I want to tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to be able to articulate clearly, despite having lived inside it my entire life.
Christmas in Japan is for couples. New Year is for families.
That is the short version. The long version is considerably more interesting.
In most Western countries, Christmas is the anchor of the winter holiday season — the occasion around which family reunions, gift exchanges, and the specific emotional weight of the end of the year are organized. New Year’s Eve is a party. A countdown. A bottle of champagne and a late night and a slight headache on the first of January.
In Japan, this is almost exactly reversed. Christmas — which Japan has adopted with characteristic enthusiasm and characteristic creativity, producing a holiday that bears only passing resemblance to its Western original — is primarily a romantic occasion, celebrated by couples rather than families, organized around Christmas cake and fried chicken and a general atmosphere of festive intimacy. It is fun. It is cheerful. It is not particularly serious.
New Year — Oshōgatsu — is serious.
Not somber. Not heavy. But serious in the way that things carrying genuine cultural weight are serious: observed with care, structured by rituals that mean something, experienced as a genuine transition rather than merely a calendar event.
And the three days of the Japanese New Year — January 1st through 3rd — are, without question, the most specifically and completely Japanese experience available to anyone who finds themselves in this country at the right moment.
Let me take you through it.
The Preparation: Ōsōji and the Logic of the Clean Slate
New Year does not begin on January 1st. It begins, in practice, in late December — with ōsōji (大掃除), the great cleaning.
Ōsōji is the deep cleaning of the house that precedes the New Year: not the routine maintenance cleaning of ordinary life, but the thorough, systematic, top-to-bottom cleaning that addresses everything that has been deferred or ignored throughout the year. The windows. The areas behind furniture. The storage spaces where things accumulate. The garden.
The logic of ōsōji is the logic of the Japanese New Year in miniature: you do not carry the old year’s dirt into the new one. The house should be clean when the New Year arrives — when the toshigami, the god of the New Year, is said to visit each household — not as a performance of tidiness for a divine guest, but because beginning the year in a clean space is beginning the year correctly. With the accumulated weight of the previous twelve months cleared away.
I do ōsōji every year. It is, I will admit, not my favorite activity. But there is something in the doing of it — the specific satisfaction of a house genuinely cleaned, of having addressed the things you had been avoiding — that is different from ordinary cleaning. It feels like a completion. Like something finished so that something new can begin.
Alongside ōsōji, the preparations include kadomatsu — the pine and bamboo New Year decoration placed at the entrance to the house or business, welcoming the toshigami. And shimenawa — twisted rope decorations of rice straw, sometimes with paper lightning bolt ornaments (shide), hung above doorways to mark the space as pure and protected. And osechi ryori — the elaborate New Year food, prepared in advance and stored in stacked lacquer boxes (jubako), which I will describe in detail shortly.
December 31st: Ōmisoka
The last day of the year — ōmisoka — has its own rhythm and its own specific pleasures.
During the day, final preparations are completed. The house is clean. The kadomatsu are in place. The osechi ryori is arranged in its jubako. The family gathers.
In the evening, toshikoshi soba — year-crossing noodles. Long buckwheat soba, eaten on New Year’s Eve to represent long life and the wish for a clean crossing from one year to the next. The soba should be eaten before midnight — leaving unfinished soba into the New Year is considered bad luck — and its length is symbolic: you do not cut it before eating, because cutting would symbolize cutting the thread of life or fortune.
The television in the background: Kōhaku Uta Gassen, the Red and White Song Contest, broadcast on NHK every New Year’s Eve since 1951. Two teams — red for female artists, white for male — perform popular songs from the year, building through the evening to a final score and a winner announced just before midnight. Kōhaku is an institution that has outlasted every prediction of its irrelevance. Viewership has declined from its peaks but remains enormous. Many Japanese people watch it not because they are fans of the specific artists but because the specific combination of Kōhaku on the television and toshikoshi soba in the bowl and family in the room is part of what New Year’s Eve is. The ritual is the point.
At midnight, the sound that marks the transition: joya no kane — the New Year’s bell. Buddhist temples across Japan strike their bells 108 times — once for each of the 108 earthly desires or delusions that, in Buddhist teaching, cause human suffering. Each strike of the bell is understood to dispel one of these desires, clearing the way for the New Year. The tolling begins just before midnight and continues into the first minutes of the new year. Many people go to their local temple specifically to hear it.
The sound of the temple bell at midnight on New Year’s Eve is one of the sounds of Japan that stays in you. It is a deep sound and a slow one — the strikes are not hurried — and it carries in the cold air in a way that makes the transition feel real, felt, genuine. Something has ended. Something is beginning.
The First Three Days: What Oshōgatsu Actually Is
January 1st through 3rd — sanganichi — is the heart of Oshōgatsu, and during these three days Japan operates differently from any other time of year.
Most businesses are closed. Most stores are closed. The streets of Japanese cities, which are ordinarily some of the busiest urban environments on earth, are quiet in a way that is slightly disorienting. The silence of New Year’s morning in a Japanese city is specific and unlike any other silence — the silence of a country that has, collectively, paused.
Hatsuhinode: First Sunrise
Many people begin January 1st by waking before dawn to watch hatsuhinode — the first sunrise of the New Year. This is not metaphorical. People set alarms. They drive to hilltops and clifftops and beaches and mountain summits and roof terraces in the dark, and they wait, in the cold, for the sun to appear.
The first sunrise of the year carries a specific name — hatsuhi — and a specific significance. Watching it is an act of welcome: welcoming the light, welcoming the new year, beginning the year with your face turned toward something that renews itself without fail every morning. The sunrise on January 1st is the same sun that rose on December 31st. But something about watching it deliberately — about getting up in the dark to be present for it — makes it feel different.
I watch it every year. I am not, by nature, a morning person. I make an exception for hatsuhinode.
Otoso and the Morning Drink
Back at home, the New Year morning begins with otoso — a spiced medicinal sake drunk from a special set of nested lacquer cups. Otoso is said to ward off evil spirits and illness for the coming year. It is drunk in order from youngest to oldest — the young drinking first to absorb the energy of new life into the family, the old drinking last to absorb longevity from the young. The symbolism is explicit and, I find, quite lovely: the youngest and the oldest sharing the same cup in a gesture that connects the generations.
Osechi Ryori: The New Year’s Food
Osechi ryori (おせち料理) is the most elaborate food tradition in Japan — a collection of dishes, each carrying a specific meaning, arranged in stacked lacquer jubako boxes and eaten across the first days of the New Year.
The tradition of preparing osechi in advance — rather than cooking during the holiday — serves a practical purpose: the woman of the household should not have to cook during New Year, a rare and deliberate rest from daily labor. But every ingredient in the osechi carries a symbolic meaning that is understood and referenced, at least implicitly, by the families eating it.
Kuromame — sweet black soybeans. The word mame also means diligent and healthy. Eating kuromame wishes health and hard work for the coming year. Kazunoko — salted herring roe. The enormous number of tiny eggs symbolizes fertility and prosperity for the family. Tazukuri — candied dried sardines, originally used to fertilize rice fields. The name includes the characters for “rice field making” — wishing for an abundant harvest, or in modern usage, for prosperous work. Kohaku namasu — white radish and carrot in sweetened vinegar, their red and white colors corresponding to the celebratory red-and-white color combination of Japanese festivity. Datemaki — sweet rolled omelette mixed with fish paste, its shape resembling the rolled scrolls of official documents, wishing for scholarship and accomplishment. Ebi — shrimp, whose curved form resembles the bent back of an old person, symbolizing the wish for a long life.
I could continue. The osechi is long and its meanings are layered and its composition varies by region and family. The point is that eating osechi on New Year’s morning is not simply eating food. It is consuming wishes — specific, named wishes for the year ahead — made edible and shared among the people you are spending the New Year with.
The osechi is eaten with ozoni — a soup whose specific form varies dramatically by region. In the Kanto region (Tokyo), ozoni is typically a clear broth with rectangular mochi. In the Kansai region (Osaka, Kyoto), the broth is typically a white miso soup and the mochi is round. In Nagoya — close to where I live — we make it with both, or sometimes with a distinct local variation. The regional variation of ozoni is a source of constant and affectionate argument between people from different parts of Japan, the kind of argument that has no winner and is not meant to. The point is not to determine the correct ozoni. The point is to eat your family’s version and find that it tastes like January 1st.
Hatsumode: The First Shrine Visit
Perhaps the most widely observed ritual of Oshōgatsu is hatsumode — the first visit to a shrine or temple of the New Year.
Approximately 80 million Japanese people — roughly two thirds of the entire population — visit a shrine or temple within the first three days of the New Year. The most popular destinations — Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, Naritasan Shinshoji Temple in Chiba, Narita Shrine, Sumiyoshi Taisha in Osaka — attract millions of visitors over these three days. The queues can be hours long. People wait in the cold without significant complaint. This is understood as part of the experience.
At the shrine, you pray — O-maiiri. Two bows, two claps, one bow: the specific ritual of Shinto prayer, performed in front of the shrine’s main hall. You pray for the new year: for the health of your family, for safety, for whatever specific hope the new year carries for you.
You draw omikuji — fortune-telling slips of paper, pulled from a box, revealing your fortune for the year: daikichi (great blessing), kichi (blessing), shokichi (small blessing), suekichi (future blessing), kyo (bad luck), daikyo (great bad luck). If the fortune is bad, you tie the slip to a designated pine tree or wire at the shrine, leaving the bad luck behind. If it is good, you keep it and carry the good fortune with you.
You buy ema — small wooden votive tablets on which you write a wish or prayer and hang at the shrine. You buy omamori — protective amulets for traffic safety, health, academic success, love, business prosperity. You return the omamori from the previous year to be ritually burned at the shrine — their protection has been used up, and they should be returned with gratitude rather than simply thrown away.
Hatsumode is, for many Japanese people, the only time they visit a shrine with genuine intention rather than cultural habit. And yet the genuine intention is real — the act of standing before the shrine in the cold January air and stating your hopes for the coming year is, whatever its metaphysical status, an act of taking the year seriously. Of acknowledging that what happens in the next twelve months matters, and that you intend to face it with some degree of care.
Otoshidama: The Children’s New Year
No account of the Japanese New Year is complete without otoshidama — the small decorated envelopes of money given by adults to children during the New Year period.
The amounts are calibrated by age and by the relationship between giver and child. Grandparents give more than aunts and uncles. Older children receive more than younger ones. The envelopes are specifically designed for the purpose — bright, decorated with New Year’s motifs, distinct from any other kind of envelope.
For Japanese children, otoshidama is the financial highlight of the year — a reliable influx of cash whose management is the subject of considerable parental guidance and not infrequent parent-child negotiation about savings versus immediate spending. Many children end up with accumulated amounts that represent significant purchasing power, carefully considered over the following weeks.
I gave otoshidama for years. Now, in my forties, my relationship with the season has shifted: I no longer receive it (this transition, when it happens in your twenties, is quietly melancholy) but I give it, and the pleasure of giving is unexpectedly genuine. The envelope, the amount chosen with care for each specific child, the moment of presenting it — there is something in the ritual that I value now in a way I did not when I was the one receiving.
What the New Year Means: The Japanese Understanding of Transition
The Japanese New Year is built on an understanding of time that is worth articulating directly.
In the Japanese calendar tradition, each year is a discrete unit — not merely a continuation of the previous year with an arbitrary number incremented. The old year is genuinely completed, in a ritual sense, by the cleaning and the toshikoshi soba and the temple bell. The new year is genuinely new — welcomed by the sunrise, inaugurated by the otoso, populated with specific wishes made edible in the osechi.
This is not merely symbolic. The Japanese language has specific vocabulary for the first occurrence of things in the New Year: hatsu-hi-no-de (first sunrise), hatsuyume (first dream, traditionally on the night of January 2nd), hatsumode (first shrine visit), hatsugama (first tea ceremony), hatsuuri (first shopping). The emphasis on hatsu — first — reflects an understanding that the first instance of something in the New Year carries a special quality, a tone-setting significance. The first dream of the year is said to predict the year’s fortune. The first sunrise illuminates the year’s beginning. The first prayers at the shrine ask for the year’s blessings.
This attention to beginnings — this investment in the specific quality of the year’s first moments — is, I think, one of the more psychologically healthy aspects of Japanese culture. The idea that each year is a genuine fresh start, that the slate can be genuinely cleaned, that you can stand at the shrine on New Year’s morning with specific hopes for the next twelve months and take them seriously — this is not naïve optimism. It is a structured relationship with time that makes the transition feel real rather than arbitrary.
The Japanese New Year is not a party. It is a practice.
And the practice, engaged with honestly, is one of the most genuinely renewing experiences I know.
— Yoshi 🎍 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “O-Bon: Japan’s Festival of the Dead — and Why It’s Actually Beautiful” and “Hanami: Why Cherry Blossom Viewing Is About More Than Just Flowers” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
