Winter Break Part II

Here, I will talk about part two of my winter vacation. Part one can be found here.

After staying with Tara’s family in Singapore, I went to Tokyo, where I stayed with a couple different family friends.

The first night, I stayed with Yuto and his family. Yuto is a student at a small college near my house in Minnesota. As an international student, he has a host family—not to live with, because he lives in a dorm, but to visit, since his home is so far away. He has dinner with my family once every week or two, and comes to family gatherings during holidays. When I got to Tokyo, he was home for winter break.

His family took me around the Yanaka area of Tokyo. We went to a cute little onigiri shop for lunch, and then we went to make candy. Amezaiku is a traditional Japanese candy. We didn’t make the candy itself; rather, we learned to shape it. As amezaiku is a hard candy, we first waited while it was heated up. We were wearing two pairs of gloves: a thicker pair, to keep us from burning ourselves, and ordinary plastic gloves, to stop the candy from sticking to us and for sanitary reasons.

According to the shopkeeper, amezaiku is different from Western decorative candies because it is shaped out of one piece of candy. There is no making small, intricate parts and then connecting them. You have to do it with one piece, and that means you have only three minutes to do it. Then the candy hardens, and that’s that.

I say this in part to justify how my ‘dolphin’ candies look much more like some kind of eel-shark hybrid.

After making candy, we went to a market called Yanaka Ginza. For whatever reason, the street is largely cat themed. There are cats on the roofs of some buildings, watching over the market, and every other shop sells cat-themed merchandise. One shop even had its own live cat! I bought a little good luck charm. It’s a small glass cat with gold on the inside, and when kept in one’s wallet, it brings good luck.

All in all, I had a really good time with Yuto and his family!

For the rest of my trip, I stayed with Yuriko. My mom met Yuriko the first time she came to Japan, when she studied abroad in Tokyo during her junior year of college. They’ve been friends for more than thirty years. The first time I went to Japan, three-and-a-half years ago, we stayed with Yuriko for a while in Tokyo. It was nice being back there again. It was also great because it was my first time experiencing a Japanese New Year!

My mom with Yuriko and her family in 1991

In my experience, for Americans, Christmas and/or Hanukkah are the holidays where we gather with family and, if religious, engage spiritually with the holiday. In Japan, Christmas is a party day, even a date night. Santa has made his way over here, but the holiday doesn't have the same weight as in America. Aside from Santa, other Japanese Christmas traditions include eating cake and (for some reason) KFC.

On New Year’s, Japanese people gather with their families. Often, they return to their parents’, grandparents’, or even great-grandparents’ house. I spent New Year’s Eve itself with Yuriko and some family friends. Many people in Japan watch the first sunrise of the new year, and go to shrines very early in the morning (or rather, very late at night). I was too tired to stay up much past midnight, but I did have a good time!

In Japan, お正月 (oshougatsu), or New Year’s, refers to January first through third. While many people in America go back to work on January 2nd, Japanese people are on holiday through January 3rd. (They do have work on Christmas, though, so I’d deem it an even trade-off.) Here are some elements of Japanese culture that I learned about during my first お正月 in Japan!

• Yuriko helped me do 生け花 (ikebana), Japanese flower arranging, for the first time! I can’t pretend to know the nuances of ikebana aesthetics, but I do think this turned out very well! Credit for that largely goes to Yuriko.

• おせち料理 (osechi ryouri) refers to foods traditionally eaten during New Year’s. Once upon a time, all of the stores closed during New Year’s, and people didn’t cook. They devised a meal full of symbolic foods that could be cooked before New Year’s and eaten throughout the holiday. Here’s an article talking about the symbolism behind the various foods. 

• Up until last year, I thought that mochi was specifically a dessert. Often it is served as a little ball, with anko (sweet red beans) or matcha (green tea flavoring) on the inside. However, it turns out that mochi is used for more savory meals, as well, particularly during the New Year. Yuriko ordered a lot of mochi from her favorite maker. It arrived on New Year’s Eve. I helped cut it up, which was deceptively difficult: as it is made of rice, it is very sticky. The trick is to get the knife wet every so often to keep it from sticking.
  
  I ate mochi two ways during New Year’s, though I’m sure there are more. One way is to take a piece of mochi and wrap it in seaweed, then sprinkle it with soy sauce. Yuriko’s family adds another special touch: a piece of cheese. It was really good! The other way is a soup called お雑煮 (ozouni), which contains mochi and vegetables.

• Another New Year’s food is soba, or buckwheat noodles. They are healthy. Because of that and because they’re long, eating soba during the New Year is believed to give you a long life. 

• We visited a temple together for the first time in 2019. The temple is called 深大寺 (jindaiji), and it was very busy on January 2nd! There were a lot of merchants, selling foods, traditional Japanese toys, and boar-related decorations, as 2019 is the year of the boar (or inoshishi, in Japanese).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I got my fortune there. The fortune is written on a piece of paper. If it’s a good one, you can keep the paper, and if it’s bad you tie it on something that looks like a clothesline, leaving your bad luck at the temple instead of taking it with you. My fortune was very good—of all the levels, it was the second best. Among other things, it told me that 2019 will be a good year for moving and starting new jobs—which is great, because I’ll be moving back to America in August!

Japan has many New Year’s traditions, and I haven’t listed even close to all of them. Even as it is different from American holiday traditions, it is also similar in a lot of ways. We, too, gather with family and eat symbolic foods; and we also treat the new year as a new start.

Thanks for reading! Here’s to a great 2019 for all of us!

(And, yes, I have already failed in my one-post-a-week goal. In my defense, I did write this last week! I just didn't get around to posting it.)