At the eastern entrance of Minami Kōen, a large, heavily forested park that is almost always deserted, you can find this small shrine dedicated to Konpira Gongen (金毘羅権現), god of merchant sailors. The shrine, which like the park is neglected by visitors, looks like something right out of a Miyazaki Hayao film.
Little Tokyo
Several years ago when ABC News was still producing a podcast—one of the best out there at the time—they had a weekly segment on art that featured the works of some very inspirational and creative artists, including a music video made by an Australian photographer by the name of Keith Loutit for the band Headless Heroes. I had never heard of tilt-shift photography, or of the band, but became a quick fan of both after watching the video.
Ever since Loutit's work was featured on ABC News, I've come to see countless examples of people using the same technique of stitching together time-lapsed, tilt-shift photography to create videos. While it looks good, none of it has wowed me the way Loutit's work did (and still does).
It's not as easy as it might look at first. Location and height are important. As it the lighting, of course. You need to be several stories above your subject, so that you're looking down at an angle of about thirty degrees.
If I have time, I might try to make some videos myself. Don’t hold your breath, though. Until then, I will tinker.
My father giving the one-finger salut.
Child Soldiers
There was an awful report on the BBC a few years back about child soldiers fighting in Syria's civil war. Unimaginable the horror these young boys are experiencing. Then again . . .
It occurred to me that my own grandfather was sent to the front in WWI at the tender age of 16. The story I heard is that he ran away from home, and, using the birth certificate of someone who had a similar name, but was a bit older, enlisted in the Army. I recall seeing a photo of him smiling before a massive artillery piece. Better to be the one firing one of those cannons and making minced meat of the enemy, I guess, than vice versa.
His son, my father, joined the Navy at the age of 17, just a few years after the end of WWII. I asked my mother what would possess someone to do that. “People were very patriotic in those days,” she replied. He would later re-enlist in the Marines and get sent off to Japan and Korea. (Obviously, I wouldn't be around today if he had been one of the more than thirty-three thousand Americans who died there.) He was in Japan during the Occupation for about 13 months, I believe, something he rather enjoyed. His time in Korea wasn’t as much fun, as I can imagine.
One of the themes of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 is that WWII was fought by boys despite the image portrayed in Hollywood movies. The oft-forgot subtitle of that novel was The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.
Seems, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Fufu Bessei
Ask a simple question—i.e. “If you are a foreigner currently or formerly married to a Japanese citizen, did your spouse keep his/her Japanese family name after getting married to you?”)—and you will surely get an angry reply like this:
"I was married to a Japanese man, and yes - he kept his name. You seem to be assuming that the only people who marry foriengers are Japanese WOMEN. I happen to be a foreign woman who married a Japanese man. I kept my name because it's my name - why would I change it? Women don't "belong" to their husband; why should they change their name?"
Ugh. I wasn't assume anything. And why do you assume that as a man I was assuming something? Sheesh.
Statistically, Japanese men are far more likely to marry foreign women than Japanese women. This is something I have known for years. They tend, however, to marry other Asian women (Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Thai, etc.). Japanese women, on the other hand, marry in decreasing order Koreans, Americans, Chinese, British nationals, and so on.
What I am trying to look into—again, no assumptions; that’s why I’m asking—is what motivates people (particularly Japanese women) to either keep their Japanese maiden name or take their husband's upon marriage to a foreigner. Also, what motivates foreign men/women to adopt their Japanese spouse’s family name?
Ultimately, what I want to look at is what family name Western parents of half-Japanese children (i.e. children who are likely to look "half") are choosing for their kids and what motivates it. I also want to know what challenges, if any, they may have had if they had chosen the Western family name.
One of my friends is half Japanese/half American, but looks for the most part like a Japanese man. Since his wife is Japanese, their children look, as you would suspect, Japanese. But, they all have his American family name written in katakana on their name tags at school. Whenever they change schools/grades and are introduced to new classmates, everyone is surprised by how good their Japanese is. Seeing the American name, the other kids brains assume the kids are 100% American rather than 75% Japanese.
As for my own children, they look very . . . hard to say. They don't look Japanese at all, but they speak Hakata-ben and have my wife's family name. Wherever we go, people look at the boys and start speaking in broken English to them.
Here are some stats on "international marriage": http://www.lifeaaa.jp/27.html
If you are a foreign resident in Japan who is married to a Japanese national, please have a look at this short survey at Survey Monkey.
1 Bangai Cafe & Shisha
I wrote the following in 2012, a lifetime ago, when I was employed at a women’s college and enjoyed a generous “research budget” that allowed me to travel about once every two or three months. Early on, I spent a lot of time in Tokyo, so much so people there assumed I lived there.
Stumbling across a restaurant which served Uighur cuisine of all things, it occurred to me that Tōkyō might have just about everything a person could ever want. So, I googled "Lebanese restaurant Tokyo" and, lo and behold, discovered that there were two: Sindbad in Nishi Shinjuku and My Lebanon in Ebisu Nishi. (My Lebanon has since closed and Sindbad which had moved to Akasaka after some 17 years in Shinjuku and closed its doors around 2017, I think.)
As I was closer to Sindbad, I made my way to Shinjuku, guided mercifully by GoogleMap. The food was alright, but best of all was the Almaza beer which they served nice and cold and the arak.
Ice cold beer might be all the rage this summer in Japan—I've even got two new shops (Kirin's Frozen Garden and Asahi Extra Cold) just down the street from my apartment—but the Lebanese have been serving their Almaza that way for years. Sometimes the bottles will even come with chucks of ice still frozen to the outside of them. When the wind stops blowing in off of the Mediterranean and the sun burns down, nothing quite fights off the heat like an Almaza.
Drinking Lebanese beer and arak, I started itching to smoke a narghile. Although I have my own pipe at home, it's a hassle to assemble and clean it. (I also don't like to smoke in front of my son who has taken to imitating whatever Daddy does.)
So, I did another GoogleMap search of mizu tabako (水たばこ) and shisha (シーシャ) and found a promising shop in Shimo Kitazawa. When I told my friend later that day that I had spent the afternoon in that neighborhood of Setagaya Ward, she was impressed that I had come to know Tōkyō so well.
I didn't and don't. It was all GoogleMap.
There weren't any customers when I arrived at the “cafe”. But then, I hadn't been expecting the place to be packed.
I asked if it was okay to sit outside and was shown a icebox—yes, and icebox—to sit on. Not the most comfortable of seating arrangments, but since I had been walking for almost six hours that day it was nice to finally take a load off.
I ordered two-apples tobacco, possibly the most commonly smoked flavor in the Middle East, and a beer.
The cafe is located in one of the back streets of Shimo Kitazawa, a neighborhood which reminded me of my own neighborhood of Daimyō: lots of small shops, boutiques, restaurants and cafes along narrow, meandering roads. It's an area I'd definitely like to return to and explore when I have more time.
Before long, my narghile came. The manager of the shop sat down beside me and had a smoke himself.
“Is it always this quiet,” I asked.
“Depends,” he replied.
He asked me where I was from. “The States,” I said, “but I've been living in Hakata for twenty years.”
One of the funny things about Fukuoka is that many people outside of, say, the western half of Japan don't quite know where it is. I suppose that's because there are a number of other prefectures and cities with similar names—Fukushima, Fukui, Fukuyama, to name a few. But tell someone you're from Hakata, the old name of the city, and they'll know right away. So much of what makes Fukuoka famous—the food, the dialect, the festivals, the souvenirs—have Hakata before them: Hakata motsunabe (a spicy dish of stewed pork or beef offal), Hakata-ben (the local dialect), Hakata Gion Yamakasa (our summer festival held in July) and Hakata Karashi Mentai (spicy cod roe, originally from Korea), and so on.
The other thing Hakata is famous for is the Hakata Bijin, or Hakata beauty. Women from Hakata (Fukuoka, and by extension Kyūshū) have a reputation for being good-looking. Having traveled all over this country, I can say from experience that the reputation is earned. The women are better-looking here than in any other parts of Japan. (I still haven't been to Tôhoku or Hokkaidô, though.)
The manager told me that his own girlfriend was from Fukuoka and he thought she was pretty darn cute the first time they met.
It's the mixing of blood, I explained. Fukuoka has long been a place where people from different parts of Asia, Kyūshū and other parts of Japan converged. All that comingling of DNA has been very good for the looks of the women. It might also be one reason why so many tarento (TV personalities and performers) hail from Fukuoka.
And speaking of beauties, two young women dropped into the shop as we were chatting. Not long after they arrived, the little cafe filled up rather quickly. Two Saudis, a father and a son, eventually took the seat besides me and we chatted for an hour. The father was a professor of engineering in Riyad, his son was studying at a university in Tōkyō. Both were very nice.
After they left, the two young women came out and sat besides me and struck up a conversation. The better looking of the two (seated on the right) came from Hokkaidō originally. If she is any indication of how the women look on that northern island, I can understand how the men are able to endure the cold winters.
After about two and a half hours, it was time for me to go meet a friend. I bid my farewell to the women and to the manager, promising to visit again when I was next in Tōkyō.
Of all the places I visited during my three-day stay 1 Bangai Cafe & Shisha was the friendliest and the easiest place to meet new people. I'll be back.
And back I did go. Whenever I visit Tōkyō, I spend at least one afternoon at 1 Bangai Cafe, smoking outside and watching the people go by. It’s my second
Easy-peasy
Every day I hear Japanese complain, “Eigo-wa muzukashii.” (English is difficult.)
I suppose for non-native speakers of the language, English can be hard to master. This blessed tongue of mine is a hodgepodge of languages—Germanic, Romance and Celtic—making the spelling and grammar a confused mess that is cumbersome for learners and native speakers alike.
BUT! The Japanese language is so much more muzukashii. Our list of irregular verbs and odd spelling rules can NOT even begin to burden a student the way the Japanese writing system hinders foreigners.
Of the more than five thousand different languages out there in the world, the most difficult one to read is Japanese.
It’s not unusual to find a single sentence chockablock with Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Rômaji, and even Arabic numerals. While hiragana, katana, and rômaji are straight-forward enough and can be memorized in less than a week, what really makes Japanese so hellish is the fact that unlike the pictograms in Chinese, known as hànzi (漢字) where most characters have one basic reading, almost all Japanese kanji have several possible, often unrelated readings.
Take the kanji for “I”. In Chinese it is pronounced wǒ. In Japanese, however, it can be pronounced a, aré, ga, wa, waré, and waro. The character for “food/eat” 食 is read shí in Chinese, but can be read uka, uke, ke, shi, jiki, shoku, ku, kui, su, ta, ha and so on, depending on context. And while the kanji for “go”, 行 can be read in a number of similar ways in Chinese—xíng, háng, hang, héng—in Japanese it can be read in all kinds of different ways: kô, gyô, okona, yu, yuki, yuku, i, an, and, who knows, possibly more.
Kids in Japan must master 1,006 of the 2,136 different characters, the so-called jôyô kanji,[1] by the end of elementary school and the remainder in junior high school.
Now think about that.
It can take up to nine years of education for a Japanese child to become literate in his own language, far longer than it takes an American to learn how to read English. By comparison, hangul (한글) the Korean writing system can be mastered for the most part in a single day. If you’re determined enough, that is. I taught myself how to read (though not understand) hangul during a trip I took in the mid 90s. Riding on the high-speed train connecting Busan in the south of the country to Seoul in the north, I compared the Romanization of the station names and the Chinese characters with the hangul. By the time I reached Seoul a few hours later, I could read the Korean script. Piece of cake!
No other language offers as overwhelming a barrier to entry as Japanese does when it comes to its writing system. As a result, students of the language are often forced to focus on speaking alone. They cannot reinforce what they learn by, say, reading books or magazine and newspaper articles the way you can with other languages.
If they ever try to do so, however, as I did, they’ll find that written Japanese is a very different animal from the spoken language. Open up any book, even a collection of casual, humorous essays by Murakami Haruki for example, and you’ll bump up against “ーde-aru” (ーである). I hadn’t come across this copula[2] until I started trying to read things other than textbooks and manga.
De-aru, which is just another way of say desu (ーです) but in a more formal and rigid way that is suitable for reports or making conclusions, is only the beginning. (You can learn more about de-aru here.) While I can generally catch almost everything that is being said to me or what is said on TV even when I’m not really paying attention,[3] written Japanese takes concentrated effort to comprehend and sometimes up to three perusals[4] to get a firm grasp on what the writer is trying to convey.
Even if you’re not interested in learning how to read Japanese, just trying to master the spoken language can provide you with years of headaches.
Thinking I could master the language in my first three months or so in Japan, I dove headfirst into my studies almost as soon as I arrived, taking sometimes two to three private lessons a week.
At the time, the selection of textbooks for learners of Japanese was extremely limited. While I had a good set of dictionaries called the Takahashi Romanized “Pocket” Dictionary—the only kind of pockets they would conceivably fit in were the pockets you might find on the baggy pants of a circus clown—the textbook I had to work with couldn’t have been more irrelevant.
Written for engineers from developing countries invited by the government to study and train in Japan, it contained such everyday vocabulary as “welding flux”, “hydraulic jack” and “water-pressure gauge”. The phrases taught in the textbook were equally helpful:
Q: ラオさんは何を持っていますか。
Rao-san-wa nani-o motteimasuka。
What is Rao-san holding?
A: ラオさんはスパナを持っています。
Rao-san-wa supana-o motteimasu
Rao-san is holding a spanner.
In all of my twenty-plus years in Japan, I have never once used this phrase. I haven’t used a spanner or a wrench for that matter, either. Nor have I met anyone named Rao.[5]
But, the biggest shortcoming of the textbook was its desire to have learners of Japanese speak the language politely.
And so, the less casual -masu (−ます) and -desu (—です) form of verbs triumphed. If you wanted to ask someone what he was doing, the textbook taught you to say:
あなたは、なにをしていますか？
(Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka?)
I practiced this phrase over and over: Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka? Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka? Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka? Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka? Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka?
Armed with this new phrase, I accosted a group of children in a playground and asked, “Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka?”
Crickets.
A few months later I was diligently studying Japanese in that most effective of classrooms—a girlfriend’s bed—when I learned that people didn’t really say Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka, especially to children much younger than themselves. No, they said, “Nani, shiteru no?” or something like that, instead.
After about a year of studying the language, I could manage. I certainly wasn’t what I would call fluent, but I was no longer threatened by starvation. When I moved to Fukuoka, however, I bumped up against a new and very unexpected wall: hôgen. The local patois, known as Hakata-ben, is one of the more well-known of Japan’s many bens, or dialects.
When the people of Fukuoka wanted to know what you were doing, they didn’t say anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka or even nani, shiteru no. They said, “Nan shiyô to?” (なんしようと) or “Nan shon?” (なんしょん).
Let me tell you, it took quite a few years to graduate from saying “Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka?” to “Nan shiyô to?” And that, of course, was only the beginning. It took me nearly a decade to figure out what 〜んめえ (~nmê) and ばってん (batten) meant.
Example:
博多弁: 雨なら、行かんめーと思うとるっちゃばってん、こん様子なら降らんめーや。
Hakata-ben: Ame-nara, ikanmê to omôtoruccha batten, kon yôsu nara, furanmê ya.
標準語: 雨なら行くまいと思ってるのだが、この様子だと雨は降らないだろう。
Standard: Ame nara, ikumai to omotteru-no daga, kono yôsu dato, ame wa furanai darô.
English: I was thinking of not going if it rained[6], but it doesn’t look like it’s going to rain (after all).
My Japanese grandmother would say something like, “Anta, ikanmê” (you aren’t going, are you) to which I’d grunt, “Un” (that’s right), when in fact I had every intention of going. The poor woman and I had conversations like that all the time.[7] When I finally figured that one out it was as if the scales had fallen from my eyes. Day-to-day life here has contained fewer misunderstandings ever since. ばってん (batten), by the way, means “but”.
My experience with Hakata-ben has spawned a masochistic interest in Japanese dialects in general and I have been maintaining a blog on the topic for the past few years. Have a look-see!
Anyways, the long and short of it is that while English is no cakewalk, it’s still much easier to learn than many other languages, such as Japanese. So, the next time you hear your students grumbling about how difficult English is, just tell them, “Oh, shuddup.” Or better yet, tell them “Shekarashika!”
[1] 常用漢字, jôyô kanji, are the Chinese characters designated by the Ministry of Education for use in everyday life.
[2] A copula is a word used to link a subject and predicate, as in “John is a teacher”, where “John” is the subject, “a teacher” (actually a predicative nominal), the predicate and “is”, the copula. (Don’t worry, I had know idea what a copula was either until I started studying Japanese.)
[3] Unless it’s a period piece and the actors are using Edo Period Japanese.
[4] I use the word “perusal” to imply thoroughness and care in reading. So many Americans today mistakenly assume the word means “to skim”. It does not, it does not, it does not. So, for the love of God, stop it! Same goes for the word “nonplussed”. If you’re not a hundred percent certain of the meaning—and even if you are (over confidence is America’s Achilles heel)—don’t use it. Chances are you’re probably mistaken.
[5] I eagerly await his arrival, though. For when I find him, I will surely ask, “ラオさん、何を持っていますか？”
[6] I have intentionally translated this in the manner that Japanese speak—namely “I was thinking about not doing” rather than the more natural “I wasn’t thinking about doing”—to make the original sentences easier to understand.
[7] Incidentally, while in Tôkyô I chatted up a girl from Gifu who told me that they also used the same ~nmê verb ending. Her friend from Hokkaidô had never heard it before.
Bloody Catholics
“Look at ‘em! Bloody Catholics filling the bloody world up with bloody people they can’t afford to bloody feed!”
--from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
When I was a kid—I couldn’t have been more than six at the time—I asked my parents why they’d had so many goddamn children. I was Number Eleven myself, and Number Twelve had come into the world recently. It was in my mother’s arms, as new as the furniture in the living room that had also just arrived. The timing of the two was so uncanny that it wouldn’t have surprised me if my father had replied that we kids had all been promotional giveaways, my little sister having been thrown in for free when he bought the living room furniture at Ethan Allen.
What he told me, however, was no less remarkable:
“When two people, who are in love, sleep in the same bed together, babies happen.”
My parents, who still hugged and kissed each other after nearly twenty years of marriage, were clearly in love. Even a six-year-old could see that. What’s more, they slept together every night in a giant king-sized bed. Why, if you put two and two together, naturally you got twelve.
A year and a half later, Number Thirteen appeared out of nowhere.
Now, compare that with the bleak conjugal life of my paternal grandparents and you’ll understand why I found what my father told me had so convincing.
I spent a lot of time with my grandparents when I was little, so much so that most of my earliest childhood memories involve them rather than my own parents.
Let me tell you, hardly a day went by when my grandmother and grandfather were not squabbling about something. I remember my grandmother would get so fed up with her husband’s grousing that she’d turn her hearing aid off. Out of earshot, out of mind, I guess.
On top of that, Grandma and Grandpa slept not only in separate beds, but in bedrooms that lay at opposite ends of a hallway. It made perfectly good sense to me then that the two would have only one child: my father.
Now that I am much older, and a father myself, I understand that Catholicism probably played just as big a part in my parents' fecundity as that big bed of theirs.
Blasphemy
My wife made an interesting observation after spending the day with an old friend: "Ideas about the proper way to raise children are like a religion. It's like I belong to this sect. My friend belongs to another sect. And just like you shouldn't say 'My God is the One True God and yours is a blasphemy.' it's hard to tell someone that their way of raising a child may be wrong."
She was referring in particular to the Boob Tube and how some families have the TV on all day long like BGM in their homes. "How can you talk to your children or read to them if you've always got the TV on?"
As with religion—you won't really know if you were right or completely wrong until you die (even then you still may not have an answer)—when it comes to kids, you won't know if your policies worked until the kids grow up and go out into the world.
The other day, our sons (“Cain and Abel”) were at their grandparents. (Heaven on earth!) I plopped down on the sofa and looked at the black screen of my TV. I thought about turning it on to watch the news, but the effort to get off my arse and do so was too much. Inertia has a way of keeping you verring out of habit. It occurred to me that for many people the effort required to turn off the TV and open a book, instead, is often too much for many people, too.
How to say February in Japanese
It's February again which makes me wonder if there are any songs dedicated to the coldest month of the year. I can't think of any off the top of my head.
This time last year an honest to god blizzard hit Fukuoka which was a lot of fun. I cancelled my class at the uni and took my sons out to Dazaifu which tends to get two to four times as much snow as we do in the city. Keep it in mind, the next time the area is hit with a snow storm.
Anyways, February, like the other months is known by a number of names in Japanese. Nigatsu (二月, "Second Month") is the most common. Kisaragi, also pronounced Jōgetsu (如月, ") is the old name for the month according to the lunar calendar, or inreki (陰暦, literally "cloudy/shadow + calendar"). The second month was also called 如月 in China, but apparently there is no connection to the kisaragi of Japan.
There are some theories for the origin of the name. One is that in the old lunar calendar, kisaragiwas still cold--hey, it's still cold today--and people were encouraged to wear extra layers during the month. Kisaragi can also be written 衣更着, which means to put on (着) even more (更に) clothing (衣).
Another theory is that plants and trees (草木, kusagi) put forth new buds (芽が張り出す, mi-o haridasu) during the month, so the month may have been known as kusakihariduki, which when abreviated became kisaragi.
Reigetsu (麗月, "beautiful month") is another name for the second month because everything sparkles beautifully.
Umemizuki (梅見月, "plum blossom viewing month")
Hatsuhanatsuki (初花月, "first flower month")
Yukigeduki (雪消月, "snow disappears month")
Tangetsu (短月, "short month") due to the number of days in the month
The magazine Keiko to Manabu, a subsidiary of Recruit, publishes an annual survey on extracurricular activities.
After School Activities in Japan
I have been trying to put a piece together on extracurricular activities in Japan with comparison to the situation in the States. There are loads of stats on naraigoto (習い事, after school lessons) here, but much less information concerning extracurricular lessons and activities in America. The Census Bureau claimed that 6 out of 10 kids in the US participated in some kind of extracurricular activity, but didn’t give much detail as to what kind or how often. One interesting nugget in the report was that only 8% of children in America were taking part in all three activities (i.e. sports, clubs, and lessons) at the same time. Children referred to those in grades K-12.
As for our family, my second-grade son does karate 2-4 times a week, soccer 2-3 times, soroban (abacus) once a week, and English once a week with his friends from kindergarten. He has mini English lessons with me a few times a week in addition to the lesson with his friends. During school breaks, we enroll him in swim lessons. For half of last year, he was in a shōgi (Japanese chess) class a few times a month. His 6-year-old brother has a similar schedule, minus the shōgi, and soccer is only once a week. In the winter months, I take the boys ice skating every other week.
Living downtown as we do, almost all of the lessons are a short walk away.
When my elder son was in his infancy, I had ideas about what lessons I would have him take—English, of course, but also calligraphy, classic guitar, and so on. None of that happened, except for the English.
His first activity was Play School. A bit expensive, but highly recommended. Shortly after he entered elementary school, though, he grew tired of it. Karate became the focus. At first it was only 1-2 times a week, but after getting his arse whooped in a tournament, he told his mother that he wanted to become stronger, so she started taking him to the main dōjō. Soccer was started as a way to maintain the friendships with his kindergarten friends but last year he changed teams, again in order to be a better player. Soccer is his passion at the moment and he doesn’t mind going to every practice. He insists even though he is exhausted afterwards.
The other day, I was walking past the Eishinkan Juku (cram school) just as the kids were getting out. It was Saturday evening and they kids looked as if the life had been sucked right out of them.
Cram schools like Eishinkan offer tests free to the public as a way to, one, check the level of the eggheads who study at their school with that of non-juku kids, and, two, to scare parents whose kids don’t go into following the herd and sending their own children as well. It’s a funny business.
We had our boy take the test a few weeks ago are now waiting the results. Ideally we would like to avoid jukus as long as possible, but I wonder how feasible it is. At the moment only a handful of his second grade classmates go, but by fifth grade apparently it’s the reverse. Even kids who are not going to take a private junior high school’s entrance exam go to juku which always has me scratching my head.
The Keiko to Manabu report had some interesting stats on narai goto in Japan.
44% of kids surveyed engaged in one extracurricular activity. 34% two part in two. 16% had three. 5%, like our sons, had four.
40.8% of kids had swim lessons
27.7% had English lessons
20.3% Piano
14.1% Calligraphy
13.5% Cram School
12.8% Gymnastics
8.6% Soccer
7.1% Soroban/Abacus
5.1% Other Sports
4.3% Dance
4.3% Karate
Toka Ebisu Festival
One of the nice things about living in Japan is that there is always some festival or holiday to look forward to. Unlike America where once the holiday season ends with New Year's or, ho-hum, the feast of the Epiphany on January sixth, there is a long lull in festive events, in Japan something fun is always just around the corner. Once Christmas has passed, the trees come down and up go the kadomatsu and other New Year's decorations. After the five or six-day drinking, eating, and TV-viewing binge known as O-Shôgatsu, or the Japanese New Year, comes Tôka Ebisu, a festival honoring Ebisu, the patron deity of businesses and fisheries. At around the same time, the Coming-of-Age Day celebration celebrating the entry into adulthood of the nation's twenty-year olds, is held. There is the bean-throwing exorcism known as Setsu-bun in early February, as well as a number of local festivals held in shrines and temples in the meantime.
On Sunday, I went to Fukuoka's main Ebisu shrine which is located just outside of Higashi Park. While I sometimes miss the New Year's celebrations do to travel, I always manage to get back in time to attend the Tôka Ebisu festival.
Like most other festivals held throughout the year in Japan, you'll find the usual demisé food stalls selling o-konomiyaki (below), jumbo yakitori, and so on. What makes Tôka Ebisu different, however, is the number of stalls selling good luck items featuring the seven lucky gods (Shichi Fukujin) of which Ebisu is one, talismansand other trinkets to ward off bad luck, and so on.
The festival also attracts a much different class of people. Whereas you can see many young men and women at the harvest festival Hôjoya (also known as Hôjoe), the people attending Tôka Ebisu tend to be older and "tarnished", making it an interesting place to people watch. I never fail to find the middled aged mamas of "snacks", rough-looking men who look as if Ebisu hasn't been very generous to them, and others desperate for an auspicious start to the new business year.
This year, there seemed to be far more people at the festival than usual. Perhaps it was the weather, perhaps it was that after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami everyone is hoping for a bit of luck.
Sweet roasted chestnuts.
If you look closely at the apex of the crowd in the picture above you can see an upside down red fish, a sea bream. This is a symbol of Ebisu who is often depicted carrying one. In Japanese the sea bream is called tai which rhymes with medetai, meaning “happy”, “auspicious”, or “successful”. Real sea bream are often displayed at a celebratory gatherings, such as New Years, the end of sumô tournaments, engagement ceremonies, and so on.
Just beyond the red sea bream is a procession of the Hakata Geiki, a troupe of geisha working in Fukuoka City. I’ll write about them in a later post in the coming months. Incidentally, the photo on the cover of my second novel, A Woman’s Nails, was taken at this event several years ago.
The geisha making their way to the shrine. This procession is held every year at the height of the Tôka Ebisu festival and worth seeing. This year we just happened to be there when it was taking place.
Another feature of Tôka Ebisu is the drawing that is held at the shrine. On either side of the shinden there are booths selling tickets.
The first time I attended the festival was over ten years ago and didn’t know what to expect. So, when I pulled out one of the lots from a hexegonal box and the Shintô priest shouted, “Ôatari!” (Jackpot!), my mind filled with delicious possibilities: a new car? A trip to Hawaii? Cash? I had never ever won so much as a cakewalk or bingo game before. Needless to say, I was quite excited.
As another priest pounded out several beats on a drum and shouted “Ôatari,” the first priest pulled out a huge red fan from a pile of trinkets and talismans behind him and passed it to me. The fan had 商売繁盛 (shôbai hanjô, “prosperity in business”) written on it in large white characters. Prosperous was the last thing I felt.
That didn’t stop me, however, from going back year after year and trying my luck. In the past, the tickets were only ¥1,500. Today, they go for ¥2,000 each—so much for the deflationary pressure we are told has been pushing prices lower and lower—and where I once bought two or three of the tickets, I now only buy one.
Over the years I have “won” two of those large red shôbai hanjô fans, a massive wooden paddle as big as a cricket bat that has 一斗二升五合[1] written on it, a plate featuring Ebisu-sama, a wooden piggy bank, a calendar, and a small Ebisu doll.
A dutiful follower of this cult of Ebisu, I went on the tenth of January last year. The weather was awful—freezing cold and rainy—and I had been forced to wait under a canopy that leaked like a sieve for a good hour and a half until my wife and son showed up.
When they finally did, I was in a foul mood. My pant legs and shoes soaking wet, the cold was beginning to seep into my bones.
“Let’s just get the damn thing and head on home, okay?” I grumbled to my wife. “It’s freezing!”
We hurried into the shrine, which thanks to the lousy weather was not as crowded as it usually can be during the festival. There was only a handful of people in line for the drawing.
Well, no sooner had we handed over our ¥2000 at the reception desk than the man at the counter said, “Congratulations, you’re our twenty-five-thousandth visitor.” Or something like that. He had us fill out a form and then asked us to follow him to the place where the lots were drawn. After handing the form to the priest with the box containing the lots, I was told to pull one of the sticks out. It didn’t matter which. I did so and gave it to the priest who stood up and, turning on a microphone, said he had a big announcement to make.
“We have a major prize for our twenty-five-thousandth visitor today!” Another priest started banging away at a drum. The other priests in the shinden stopped what they were doing, stood up, and started clapping in unison. After a number of Banzais, the priest handed over a massive and cumbersome bamboo rake to me. It was adorned with ceramic depictions of the gods Ebisu and Daikoku, a red sea bream, a bale of rice, and other auspicious items.
Let me tell you, I couldn’t have been more thrilled had I won a trip to Hawaii.
I don’t know if it is thanks to Ebisu-sama, my son whose arrival in my life signaled the beginning of things finally going my way, or plain dumb luck, but last year ended up being the very best year ever in so many ways.
When you’ve already won the jackpot, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to continue dropping quarters into the slot machine, and yet that is essentially what we did by returning to the Ebisu festival this year and trying our hand at the drawing again.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” my wife said.
“I know, I know,” I replied. “But still, it would be nice to get one of those boats with the seven lucky gods in it. I’ve always wanted one for the collection.”
Sure enough, Ebisu wasn’t as generous to us this year: we got a simple little wooden abacus. I suppose the message the gods are trying to tell us is that we should be more careful about how we spend money. Duly noted, Ebisu-sama!
[1] Ask your Japanese friends to try reading 一斗二升五合and most of them will be stumped. It is a riddle of sorts employing 斗, 升, 合 all of which are traditional Japanese measures of volume.
一斗 (itto, about 18 liters) is equal to ten 升 (shô, about 1.8 liters). 一斗, then, can be said to equal 五升の倍 (go shô no bai), which means “five shô doubled”. 五升の倍 (go shô no bai) is synonymous with 御商売 (go shôbai) which means “one’s business or trade”. Got that?
二升 (nishô). 升 can also be read masu. 二升 here is read “masu masu” which sounds like 益々 (masu masu), meaning “more and more”, “steadily”, and so on.
五合 (go gô, 5 x 0.18 liters, or 0.9 liters) is one half of a shô or 半升 (hanjô) which sounds the same as 繁盛 (hanjô, prosperity). So, putting it all together 一斗二升五合 can be read “Go-shôbai masu masu hanjô!” (御商売益々繁盛), meaning something to the effect that your business or trade will enjoy increasing prosperity.
Dazaifu Tenmangu (太宰府天満宮) is Fukuoka's most famous shrine.
Sansha Mairi
If you live in only one region of Japan for an extended time as I have, it’s easy to make the mistake of assuming that what is true in the town you reside in is also true throughout the rest of the country.
I first recognized this many, many years ago when I kept getting tripped up by the local dialect, known as Hakata-ben (博多弁). I’ve written about this elsewhere, but what I’m getting at here here is not my failure to understand what someone is saying because he is speaking the local dialect, but rather people not understand what I am saying because I have unwittingly used the dialect thinking that what I was speaking standard Japanese.
Take the Japanese word koi (濃い), which can mean deep, heavy, dark or thick—such as in koi aka (濃い赤), “deep red”; koi sūpu (濃いスープ) “thick soup”; ~ wa ajitsuke ga koi (〜は味付けが濃い) “. . . is strongly seasoned”; or even chi-wa mizu-yorimo koi (血は水よりも濃い) “Blood is thicker than water.” For the first ten years of my life here in Fukuoka, I thought koi was pronounced koyui. (Try looking it up in a Japanese-English dictionary.) If you go to Tõkyõ and ask a bartender to make you a stiff drink, saying “make it koyui”, he’ll probably give you a funny look.[1]
Traditional foods, too, can vary from region to region in Japan, so much so that a simple dish like o-zōni—a soup eaten during New Year’s—can contain radically different ingredients and yet still be called o-zōni.
Customs, as I have mentioned before, also differ from prefecture to prefecture. The Bon Festival of the Dead, for example, can, depending on the region, be held as early as July 15th (in Shizuoka, for example) or in other parts on August 15th. Some regions, such as Okinawa, observe what is known as Kyū Bon (旧盆) which falls on the 15th day of the seventh lunar month. In 2019, Kyū Bon and “regular Bon” will take place at the same time, namely from the 13th to the 15th of August. Living all this time in Kyūshū, I used to assume that all Japanese celebrated the Bon in the middle of August and would pester everyone with the question: “Why isn’t this a national holiday like New Year’s?”
Stop pushing’!
Now only a few years ago, it finally dawned on me that something I had taken for two decades to be a widely-observed custom was actually a very local one: sansha mairi (三社参り).
In Japan, many people (and I would venture most) visit a Shintō shrine during the first few days of the new year, a custom known as hatsumōdé (初詣), to pray or make wishes. At the shrines, they buy good luck charms called o-mamori (お守り), drink a special kind of saké, and buy written oracles known as o-mikuji (おみくじ). It’s primarily in Fukuoka, though, that people visit (o-mairi, お参り) three shrines (三社) rather than one.
Live and learn.
God? You up there? Do you hear me, God?
So When is O-Shogatsu Over Anyways?
This is a piece I wrote for GaijinPot last year.
My wife took down the shime kazari the other day.
Shime kazari are the decorations you find hanging on front doors and gates at o-Shōgatsu (お正月, or the Japanese New Year). Traditionally made with twisted rice straw, they are often festooned with a daidai (bitter orange), fern fronds and gohei or shide (zigzag strips of white paper), the ornaments serve to welcome Toshigami-sama, the Shintō deity who brings a bountiful harvest and blessings for the new year.
Modern designs, like ours (above and below), take great liberties with more traditional decorations, adding generous loops of red-and-white cords of twisted paper, known as mizuhiki, pine branches, colorful Japanese washi paper, auspicious doodads and occasionally fresh flowers.
I asked my wife what she was doing.
“Shōgatsu is over… ”
“Says who?”
“My parents already took down their shime kazari.”
“So? I paid ¥4,000 for that. Put it back. Please!”
“But… ”
There’s quite a bit of debate about when you should take your New Year’s decorations down. Regional variations have something to do with it — why, even the design of the shime kazari themselves can vary greatly from region to region — but so do different interpretations of when o-Shōgatsu is officially concluded.
I guess you could say a similar discussion exists in the West concerning when Christmas trees should be tossed out. Is it the Feast of the Epiphany, which falls on Jan. 6 (hence the 12 Days of Christmas)? Or should the tree and other holiday decorations remain until Candlemas, which falls on Feb. 2, i.e. 40 days after the nativity of Jesus? Thanks to Christmas tree recycling drives hosted by the Boy Scouts in early January, in America at least, trees are now being ground up into mulch before they can become a fire hazard.
As for the last day of o-Shōgatsu, many assert that it is Jan. 7. This day is widely considered to be the final day of matsunouchi, the week-long period starting with New Year’s Day during which the kadomatsu (New Year’s “gate” pine) and other decorations are displayed. New Year’s greeting cards, known as nengajō, should be received within the first week of the year. The seventh is also the day Japanese eat nanakusa gayu, a dishearteningly bland rice porridge dish made with seven different herbs. It was for these reasons, I suspect, that my wife’s mother and many others had already taken their own decorations down.
But, I still wasn’t sold on the idea.
During a quick walk around my neighborhood, I noticed several shops were still displaying their shime kazari. Perhaps because it was Seijin-no-hi, or Coming-of-Age Day, a national holiday that serves as a psychological bookend to New Year’s.
Whatever the shops’ motivations, some believe that it’s quite alright to keep the decorations up until Jan. 15, a date known as Ko-Shōgatsu (小正月, Little New Year), as was the custom up until the Edo Period (1603-1868). The first week of the new year was called Ō-Shōgatsu (大正月, lit. “Big New Year,” in this instance) while the rest of the month was considered just regular “Shōgatsu.”
Rice porridge with seven herbs and salt.
Ko-Shōgatsu is known by other names, too, such as Niban Shōgatsu (Second New Year’s), Onna Shōgatsu (女正月, Woman’s New Year) and so on. Before Japan adopted the Gregorian solar calendar, the 15th was the day on which the full moon appeared. As far back as the Heian period (794-1185), it was customary to eat rice porridge made with sweet, red azuki beans. A similar dish called o-shiruko (sweet red-bean soup), made with azuki beans and half-melted globs of mochi (sticky rice cake) is traditionally eaten around the 11th, the day kagami (mirror-shaped) mochi decorations are broken. Today, at shrines throughout Japan, you can find hi-matsuri (火祭り, fire festivals), known as sagicho or dondoyaki (burning of New Year’s gate and other decorations), held on the 15th when kadomatsu, shime kazari and the previous year’s talismans are set alight in a bonfire.
Despite that, others argue that it’s acceptable for New Year’s decorations to remain until Hatsuka (20th day of the month) Shōgatsu, which falls, not surprisingly, on the 20th of January. In the Kansai area, the head and bones of the buri (Japanese amberjack) are cooked with sake kasu (lees), vegetables and soy beans. Because of this, the day is also called Honé (bone) Shōgatsu.
My wife, following her mother’s example, had been deferring to tradition. I countered with the argument that if we were really going to stick to good ol’ “tradition,” we would have to keep the shime kazari up until March 2, which — in accordance with the Chinese lunar calendar — is actually Jan. 15.
“Let’s keep it up until Hatsuka Shōgatsu, then,” my wife suggested.
“The 15th will be fine,” I said. “We don’t want to get carried away.”
Kadomatsu
Kadomatsu (門松, literally “gate pine”) are traditional decorations of the Japanese New Year placed in pairs in front of buildings, and to a lesser extent homes, to welcome ancestral spirits or kami of the harvest. They are put out immediately after Christmas, sometimes as early as the evening of the 25th, and remain traditionally until the 15th of January (Matsunouchi, 松の内), but only until the 7th in recent years.
Designs for kadomatsu can vary depending on region but are typically made of pine, bamboo, and sometimes umé tree sprigs which represent longevity, prosperity and steadfastness, respectively.
The fundamental function of the New Year ceremonies is to honor and receive the toshigami (deities of the new year), who bring a bountiful harvest for farmers and bestow the ancestors' blessing on everyone. After January 15th the kadomatsu and other New Year’s decorations are burned in bonfires at Shintō shrines to appease the gods and release them, an event known as Dontoyaki (どんと焼き) or Sagichō (左義長).
At the Nishitetsu Grand Hotel
At Daimyō Elementary School
In front of Mitsukoshi Department Store in Tenjin
At the Seahawk Hilton Hotel in Momochi
In front of a popular Japanese restaurant called Chikae
Kagami Mochi
Kagami mochi (鏡餅, literally mirror rice cake) is a traditional Japanese New Year decoration, which consists of two round mochi (rice cakes), the smaller placed atop the larger, and a Japanese bitter orange, known as a daidai, with an attached leaf on top. It may also have a sheet of konbu and a skewer of dried persimmons under the mochi.
It often sits on a stand called a sanpō (三宝, see photo below) over a sheet called a shihōbeni (四方紅), which is supposed to ward off fires from the house for the following year. Sheets of paper called gohei (御幣) or shidé folded into lightning bolt shapes are also sometimes attached.
Kagami mochi first appeared in the Muromachi period (14th-16th century), the name kagami ("mirror") having allegedly originated from its resemblance to an old-fashioned kind of round copper mirror which also had a religious significance.
The two mochi discs are also said to symbolize the going and coming years, the human heart, yin and yang, or the moon and the sun. The daidai (橙), whose name is synonymous with "generations" (代々), is said to symbolize the continuation of a family from generation to generation.
Traditionally, kagami mochi was placed in various locations throughout the house. Nowadays, however, it is usually placed in a household Shintô altar, called a kamidana or placed in a small decorated alcove, called a tokonoma, in the main room of the home.
At a small privately owned shrine in the neighborhood.
The faux kagami mochi in my home.
At Kego Shrine in Tenjin, Fukuoka
Our neighborhood mochi shop at year’s end.
Fresh mochi rice cakes.
Shimenawa
Shiménawa (七五三縄, 注連縄 or 標縄, literally "enclosing rope") are another common decoration of the Japanese New Year. Rice straw is braided together to form a rope, that is then adorned with pine, fern fronds, more straw and mandarine oranges. They can represent a variety of auspicious items, such as the rising sun over Mt. Fuji or a crane. The shiménawa pictured above is the one that hung on my front door a few years ago.
Used mostly for ritual purification in the Shintô religion, shimenawa can vary in diameter from a few centimetres to several metres, and are often seen festooned with shidé paper. The space bound by shimenawa often indicates a sacred or pure space, such as that of a Shintō shrine.
Shiménawa are believed to act as a ward against evil spirits and are also set up at a ground-breaking ceremonies before construction begins on a new building. They are often found at Shintō shrines, torii gates, and other sacred landmarks.
They are also tied around objects capable of attracting spirits or inhabited by spirits, called yorishiro. These include trees, in which case the inhabiting spirits are called kodama, and cutting down these trees is thought to bring misfortune. In cases of stones, the stones are known as iwakura.
Most of the following photos were taken of shiménawa hanging at the entrance of restaurants and boutiques in my neighborhood.
This is the kind of shimékazari typically found in Fukuoka.
Corporate Japan
A few years back someone posted an infograph of the “Corporate States of America” with the most representative/iconic companies based in each state. Now someone has done that with Japan. Have a look.
Hokkaidō: ニトリ (Nitori, interior/furniture retailer) and 六花亭 (Rokkatei, confectioner/chocolate)
Aomori: サンデー (Sunday, home center/DIY)
Iwate: 薬王堂 (Yaku Ōdō, drugstore chain)
Miyagi: アイリスオーヤマ (Iris Ohyama, maker/seller of household plastic products)
Akita: たけや製パン (Takeya Seipan, maker of bread and western-style sweets and cakes)
Yamagata: でん六山形県山形市に本社を置く菓子メーカー
Fukushima: ヨークベニマルスーパーマーケットチェーンを展開する福島県郡山市の企業
Ibaraki: ケーズホールディングス茨城県水戸市に本社を置き「ケーズデンキ」の屋号で家電量販店をチェーン展開
Tochigi: コジマ栃木県宇都宮市に本社を置く家電量販店チェーン
Gunma: ヤマダ電機群馬県高崎市に本社を置く家電量販店チェーン
Saitama: 赤城乳業埼玉県深谷市に本社を置くアイスクリーム専業メーカー千葉県イオン「イオングループ」を統括する純粋持株会社
Tōkyō: NTT東京都千代田区に本社を置く日本の通信事業最大手であるNTTグループの持株会社
Kanagawa: 崎陽軒本社を神奈川県横浜市に置き主にシウマイの製造販売ならびにレストラン事業を展開
Niigata: 亀田製菓新潟県新潟市に本社を置き主にせんべいなどの米菓の製造を手掛ける企業
Toyama: 光岡自動車富山県富山市に本社を置く自動車メーカー
Ishikawa: アイ・オー・データ機器石川県金沢市に本社を置く精密機器メーカー福井県増永眼鏡福井県福井市に本社を置く眼鏡フレームの老舗メーカー
Yamanashi: 富士急行山梨県富士吉田市に本社を置き運輸・観光・不動産・流通事業などを行なう会社
Nagano: セイコーエプソン長野県諏訪市に本社を置く情報関連機器・精密機器のメーカー
Gifu: 西濃運輸路線トラック業界最大手で岐阜県大垣市に本社を置く運輸会社
Shizuoka: ヤマハ静岡県浜松市に本社を置く楽器・半導体・自動車部品製造発売を手がけるメーカー
Aichi: トヨタ自動車愛知県豊田市に本社を置く自動車メーカー
Mie: 井村屋三重県津市に本社を置く菓子メーカー
滋賀県近江兄弟社滋賀県近江八幡市に本社を置く医薬品メーカー
京都府任天堂京都府京都市に本社を置く家庭用レジャー機器の製造・販売を行う企業
大阪府パナソニック大阪府門真市に本社を置く世界的な総合電機メーカー
兵庫県川崎重工業兵庫県神戸市に本社を置き二輪車・航空機・鉄道車両・船舶等を製造する企業
奈良県呉竹本社は奈良県奈良市にあり書道用の墨汁・筆・硯などで知られるメーカー
和歌山県オークワ和歌山県和歌山市に本社を置き8つの府県で展開しているチェーンストア
鳥取県寿製菓鳥取県米子市に本社を置く菓子メーカー
島根県一畑電気鉄道島根県松江市に本社を置き交通・観光・流通・建設等の事業を展
開岡山県ベネッセコーポレーション岡山県岡山市に本社を置き通信教育・出版などの事業を行なう企業
広島県マツダ広島県安芸郡府中町に本社を置く自動車メーカー
山口県ユニクロ山口県山口市に本社を置き衣料品の生産販売を一括して展開する企業
徳島県日亜化学工業徳島県阿南市に本社を持ち発光ダイオードなどの電子デバイス扱う化学会社
香川県日プラ香川県木田郡三木町にあるアクリルパネルメーカー
愛媛県大王製紙愛媛県四国中央市に本社を置く独立系大手製紙メーカー
高知県キタムラ高知県高知市に本社を置く写真用品店チェーン
福岡県ゼンリン福岡県北九州市に本社を置く日本最大手の地図制作会社
佐賀県久光製薬佐賀県鳥栖市に本社を置く医薬品メーカー長崎県ジャパネットたかた
長崎県佐世保市に本社を置く通信販売会社
熊本県再春館製薬所熊本県上益城郡益城町に本社を置く化粧品・医薬品・医薬部外品の通信販売業の企業
大分県ジョイフル本社を大分県大分市に置き九州を中心にファミリーレストランをチェーン展開
宮崎県宮崎交通宮崎県宮崎市に本社を置きバス事業などを展開
鹿児島県セイカ食品鹿児島県鹿児島市に本社を置く総合食品製造メーカー
沖縄県オリオンビール沖縄県浦添市に本拠を置く大手ビールメーカー
Mochi-tsuki
Because my sons’ kindergarten is Buddhist, there are no Christmas decorations or Christmas-related events. None whatsoever.
(No worries there as we already do plenty at home.)
The kindergarten does, however, hold New Year’s related events, such as “mochi-tsuki”.
What’s “moji-zugi”, you ask?
Mochi-tsuki (moh-chee-tsoo-kee) is the making of mochi (rice cake) by pounding steamed sticky rice (もち米, mochi kome) with large wooden hammers for God knows how long. It is in the words of the esteemed Mr. Wiki very “labor intensive”. I think the only thing that we have remotely similar to mochi-tsuki in the US is handmade ice cream.
Now the thing with handmade ice cream is that your effort is rewarded with something that tastes pretty damn good. Mochi, on the other hand, is rather bland. Mixed with sweet beans or covered with syrup, it can be rather nice. But, again, alone it’s so hopelessly boring, it makes you wonder why people go to all the trouble.
My son has already left for school. He asked me to go, too, but as only the fathers of third-year students can attend—damn—I have been spared the forced labor demanded of tradition.
This evening I will be taking my boys to see the Christmas lights in Kego Park and ride the kiddie “Polar Express” train.
There are only five more days till Christmas. For some reason or another, this holiday season has just whizzed by. Last year, I couldn’t wait for it to be over. This year, though, . . .
I think it’s the realization that Christmas with young boys who believe all the stories of Santa Claus, no matter how far-fetched or contradictory, won’t last forever. We’ve got perhaps five or six more years of the season’s magic. And then? Well, we will just have to find a new way to enjoy the holiday. Perhaps with a mochi-tsuki party.
Shimekazari
When you live as long as I have in only one part of a country, it's easy to assume that the way things are done in your region are the same nationwide. It took me two decades to realize that sansha mairi (visiting three shrines at New Year's) was a custom peculiar Kyūshū, and in particular to Fukuoka.
Similarly, the shimé kazari, a New Year's decoration placed above the entrance to homes and buildings, varies from region to region. Shime-kazari is said to originate from shime-nawa (twisted hemp and rice straw rope placed at the entrance of shrines to indicated a sacred space) and meant to keep misfortune and unclean spirits away and greet Toshigami (年神), the gods and ancestors brought with the new year.
Sorry, but . . .
Few end-of-the-year customs in Japan seem sillier to the casual observer than that of the mochū hagaki (喪中葉書, "mourning postcard"). Mochū hagaki (pictured above) are postcards sent out to friends, relatives, co-workers, and others in December or earlier, notifying them that due to the death of family member in the past year they are in mourning and will therefore be unable to send nengajō (年賀状), or New Year's greeting cards. It is as if people are saying, "FYI: I am sending this postcard to you now to inform you that I cannot send you that other postcard later."
To be fair, mochū hagaki do serve some useful purposes. For one, they inform others that they need not bother sending a nengajō to the family out of respect for their loss—even when the person who has died was 105 years old, as is the case in the postcard on the left, and "relief" rather than “sorrow” might be a better adjective describing the emotions felt when Great Grandpa finally kicked the bucket. And, probably more importantly, mochū hagaki preemptively assuage any misunderstandings that might occur when a nengajō goes unanswered.