year, from a coast, a mountain or a high window.
how long it lasts
How long the Japanese New Year lasts
The kadomatsu does not stay up for long. The period it marks, matsu no uchi, "within the pine", ends on the seventh of January across most of eastern Japan and on the fifteenth in Kansai, a split traced to a 1662 directive of the Edo shogunate that shortened the display in its own capital while the older, longer custom carried on in the west. Kyoto keeps its pine up for the full fifteen days, so a visitor who thinks of the new year as the first of January alone sees only the start of it.
in short
Questions a guest asks first
What is the Japanese New Year?
Oshōgatsu, Japan's most important holiday: a fortnight of set customs that runs from a last bowl of noodles on Ōmisoka, New Year's Eve, through the temple bells at midnight and lacquered osechi in the days that follow, to the first shrine visit, hatsumōde.
How long does the new year in Japan last?
Matsu no uchi, the period the pine decoration stays up, runs to the seventh of January across most of eastern Japan and to the fifteenth in Kyoto and the rest of Kansai.
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Luxury Japan Travel plans journeys over the New Year as a Custom Tour of Japan, private, from five nights, on the dates the party chooses, with a private car and driver every day and a Tour Director travelling with the guests. In Kyoto that can mean the bells of Ōmisoka in a temple precinct, osechi on the first morning of the year and the crowds of hatsumōde at Yasaka Shrine, with the pine still standing at the city's doors until the fifteenth.
