Japan: Akemashite Omedetou

The dazzle of Christmas lights has faded, and they were dazzling, replaced by New Year festivities. Welcome to the Year of the Tiger. The traditional machis  (towns or more aptly suburbs) of tokyo skipped the Christmas trimmings in the hubub of New Year preparations. Asakusa's main shopping street - Nakamise- was decked out with Tigers and new year trims,   not a Christmas tree to be seen.

In it's Meiji era quest for "Civilization and Englightenment" Japan ditched the Chinese lunar New Year as the marker of the New Year, in favour of the Western 1st of January. I have puzzled about how that affects the horoscope of people born in January, but haven't found the right person to ask abou it yet. The animal years remain the same, as do the traditions, only the date changed. (These days, there is a definite commercial advantage for Japan in having it earlier as excess stock of New Year paraphenalia can no doubt be sold in Taiwan, HK, Singapore or China...)

Typically Japanese people go to the temple or shrine on New Years Eve, or early in the New Year for Hatsumode - the first visit to the shrine for the year. Shrines are Shinto, temples are Buddhist, Shrines are probably more popular for New Year but for most people it doesn"t really matter which, and going to both is OK too.
On the afternoon of NYE we took our visitors to Meiji Jingu, one of the most popular shrines in Tokyo, where there were signs fluttering announcing the 'yakudoshi' or unlucky years.   In Japanese custom men and women at particular ages have an unlucky year; according to Meiji Jingu the men born in 1950 (the 25th year of the reign of emperor Showa otherwise known as Hirohito), 1969 (Showa 44) and 1986 (Showa 61) will have an unlucky year. Women born in Showa 49 (1974),   Showa 53 (1978) or Heisei 4 (1992) will have unlucky years. The year before and after the yakudoshi are also yakudoshi.   To escape the unluckiness of the yakudoshi, people will sometimes go to the shrine for a ceremony. Exorcism would be too strong, blessing may be more apt. While we were at Meiji we saw what I presume was such a ceremony - robed people at the front undergoing ceremonial purification. There were people in ordinary clothes also involved in the ceremony, who either were family / friends of the robed participants, or participants who had paid a lesser fee, I am not sure which. Next time I stumble across something similar I will ask.

We walked passed our local shrine on New Years day on our way back from Tokyo station. Though it was after lunch on NYD the queue was more than 300 m. long so Hiro was happy to pass on Hatsumode. In Odate, Hiro"s hometown, on the one occasion we braved the snow to go to the shrine at midnight   even at midnight there was a queue of less than 10 people....