Shogatsu (New Year)

Shogatsu, the Japanese New Year, is the most important and elaborate holiday of the Japanese year, centred on the first three days of January (the observance shifted from the lunar to the Gregorian calendar in 1873). Its governing idea is renewal: to see out the old year and welcome the new with a clean slate. In the days before, households settle debts, hold a thorough year-end cleaning (osoji), and decorate the home and gate with pine, bamboo and plum arrangements (kadomatsu) and sacred straw ropes (shimenawa) to welcome the toshigami, the deity of the incoming year, and to keep off misfortune.

The festival blends Shinto and Buddhist custom. Its central religious act is hatsumode, the first shrine or temple visit of the year, made by huge numbers in the first days of January to pray for health and happiness in the year ahead and to draw a written fortune (omikuji). On New Year's Eve, Buddhist temples ring their great bells 108 times (joya no kane), a number said to correspond to the earthly desires or passions of Buddhist teaching, tolling them away as the year turns. Families gather to eat special foods (osechi-ryori, arranged in tiered boxes, and the noodle toshikoshi soba), send New Year cards (nengajo), and give children money in decorated envelopes (otoshidama). As a festival of renewal, purification and hope kept by nearly everyone, Shogatsu is the still centre of the Japanese calendar.

Japan is the clear exception among the major East Asian cultures that historically shared the Chinese lunisolar calendar: China, Korea, Vietnam and Chinese communities worldwide continue to treat the Lunar New Year as their principal new year festival, often alongside the Gregorian 1 January as a separate, lesser occasion, but Japan's 1873 Meiji-era calendar reform shifted the nation's primary new year observance to 1 January outright, and Shogatsu absorbed the full traditional weight, the family gathering, the religious visits, the symbolic renewal, that the lunar festival still carries elsewhere in the region, rather than that older lunar observance simply continuing on its own separate date as a folk custom alongside the new one.

The shift was not absolute everywhere in Japan: Okinawa and some other outlying regions with their own distinct cultural history continued, and in some communities still continue, to mark the traditional lunar new year in some form alongside the now-dominant Gregorian Shogatsu, a regional exception that stands out precisely because it is exceptional, underscoring how thoroughly the Meiji reform succeeded in relocating Japan's main new year celebration to a fixed solar date across most of the country.