Japanese New Year

Forgoing this year the standard New Year boozey party - a culture was embraced!

Getting to Yasukuni shrine (near Hosei's Ichigaya campus) at about 22.30, it looked quite dead and as though it would be a quiet affair...
Passing through the first torii gate, the food stalls began to appear, kebabs, yakitori, whole fish, squid... All sorts of food - hot and cold, traditional and not so much. Personally, I had a kebab (not quite up to Mango's standards, nor even the Roppongi kebab shop's - but still おいしかった) and a bit of garlic-y yakitori.



We made our way through the stalls of sweets and such and found our path blocked by a rather sizeable gate.


Of course, as a Brit, I know how to queue, and so - like good little 外人 queued to get into the shrine proper.







When the gate opened we made our way through and towards the area where you throw your five yen into a giant tarp and make your New Year's wish.







The reason for the five yen is that "good fortune" and "five yen" both have the same Japanese pronunciation: ごえん "goen"

So I threw in my coin with a hole in the middle (I love Japanese money) and made my wish... No I'm not telling you, shush.


After that we made our way around the stalls in the inner-shrine and warmed ourselves on some of the boy-scout-guarded fires. There were a couple of large walls of "ema" - wooden plates that one writes a wish upon, from a lot of Japan's larger shrines, covered in some very impressive dragon artwork, for the year of the dragon, don't you know.

Here's Yasukuni's one - it was a little large!!

Incidentally, if anybody could shed some light as to why the dragons all seemed to be holding some sort of orb, I'd be most grateful!







To further keep out the cold, we wandered around some more, and got food as well as a nip of some exceptionally delicious sake:

As it was rather chilly out (めっちゃ冷たい one might say!), so the sake was nicely chilled - and went down most welcomely :)











Finally, we all took our (utterly incomprehensible) fortunes. These we took home with us for translation purposes... Hopefully they're not unlucky!!

That was お正月 in Japan... Not the boozey affair the England has, nor did we sing Auld Lang Syne, but it was still damned good fun!


Signing off.

Coming soon:
10 reasons why Japan is better than England
Exam time
Some sort of food-related post (at Eddy O'Dwyer's request)
Kobe, parts 1 & 2
My fortune: A translation