new year's continued

New Year's Day started with a special Japanese meal, called Osechi Ryouri, in the morning. It felt sort of like Christmas morning . . . the same sense of excitement and getting a meal together. Osechi is very time-consuming to make. Japanese women traditionally make it in the three or four days leading up to New Year's. It is all made to stay fresh for several days so that they can relax on New Year's Day with their families, with no meal to cook. Nowadays, many people buy osechi, or at least part of it. It can be very expensive. My guess is that the meal that we ate that day costed about $200.

Here are Jesse and Tetsuo getting ready for the meal. Osechi is kept in a stack of boxes . . . you can see two on the table here. These can be really elaborate boxes made of lacquer, costing several thousand dollars. I actually just received a set from my students, not one that cost a thousand dollars :), but really pretty. The box on this table is one that came with the food that Mio's mom bought.

From L to R, Mio's mom (Naomi), her brother (Yuto), Mio, Tetsuo and me. The Osechi boxes are separated and laid out in the middle.

Some close-ups of the food follow. There were both salty and sweet foods. This box included small dried fish, pink and white fish paste, egg cakes, kelp, etc.

Lotus root, vegetables in the shapes of animals (cranes and turtles for long life, a boar because that's the animal of the year), small octopi, shellfish in the shell, smoked raw salmon, persimmon, herring eggs, etc.

Squid, salmon eggs, mushrooms with crab, shrimp, rice paste balls, etc. Mio's mom also prepared two kinds of plant and flower bulbs. And we ate miso soup with rice cakes and chicken and vegetables, and drank tea with whole cherry blossoms in it. Everything we tried was really delicious.

After the meal, we all got in the car to go visit a shrine. The annual New Year's shrine or temple visit is called Hatsumode. There are line-ups, even at small community shrines. The temple in Narita, a city about 30 minutes' away, is the #2 most popular location for Hatsumode, with 3 million visitors in January.

In the picture above, taken discreetly :), you can see an elderly woman praying. While waiting in line, a person can wash their hands at a water fountain with bamboo cups. They then approach the shrine, throw in some money (5 yen is the most popular coin to toss), ring the bell, clap twice, and take a moment to pray.

After praying at the shrine, people deposit their charms and decorations from the past New Year's holiday.

In the shrine area, new good luck charms for the coming year and fortunes can be bought. Many people were grilling rice cakes and warming at the fire.

Most people were dressed warmly in regular clothing, but a few were wearing kimonos. I liked the picture of these two boys facing each other, looking so alike and so different at the same time.

Our last stop at the shrine was ringing a bell at the top of the bell tower.

In the afternoon, Mio made macha (powdered green tea) with a bamboo whisk, and we ate omanju, colorful New Year's sweets made with red beans and fashioned into perfect shapes (flowers, fans, bamboo, etc.).

Afterwards, we ran out to a couple shops to check out their New Year's sales, and try our luck at a few various drawings. (We got consolation prizes only.) Almost every shop does something called lucky or happy bags. Shoppers pay a certain amount of money (up to $100) to get whatever is in the mystery bag. It's really popular and you can get some really great stuff. Of course, it's all leftovers from last year, so not always what you might hope for. Back at Mio's mom's house, we took naps, watched TV (including the cable CNN coverage of the ball drop in NY!) played card games, and ate leftover osechi for dinner. It felt so good to be hanging out with a family, even though we still miss ours, and we were so happy to get a picture of Japanese New Year's, something that is so special to many people in our life here.