New Year in Japan: Traditions, Bells and the First Sun

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 troubles of the old year. The bowl is plain by Japanese standards, a clear broth, a scattering of spring onion, at most a prawn in tempura, and it is eaten without ceremony in front of Kōhaku, NHK's red-and-white song contest, a fixture of New Year's Eve since the 1950s.

The bells begin as the bowls are cleared. Joya no kane is rung a hundred and eight times, once for each of the worldly desires that Buddhist teaching holds to be the cause of human suffering, and most temples strike the last stroke just after midnight, so that the old year is rung out and the new one rung in. At some temples visitors queue for a turn on the rope; at Chion-in only the monks ring, and the city gathers in the cold to listen.

A few streets away in Kyoto, Yasaka Shrine keeps a Kyoto custom found nowhere else. At okera mairi, lanterns burn with okera, a fragrant medicinal herb, and visitors light a length of bamboo rope from the sacred fire and carry it home through Gion, swinging it in slow circles to keep the ember alive. At home the flame lights the stove for the first ozoni of the year, and the spent rope is kept in the kitchen as a charm for the household. Late on the thirty-first, the lanes of Gion are full of small, turning points of fire.

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, so that no one need cook in the first three days of the year.

Each dish is chosen for what its name sounds like or what it resembles, and the box reads like a page of puns. Kuromame, black soybeans simmered until glossy, carries a play on mame, which means both bean and diligence. Kazunoko, herring roe, is eaten for a flourishing family line. Prawns, cooked until their backs curl, stand for a life long enough to bend the back with age; kuri kinton, chestnut in sweet potato, is gold for prosperity; datemaki, a sweet rolled omelette, takes the shape of a scroll, for learning. A guest who can read even three of them reads the table as the family does.

Beside the boxes comes ozoni, the New Year soup with mochi, and nothing places a Japanese family on the map faster. Kyoto makes it with sweet white miso and round mochi, simmered soft; Tokyo uses a clear broth of dashi and soy with square mochi, grilled first until they puff and brown. The meal opens with toso, a spiced medicinal sake poured from a lacquer vessel into shallow cups, a sip for each person at the table. At a great ryokan the first breakfast of the year arrives exactly so: osechi in lacquer, ozoni in a covered bowl, and toso poured before anything else is touched.

Hatsumōde, the first visit of the year to a shrine or temple, is the most public of the customs, made in the last hours of the old year, the first hours of the new, or on any of the first days of January. Meiji Jingū in Tokyo receives more visitors over those days than any shrine in Japan, more than three million. In Kyoto, Fushimi Inari and Kitano Tenmangū draw their own great numbers, and every neighbourhood has its own small shrine where families go first. Old amulets are returned to be burnt, a new year's fortune, omikuji, is drawn and, if unlucky, tied to a branch and left behind, and a hamaya, a white-feathered arrow, is carried home for the household altar.

Hatsuhinode, the first sun of the year, has its own devotion. On the Ibaraki coast north of Tokyo, Ōarai Isosaki Shrine keeps a lone torii, the Kamiiso no Torii, on a rock in the Pacific where its deity is said to have come ashore, and on New Year's Day the sun rises between its pillars. The more comfortable way to keep the custom is from a room turned to the east, over the sea or the mountains, with the first pot of tea of the year.

The second of January is when Japan comes out to play. The department stores reopen for hatsu-uri, the first sale of the year, and with it come fukubukuro, sealed lucky bags sold for a fixed sum and filled with rather more than the sum paid. Most are clothes, sweets or tableware; the department stores also offer extravagant ones, a stay at a fine hotel, a work of art, a rare experience, and the unwrapping is the fun of the thing.

On the same morning the gates of the Imperial Palace open for the New Year greeting, when the Emperor and Empress and members of the Imperial Family appear on the glassed balcony of the Chōwaden to wish the country well. Much of the country, meanwhile, is watching the Hakone Ekiden, a university relay first run in 1920, which leaves Ōtemachi in central Tokyo on the second, reaches Lake Ashi in the mountains of Hakone, and returns on the third, 217.1 kilometres in ten legs, each runner handing a sash to the next.

The night of the first or second brings hatsuyume, the first dream of the year, which by a saying of the early Edo period foretells the year to come. The luckiest dream is of Mount Fuji, the second a hawk and the third an aubergine, three famous things of old Suruga province, with a pun for good measure: nasu, aubergine, sounds like the verb for achieving something great. On the same day calligraphers, children and a good many company presidents make kakizome, the first writing of the year, a single word brushed in ink for the twelve months ahead.

There is no more glamorous way to see the year in than on the mountain. The three ski areas that lead in Japan, Niseko in Hokkaidō, Hakuba in the Northern Alps and Myoko in Niigata, each run in English, on the mountain and at the front desk, and each keeps the Japanese New Year in full: a kadomatsu standing in the snow at the hotel door, osechi in lacquer at breakfast on the first, and an open-air onsen steaming under the stars on the last night of the old year. The first run of the new year has its own word, hatsusuberi, and it is taken on the morning of the first, the powder of Niseko beneath Mount Yōtei or the long pistes of Happō-one under the peaks of the Northern Alps.

Beyond the three, Rusutsu, Furano, Kiroro and Tomamu in Hokkaidō and Nozawa Onsen in Nagano are Japan's other international ski mountains. Nozawa Onsen is also one of Japan's great onsen villages, with thirteen free public baths along its lanes, and on 15 January it holds the Dosojin Fire Festival, one of the three great fire festivals of Japan, when the village sets alight a towering wooden shrine built for the night to carry away the misfortunes of the year.

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For those who would rather keep the new year without skis, a snow-country ryokan is the most beautiful place in Japan to do it, and the easiest to reach: the snow of Nagano and Niigata lies within a few hours of Tokyo, and Kinosaki Onsen, on the Sea of Japan coast, is an easy journey from Kyoto, with snow crab on the New Year menu. Snow on the roofs, the bells of the village temple at midnight and the first sun of the year over a white valley, seen from the warmth of the room, are the new year at its most beautiful.

A New Year on the mountain is exactly what Luxury Japan Travel's Japan ski itinerary is written for. The ski edition of the Expert Japan Itinerary chooses the mountain for how each person skis, the hotel and the room, the runs for each skier, the lift pass and the rental, and the flight north or the first-class seats from Tokyo, with the skis sent ahead by courier, all planned around the closures of the first three days of January. It arrives within seven working days, ready to book and travel.

Begin a ski itinerary for New Year in Japan →

Luxury ski journeys in Japan: Niseko, Hakuba and Myoko →

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The new year worth planning divides itself in three. Ōmisoka belongs to Kyoto, for Chion-in's bell and the okera fire on the walk back through Gion. The first days belong to a great ryokan, where the season is kept on the guest's behalf, from the kadomatsu of pine and bamboo at the gate to the osechi at breakfast and the onsen under falling snow. And the second of January belongs to Tokyo, for the palace, the lucky bags and the Ekiden on the television in the bar.

The order matters, because Japan closes its doors for the first days of the year. Government offices shut from 29 December to 3 January, many restaurants and shops close from the first to the third, and the country spends sanganichi, the first three days, at home and at the shrine. The great hotels and ryokan are where the season is kept most beautifully. Which ryokan keeps the new year in the grandest style, which temples let a visitor take a turn on the bell rope, and which dining rooms open their doors on the first of January are precisely the questions an Expert Japan Itinerary answers.

The season ends gently. Matsu no uchi, "within the pine", the time the kadomatsu stays at the door, runs to the seventh of January across most of eastern Japan and to the fifteenth in Kansai, a split traced to a 1662 directive of the Edo shogunate that shortened the display in its own capital. Kyoto keeps its pine up the full fifteen days. The tea schools hold hatsugama, the first tea of the year, in the first weeks of January, with sweets shaped as camellia, narcissus and the celebratory sea bream, and on the eleventh, across much of Japan, the round mirror mochi that has stood in the alcove since the end of December is broken open and eaten, for strength in the year that has now properly begun.

Read what comes first: Christmas in Japan → (opens in a new tab)

Japan in January: the weather, the snow and where to go → (opens in a new tab)

For travellers who would rather welcome the year in Japan on their own, with every day of it already worked out, Luxury Japan Travel writes the Expert Japan Itinerary for the city and ryokan journey, and its ski edition, the Japan ski itinerary, for the New Year on the mountain. Each begins with a written set of questions about the dates, the pace and the new year in mind, and arrives within seven working days as one complete document: every day planned from morning to evening around the closures of the first three days, the hotels and ryokan recommended for each night with the room to ask for, where to hear the bells and where to draw the first fortune of the year, and the bookings that fill early, the New Year's Eve ryokan first among them. One revision is included, and every page is written by the experts behind Luxury Japan Travel's own tours.