Winter and the New Year in Japan

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 roughly the middle of the eighteenth century, and the reasoning is built into the noodle itself: soba is long, which stands for a long life, and it parts cleanly when bitten, which stands for cutting away the year's hardship before the new one arrives. The bowl is plain by the standards of a Japanese meal, a simple broth, a scattering of spring onion, sometimes a piece of tempura, and it is eaten without ceremony, often just before the household leaves for a shrine or settles in front of the television to watch the year's final hour tick down.

The hundred and eight bells begin around the time the last of the soba is cleared away. At some temples any visitor may take a turn on the rope; at others the monks alone ring it, and a crowd gathers in the cold to listen and to count. The final strike is timed, more or less, to land on the first second of the new year, so that the sound itself, rather than a clock, marks the boundary between one year and the next; a minute either side of it does not matter.

Osechi ryōri, the food eaten across the first days of January, is prepared in advance, usually finished before the year turns, and packed into jūbako, stacked lacquer boxes of three or five tiers. The stacking is itself part of the meaning: good fortune, like the boxes, should accumulate rather than stand alone. A kitchen that has spent days over these dishes does not cook again for the first morning or two of the year, which is closer to the custom's original purpose than any modern convenience.

Every dish in the box is chosen for what it sounds like or what it resembles, not simply for flavour. Kuromame, black soybeans simmered until dark and, in the Kansai style, deliberately wrinkled, carries a pun: mame means both bean and diligence, and the wrinkles stand for the long life it takes to earn them. Kazunoko, herring roe, is kept for the hundreds of eggs packed into a single cluster, a wish for descendants. Ebi, shrimp cooked until their backs curl, are eaten for the same reason an elderly person is pictured stooped, a wish to live long enough to bend that way honestly. None of it is arbitrary, and a guest who knows even three of these puns is better equipped to read the box than most people eating from it.

Before any of this, usually in the last week of December, a household or a business sets a kadomatsu beside its entrance, an arrangement of pine and bamboo cut on the diagonal, sometimes with a spray of plum. The pine and bamboo serve as a marker rather than decoration, meant to be visible from the street, telling toshigami, the deity believed to visit each home at the turn of the year, exactly where to find the door. A shimenawa, a twisted straw rope hung with folded paper streamers, does similar work strung above a doorway or a shrine gate: it marks the boundary of a space kept ritually clean enough for the deity to enter.

The correspondence that arrives in the first days of January belongs to the same idea of a household set in order. Nengajō, New Year postcards, are written and posted in December so that Japan's postal service can hold and deliver them on the morning of the first, a coordinated act on a national scale that turns an ordinary delivery round into a single shared gesture. Children receive otoshidama, small sums of money in decorated paper envelopes, from parents, grandparents and visiting relatives, a custom old enough that its envelopes have their own seasonal design tradition, distinct from the envelopes used at any other time of year.

The visit to a shrine or temple that follows, hatsumōde, the year's first prayer, is the most visible of all these customs and the one most likely to draw a crowd at its most animated hour. It can happen in the last hours of the old year or the first hours of the new one, and it need not happen at a famous shrine. Kyoto's own Kitano Tenmangū, Fushimi Inari, Yasaka Shrine: each holds a different mood depending on the hour it is met, the same precinct feeling like a festival at midday and something far more private in the early morning. Some visitors add a further custom to the same trip, hatsuhinode, watching the sky brighten into the year's first light from a coast, a mountain, or simply a high window, which asks nothing more than being awake and facing east at the right moment.

The kadomatsu does not stay up indefinitely. 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 that traces back to a 1662 directive from the Edo shogunate shortening the display period in the capital while the older, longer custom held in the west. Kyoto, solidly in the Kansai camp, keeps its pine up for the full fifteen days, which means a traveller who thinks of the new year as a single date, the first of January, misses most of the season it actually belongs to.

That longer window is the more useful way to think about it. Winter in Japan is its own season, deliberate and unhurried, and the new year sits inside it as a fortnight-long observance rather than a countdown that ends the moment the last bell has rung.

What holds the whole sequence together, from the last bowl of soba to the pine coming down a fortnight later, is patience rather than celebration for its own sake. A country that measures the new year in a hundred and eight separate bell strikes, in the specific pun of a single bean, in the exact number of days a length of pine is allowed to stand at a door, is keeping a season the way it has always been kept, in full and in order.

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