New Year's Day and beyond...

A welcome change to recent New Years in Japan was the fact that the whole family (including Clara) stayed up for the countdown to New Year. That felt a bit special, although I am never in my best form during the Festive Season in Japan as I feel like I am missing a lot of fun back in Scotland. The next Festive Season will be different though, as we will all return to Scotland for a couple of weeks as Joep will be 60 years old on 28th December. Even though that is a year away, I am starting to look forward to it already.

However, New Year's Day was nice nonetheless and it was spent relaxing, eating, drinking, and singing karaoke from the new microphone and software bought for the Nintendo Wii. My excuse for not singing was that I had a sore throat. We ate the traditional soba on New Year's Day (thank you Satoshi) and then slowly worked through the rest of the food and wine.

The best part of my 9 days off was simply spending time at home. I now spend most of my time working at Weathernews and then by myself in my small Makuhari apartment. The time spent at home was greatly valued.

On the 2nd January, we all went to Hon Kawagoe to make the yearly visit to a temple to pray/wish for good fortune throughout the year. Clara's wish was that I would find a job closer to Kumegawa so that I would not have to live in Makuhari. That really is pressure!

Hon Kawagoe

Today is a national holiday in Japan called Coming of Age Day. All young people who turn 20 years old during the year celebrate on this day. Turning 20 years old is regarded as the start of adulthood in Japan. Because we had time to kill, we all took the train to the end of the line to a station called Hon Kawagoe. Near the station, there are some temples and other old buildings. It seems to be a fairly popular tourist destination and the temple was busy with people who were apparently still performing their New Year rituals.

There were lots of stalls selling traditional snacks and trinkets. The picture at the top shows daruma - traditional Japanese dolls which are used for making wishes. As can be seen from the picture, each daruma has no eyes. When you make a wish you colour the right eye black. If your wish subsequently comes true later in the year, you then colour the left eye black. If you look at the picture of the daruma in the fire on my New Year blog, it appears that whatever wish was made did not come true in 2007 as the left eye was still uncoloured.

The next picture shows lucky cats or maneki neko. Cats which hold up their right hand are supposed to attract money while cats holding up the left hand are supposed to attract customers. We also visited Toki-no-Kane, a famous belltower which is about 400 years old. I took some photos of the area but because blogger does not seem to accept pictures in portrait, I have had to steal an image from the internet. I am also still unable to include links in my postings....arghh!!