Post by Hatsuharu Souma on Jul 12, 2005 22:37:49 GMT -5
New Year's Day
January 1 is New Year's Day, a national holiday and one of the biggest events on the calendar of annual festivities in Japan. Schools close for about two weeks of winter holiday before and after New Year's, and most companies also shut down for New Year break from around December 30 to January 3. Many people who've moved to big cities return home for the holidays to be with family and friends.
From well before dawn on New Year's Day, people flock to shrines and temples to pray for a healthy and happy year. This is called hatsu-mode and is one of the most important rituals of the year. When we greet our acquaintances, moreover, we say "Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu" (a happy new year) to convey our wishes that the year to come will be full of hope and good health.
A stack of boxes full of osechi ryori.
Special meals called osechi ryori, prepared at the end of the year before, are eaten on January 1-3. They consist of traditional dishes like boiled beans, broiled fish, and su-no-mono (sliced vegetables and seafood dressed with sweet vinegar), and it's served in a nest of boxes. The reason boxes are used is because they can easily be preserved by stacking, freeing people from the need to do any cooking over the holidays.
Until about a few decades ago, kids spent New Year's engaged in such traditional pastimes as flying kites, koma (spinning tops), and playing iroha karuta (a traditional Japanese card game), hanetsuki (a type of badminton played with wooden paddles and shuttlethingys), fuku warai (a contest where blindfolded players take turns arranging parts of a face), and sugoroku (Japanese variety parcheesi). None of these pastimes are played very much by kids these days, though.
One thing children look forward to doing on New Year morning is reading nengajo (New Year greeting cards) from friends and acquaintances. But the biggest treat, no doubt, is receiving otoshidama (money given as a gift at the beginning of a year) from parents, relatives, and other adults they meet during New Year.
Lucky dreams
In Japan, the first dream of the new year is believed to set the tone for the kind of year it'll turn out to be. Since New Year's Day is a day for quiet celebration, and people don't start returning to their daily routines until the second day, the hatsu-yume (first dream of a new year) is usually the dream you have on the night of January 2.
The importance people attach to hatsu-yume seems to go back to ancient history. For instance, there's a historical document that refers to a hatsu-yume dreamt by Emperor Suinin, who is said to have reigned around the fourth century.
Legend has it that the three "best" dreams you can have are about Mount Fuji, hawks, and eggplants - in that order. There're a lot of theories explaining why these three should be considered so auspicious, one of them being that it's about relative height. The tallest mountain in Japan is Fuji, near which is another mountain called Ashitaka (-taka means hawk) that's about half as tall as Fuji. Eggplants were added, people think, to poke fun at their high prices in ancient Japan.
The "first dream" was no laughing matter for people in the feudal period, though. They went to great lengths to make sure they had one of the good dreams - one way being to put under their pillows a drawing of a ship of treasures with the kanji (Sino-Japanese character) for treasure written on its sail. This became a common practice around Muromachi period (the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), with people from all walks of life - from the most powerful military rulers to the common townspeople - sliding a drawing of a treasure ship under their pillows in the expectation that the year to come would bring them greater joy and prosperity.
The seven herbs of spring
On January 7 families throughout Japan prepare kayu cooked with seven different vegetables, or haru no nanakusa (the seven herbs of spring). Kayu is a porridge made by cooking rice with twice the usual amount of water.
Kayu cooked with the seven herbs.
This practice came to Japan from China, where there was a custom of eating freshly harvested herbs early in the new year, but it's also been around in Japan for a long time, since there is a mention of it in Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book), written about a thousand years ago by a lady-in-waiting of the Japanese Empress. The seven herbs vary from region to region and also from era to era, but today they commonly consist of the leaves of dropwort, shepherd's purse, cottonweed, chickweed, henbit, turnip, and radish.
Eating these greens in the New Year was thought to replenish the body with energy from nature and to promote good health and longevity. It's a time-honored custom that's also very practical, since the herbs are a good remedy for indigestion from having had too much mochi (rice cakes) and other New Year's delicacies over the holidays.
Coming-of-Age Day
The second Monday of January is Coming-of-Age Day, a national holiday to encourage those who have newly entered adulthood to become self-reliant members of society. (The holiday used to be on January 15, but in 2000 it was moved to the second Monday of the month.)
Five women celebrate their coming of age in elaborate furisode outfits.
Municipal governments host special coming-of-age ceremonies for 20-year-olds, since an "adult" in Japan is legally defined as one who is 20 or over. They gain the right to vote on their twentieth birthday, and they're also allowed to smoke and drink. But along with these rights come new responsibilities as well, and so age 20 is a big turning point for the Japanese.
Coming-of-age ceremonies have been held since time immemorial in Japan. In the past boys marked their transition to adulthood when they were around 15, and girls celebrated their coming of age when they turned 13 or so. During the Edo period (1603-1868), boys had their forelocks cropped off, and girls had their teeth dyed black. It wasn't until 1876 that 20 became the legal age of adulthood.
These days, males generally wear suits to their coming-of-age ceremony, but a lot of females choose to wear traditional furisode - a special type of kimono for unmarried women with extra-long sleeves and elaborate designs. For unmarried women, furisode is about the most formal thing they can wear, and so many of them don it to the event marking the start of their adult life.
Partaking of decorative mochi (the cutting of New Year's rice cakes)
New Year wouldn't be the same without mochi, which is made by steaming and pounding a sticky type of rice (mochi gome).
The kagami mochi in its proper arrangement.
In the past, mochi was made at home, but most families today buy it ready-made. Over the holidays, a pair of round mochi (kagami mochi) the size of plates - one a little larger than the other - is stacked on a stand and placed in a household Shinto altar or tokonoma (alcove) as an offering to the deities that visit on New Year's. The ornamental mochi is removed on January 11 and broken into smaller pieces before being eaten.
By this time, the kagami mochi is usually quite brittle, and cracks appear on the surface. The mochi is not cut with a knife, since cutting has negative connotations (like "cutting off ties"). It's broken with one's hands or a hammer, and thus the ritual is called kagami biraki, or cracking open the kagami mochi.
The smaller pieces are roasted and put in shiruko (sweet soup of boiled beans) or zoni (vegetable and meat soup). By partaking of this offering to the gods, ancient people believed that they were inviting divine blessings.
Paying your respects to the Seven Deities of Good Fortune
During New Year, people young and old can be seen visiting several temples and shrines in a single neighborhood. They are paying their respects to the Shichifukujin (the Seven Deities of Good Fortune) to pray for successful business or safety for the family.
The Seven Deities of Good Fortune are a curious assortment of gods and saints originating in three countries and three religions (Buddhism, Taoism, and Shinto) and are said to bring happiness, wealth, and longevity.
Small, simplified figurines of the seven gods can be bought in gift shops. There are regional variations as to what each god represents and what they look like.
~The armor-clad Bishamonten, from India, is believed to protect people from evil and to guard their treasures. He is said to bring good fortune to poor people.
~Hoteison is the only god based on a historical figure--a Zen monk who lived in China, believed to be the incarnation of the Buddhist saint Maitreya. He is now known as a chubby god with a big belly, carrying a bag and a fan in his hands.
~Originally from India, Daikokuten holds a mallet of luck in one hand and a bag full of treasures over the other shoulder. He is the god of grainfields.
~Fukurokuju, a god of wealth, happiness, and longevity, is depicted as a long-headed elderly man holding a long staff, often with a crane at his side (the crane is a symbol of long life in Japan). He was originally a god of the Chinese religion Taoism.
~A red snapper in his left hand and a fishing rod in his right, Ebisu is a traditional Japanese deity known as the guardian of farming, fishery, and commerce.
~Also a Taoist god bringing long life and holding a long staff, Jurojin is usually accompanied by a deer. (In the above set of figurines, however, he has a crane instead.)
~Benzaiten is a goddess from India who presides over music, eloquence, and treasures, and holds a biwa (Japanese lute).
The Shichifukujin were created back in the Muromachi period (1333-1568), when seven auspicious figures were brought together modeled after the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove--seven scholars and poets of third-century China who drank wine and wrote poems in a bamboo grove. Over time, Shichifukujin came to be widely worshiped throughout Japan.
Most shrines and temples associated with the Shichifukujin are dedicated to just one of the gods, so that seven temples and shrines in one neighborhood form one group. But in some cases two gods are worshiped in one place, or sometimes even all seven of them. There are said to be more than 100 such groups of temples and shrines throughout Japan.
From January 1, the icons of these gods are unveiled to the public. The length of the period during which visitors can view the icons vary widely depending on the group; it commonly lasts until January 3, 7, 15, 20, or 31.
Daruma fair
On January 6 and 7 each year, a temple in Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture, hosts a fair of daruma dolls. These dolls are bright red likenesses of Bodhidharma, an Indian monk who founded Zen Buddhism in the sixth century. Legend has it that the monk sat meditating in a cave for so long (nine years!) that he lost the use of his legs.
This is why the daruma doesn't have any limbs. It's a roly-poly doll that returns to an upright position when tipped over. It's also a good luck charm that helps people fulfill their wishes; it encourages us to keep working toward our own goals even when others are trying to knock us over.
Daruma fairs are held throughout Japan at the beginning of the year. The biggest and most famous of these is the one at Darumadera, a temple in Takasaki about 100 kilometers (62 miles) northwest of Tokyo.
This fair began around 200 years ago, when the head priest, concerned about local villagers who were going hungry because of a crop failure, taught them how to make these dolls and allowed them to set up shops at the temple during a New Year festival.
Today, the two-day fair features around 110 daruma-selling stalls on the temple grounds. They sell around 20,000 dolls each year to the more than 300,000 visitors who come to the fair.
A new doll doesn't have its eyes painted in yet; this is because the purchaser draws in one eye while making a wish, and draws in the other when the wish is fulfilled.
Large daruma with just one eye drawn in are always found in the offices of politicians at election time. No, the dolls aren't trying to win over voters by winking; the second eye gets painted in when the candidate is successfully elected!