Japanese New Year

Japanese New Year is a season organized around the promise of renewal, but the account places that promise beside a stark reminder that the turn of the calendar cannot erase hardship. Its rituals move from Buddhist temples to Shinto shrines, while the reporter’s work in Urawa exposes the distance between ceremonial fresh starts and lives still burdened by unemployment and debt.

Rituals of Renewal

The end of the old year and the start of the new carry exceptional importance in Japan. On New Year’s Eve, thousands gather at Buddhist temples for joya no kane: a large bronze bell is struck 108 times, once for each cardinal sin in the Buddhist universe. Hearing the tolls is believed to purify listeners of their sins and let them enter the year clean. The number gives the ritual a precise, repeated form; renewal is not left as a vague wish but sounded out, blow by blow, at the threshold between years.

The narrator attends the bell ringing whenever possible, treating participation as worthwhile insurance against the uncertainties of the coming year. Some temples offer virtual bell-ringing through their websites, but the digital version does not feel equivalent. That contrast makes presence matter: the ritual may be repeatable, yet its mediated imitation does not replace being there for the physical ceremony.

After the temple bells, large crowds make pilgrimages to Shinto shrines to pray for good fortune. The sequence carries people from one religious setting to another as the old year gives way to the new. Then ordinary work pauses for three, four, or, depending on the calendar, five days. Many people return to their hometowns, and business and government districts become quiet and deserted. New Year is thus marked not only by ceremonies and prayers but by a visible interruption of the routines that normally fill the city.

The Company’s Year-End Party

Before the public ceremonies and holiday stillness comes a ritual of company life: the bonenkai, usually held in the first half of December. Its name means a forget-the-year party, and the account notes that the volume of alcohol can make that promise less than figurative. Employees and bosses alike are expected to relax and enjoy themselves. At the Yomiuri Shimbun’s Urawa office, however, the established form of letting loose was a drunken brawl. The narrator’s first bonenkai followed that tradition, placing the office’s rougher custom alongside the more solemn ceremonies that would shortly usher in the New Year.

The party’s first portion was comparatively orderly. It took place at a local izakaya, where the food included fish served raw and cooked, yakitori, tofu, pickles, rice balls, and catfish tempura. Catfish was associated with Urawa; although the narrator observed that Japanese people generally did not eat much of it because its flavor was not subtle, the dish recalled home. The evening’s formal entertainment also belonged to the expected festivities: new employees were asked to perform, with one guest doing card tricks and another twisting balloons into animals. The narrator pushed a 500-yen coin up a nostril, a feat the others regarded as remarkable. The first act went reasonably well; the party after the party did not. The contrast between scheduled amusement and the ensuing disorder captures the office’s particular version of year-end release without suggesting that every New Year celebration shared it.

A New Year Encounter with Desperation

The seasonal promise of beginning again acquires a harsher counterpoint in the narrator’s report of Hikoki Harasawa. After encountering the aftermath of a man setting himself on fire, the reporter went to the local police station for official details. Harasawa was forty-eight, lived about five minutes from the park, and had a birthday on January 5. The calendar therefore placed a new year and another birthday immediately before him, but those markers did not make his prospects seem renewed.

Harasawa’s neighbors said that he had been out of work for months after a car-parts factory closed. At the time, the narrator found it difficult to imagine that a person would set himself on fire for that reason alone. Later investigations into yakuza loan-sharking schemes supplied a probable further explanation: serious debt owed to dangerous people may have pushed Harasawa over the edge. The account presents that connection retrospectively as a likelihood, not as a certainty established at the scene.

The contrast does not cancel the meaning of the New Year customs; it shows the limits of what a calendar transition can promise. Temple bells may offer purification, shrine visits may express hope for good fortune, and a holiday may return people to their hometowns, but none of those observances by itself resolves unemployment or coercive debt. Harasawa’s approaching birthday makes the seasonal language of fresh beginnings especially stark: time advanced, while the material pressures on his life remained.