Ringing in the New Year in Japan - A Year in Fukushima #5

That I rang in the new year five days and fifteen minutes ago means a few things. One, the synapses should be firing like jiffy-pop up there, making my aluminum foil head explode with ideas for resolutions so outlandishly ambitious I won’t feel bad about breaking them; two, my mother-in-law’s mochi cakes – all fourteen varieties, including the one with the dried bits of squid entrails mixed in – should have mercifully, magically disappeared by now, from both the fridge and the walls of most of my major arteries; and three, I should have written my first post of the year four days and fifteen minutes ago and gone to bed.


I have excuses none of this is happening. Their names are Yamato and Seiji.

My older boy won’t stop making me play trains with him, or take him to the park. I wish he’d get creative and say something like ‘Daddy, just get out of my face if you can’t turn me into a dinosaur.’ Then I can get down to some serious resolution-making – after I fiddle with the settings on my blog page a little more. The younger kid thinks he’s off the mochi hook because he only has four teeth, and cries like a baby until I give in and fix him some pulverized peas instead. This of course means it’s another plate of cooled-off, brick-of-chalk mochi for papa. Then all day they tag-team mom with screaming poopie pants and glue-eating competitions, and in an apartment this size I can’t fake not noticing that the god of hellfire is shooting out the wife’s mouth again, and suddenly I’m back on daddy duty and another day of writing is shot. So here goes another late-night typing session – evidently I didn’t place the prolific writing resolution bar high enough to justify crying a quiet ‘impossible’ to myself and just crawling into my futon.
But really, I’m glad I’m feeling motivated, because I can’t wait any longer to say that my New Year’s Eve was, in a word with countless connotations, amazing.

In Japan, in case you are ill-informed, it’s all about tradition – meaning nothing has to make sense to anyone taking part. Putting it this way lends some vague sense of consolation as I look back on a New Year’s Eve that still has me reeling in the part of my brain responsible for understanding what the hell is going on.

On any other night of the year, and I think I can include my birthday here, I’m more than happy to have the wife fall asleep with the kids at nine. Then I can avail myself to the unclaimed beer, sake and snacks lying in every dark corner of the in-laws’ house. Or fire up some coffee and chocolate and bang out a few more pages of the next novel. Maybe even listen to a CD wholly lacking in songs about perky animals or talking choo-choo trains. But in Japan New Year’s is supposed to be one of the most important family events of the entire year (the others being O-Bon, the return of the spirits of the deceased to the home, and Doyo-no-Ushi-no-Hi, when everyone escapes the summer heat by eating eel). So I was anticipating something at least a little out of the ordinary from my normally-sedate relatives, even if it was going to require my polishing off the plum brandy that has been sitting around too long. (Plum brandy, it has been proven in certain controlled living room experiments, can increase one’s ability to fake comprehending conversations in garbled Japanese dialect and thus delude oneself into enjoying them.) But this past Friday night, up at the old peach farm, my mother-in-law, the last holdout, only made it to eleven. And this only because she was doing laundry.

By the time she said something sounding like ‘good night’ and disappeared into the darkened hallway I had enough sake in me to drown any chance of writing anything halfway intelligible (my standard benchmark). But I had not yet begun to find the humor in the people in the foam costumes on TV playing slapstick pork and rice trivia. Strong-willed reveler that I am, I found a solution. I cracked a can of happoshu and toed the sobriety line and got a jump-start on my Happy New Year cell phone texts. Everyone else in Japan types out the exact same message. They use the same three government-approved New Year’s expressions and send these happy, icon-laden, totally emotionless messages en masse to everyone on their address lists, time-delayed to coincide with the stroke of midnight. This of course sets repeater towers all up and down the archipelago on fire, which is an impressive sight to say the least, and my favorite part of New Year’s in Japan. I can’t believe my wife doesn’t stay up for it.

Now, as I am a writer and therefore determined to be unique in even the most pointless of situations, I began sending individualized texts to everyone I thought might be planning on sending me a New Year’s message. Then I got started on the B-list. My superior powers of concentration were on full display (though no one was around to witness) as I kept thumbing my phone right into midnight. It was a bit of a shock actually when my mother-in-law crept into the room to say ‘Akemashita omedetou gozaimasu, kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegai shimasu,’ leaving out the state-mandated ‘Ii toshi ni narimasu you ni’ because she’s just crazy like that sometimes. I looked at her, then at the clock, and saw it was already 12:03. So far I’d received not a single New Year’s text. Those repeater towers must have really been going up in flames out there.

‘Can you hear the fireworks?’ she asks. I listen, above the sounds of the people on TV laughing with themselves, and hear a faint boom-boom. ‘To the north,’ she adds, and I follow her into the kitchen to lean out the side door with her. There are no sparks, no colors, just flashes in the sky like far-off heat lightning. ‘They’re in Kunimi and Iizaka,’ I am told. Apparently Fukushima City, the prefectural seat of government, is too busy for fireworks as they are monitoring the airwaves to make sure people are using the proper three sentences in their New Year’s text messages. (Violators are firmly, politely reprimanded.)

I wasn’t the least bit disappointed in the heat lightning display because, like it was scripted by the ghosts of past generations who celebrated New Year’s without bad TV, or any TV, it had also started snowing. And this, standing in the cold doorway of my in-laws’ cramped kitchen, nobody conscious but me and my mother-in-law, made my New Year’s something to remember, at least in some small but comforting way.

But then mom fired up the stove.

Ten minutes later I was slurping down soba with my wife and both her parents. Sleep until ten past midnight, then wake up and eat. Do the Japanese have to do everything backwards? Twenty minutes later I was back in the living room, just me and the TV, my in-laws all having gone back to bed. They’d apparently decided to forego the traditional New Year’s bath at midnight, followed by an offering of fruit or sake or fourteen kinds of mochi to kami-sama sitting up in his altar above the hutch. I guess getting up for the soba is good enough for recent generations though I’d say they’re playing with fire.

New Year’s Day is a traditional day of cleaning in Japan, similar to the customary (and, perhaps like the midnight bath, quietly ignored) spring cleaning deal in the States. Now, I get the symbolism here: a new year, a fresh start, and all you Shinto demons get out from under the spare futons in the closet. But what do you say we stay up on New Year’s Eve instead, split the plum brandy and sleep in on January 1st instead of waking up early to throw all the windows and doors open to the snow still swirling in the breeze? I am just now beginning to think that it’s been more than just wanderlust that has compelled me to spend New Year’s in Malaysia, New Zealand, even New Jersey in recent years. I can deal with the mindless exchange of mandatory New Year’s greetings, but can you please shut the god damn doors? It’s like, one out there.

I tossed back the rest of my happoshu and was about to call it a night when a voice told me to switch the channel on the TV. (Okay, I was having a hard time finding the big red OFF button.) On the screen was Ichiro Suzuki, whacking another of his trademark singles through the infield. I watched for a moment as it sunk into me that it was not baseball season. Then a clip of another Ichiro hit, this a double to the gap in left. Then another single, then a slap home run, against a different team. A few more hits and I realized what was happening: they were replaying in order every one of Ichiro’s 2,244 Major League hits. With this I knew it was time to wish the empty house a happy new year and crawl into my futon – which I did after watching about one year’s worth of Ichiro highlights. Like I said, amazing carries many connotations.

Well now it has been six days and five minutes since I rang in the New Year. Teaching manufacturing company workers English, having two little boys who I can’t get to not like me no matter how well I imitate the wife’s god of hellfire routine, and the daily odds and ends of trying to sell my books to libraries, tracking down a notary public and eating a meal occasionally, all make it very difficult to get in ample writing time. But it seems my jiffy-pop is popping. I know exactly now what my New Year’s Resolution is going to be, starting this very moment.

I’m not going to sleep for the rest of the year.

I may make it, now that the plum brandy is gone.

Prelude to a Japanese New Year's - A year in Fukushima #4

With only a very limited time to write this post I found it decidedly fortuitous that there were no decent CDs in my wife’s car. Thus the drive from the Internet-less peach farm to a screaming child-less apartment would be a quiet one, as there is a law in the universe that makes it impossible for anything good to be on Japanese radio, and I would have the opportunity to think of an intelligent and snarky opening for today’s blither. But just to make sure the universe was behaving I flipped on the stereo and pushed a couple of preset buttons.

Depending on your opinion of jazz, universal law may indeed be holding constant. But I ended up in mental la-la land for most of the drive listening to a drawn-out jam session called, for no reason I could discern, Autumn Leaves. Another universal law seems to be that jazz titles shouldn’t bear any comprehensible connection to the music.

I came to Japan in September of 2001. This is the first New Year’s Eve I will be spending in Fukushima, where I have officially been living for all but two of the past nine New Year’s Eves. I drove up to the peach farm with the wife and kids two days ago, and while on the surface things appear as they always have (see this previous post), this time around the air in Arai feels different somehow.

‘How long are you staying?’ my mother-in-law asked as I dumped more bags of crap onto the front hallway floor. Yamato pushed his box of new train tracks into the living room while my wife immediately began worrying about whether Seiji needed more milk or a clean diaper or some time with his new walker-wagon as he is now spending a lot of time on his feet and my wife doesn’t want him to lose his developmental momentum. I just mumbled my Japanese greetings and lugged everything into the refrigerator tatami room where we would be sleeping for the next six nights.

New Year’s Eve is one of the most important times of the year in Japan, a time for family and good wishes and lots of silly television shows. Earlier this year my mother-in-law got a wide-screen plasma TV (or whatever the term is) so while the shows aren’t any better the sensational factor goes up, which is all Yamato needs. And the new remote is much more space-age, which helps keep Seiji’s mind off the fact that he is on his back with no pants on again, a set of circumstances that has recently been turning him into baby Godzilla. Of course television in Japan isn’t all bad – commercials for the local Shinto shrine inviting everyone to come do their New Year’s praying where ‘decorations and good luck charms have been prepared’ gives a gaijin like me a deeper glimpse into the ever-unraveling enigma that is this country.

Traditional foods abound in Japan, and perhaps at no time are there more varieties than at New Year’s. ‘Toshi-koshi soba’ is an extra long version of the regular soba noodles available anywhere all year, and are meant to signify long life. Of course nobody, not even Japanese people, believe a bowl of inordinately long noodles has the power to extend your life. For this reason, they eat them every year, banking on a sort of cumulative effect. O-sechi is an elaborate meal consisting of a dozen (at least) different kinds of fish, beans and no-gaijin-knows-what-else all painstakingly prepared and served in boxes that stack on top of each other. Back in 2004 I did have the opportunity to sit down to a real home-made O-sechi meal at a friend’s house in Gifu prefecture. His mother, and grandmother too I think, instead of buying New Year’s O-sechi at the supermarket like many people do now, had spent hours and hours making everything, as is the surviving custom in some places just now getting fully fitted with electrical wires.

My first real O-sechi! I dug in, trying everything.

The black bean thing was pretty good.

On Wednesday, once we were settled in at the snow-dusted peach farm, my mother-in-law fired up the mochi machine. Mochi is a form of prepared rice, thick and chewy and sticky and served in a multitude of ways, and is another New Year’s favorite. Together we made Dai-fuku, small round blobs of mochi filled with a sweet bean paste called anko. It stands to reason that it should not be too hard to get a blob of sticky rice to behave, but my Dai-fuku came out looking like the proverbial clay ashtray every kindergartener brings home to mom and dad, regardless of whether they smoke. My mother-in-law had already thrown together another form of mochi, once upon a time shaped and left to sit in long pieces of bamboo split in half. Now it seems a length of plastic gutter from the home center is the new custom. These half-moon rice cakes can be put in soup, smothered in anko or kinako (powdered soy bean, which is a lot better than it sounds), or eaten as is, usually grilled on top of the kerosene heater.

For breakfast on Thursday we would have mochi in all of these forms. Around 11am my wife and mom-in-law were sitting in a quiet powwow, trying to decide how to serve lunch’s mochi.

We ended up having udon.

It is colder up on the peach farm, and snows quite a bit more than down in town, and yesterday it started snowing again. So after lunch, feeling myself turning edgy being confined to the only warm room in the house and with no professional sports on TV, I told Yamato we should go sledding. From his reaction it seemed he was feeling just as cooped-up, and soon we were heading out the door. ‘Do you need to go pee pee?’ my wife asked him (but not me). Of course not, it was time to go sledding. My mother-in-law pulled out a home-made wooden sled from on top of the firewood pile in the back shed. ‘Here, use this.’ Nice gesture, but I brought along a big plastic bag just in case.

Despite the fast there are exactly zero hills on the peach farm big enough to give daddy thirty seconds rest from having to pull the boy around, a good time was had by all. We hadn’t thought to bring a decent pair of gloves for Yamato, and my wife’s wouldn’t quite stay on his hands, so after a few minutes Yamato decided to go without any, and didn’t complain about frozen fingers for the next hour. I think the same dynamic is at work with little kids and sand in their shorts. How can they not care?

Walking back up the driveway to the house Yamato said he wanted to go pee pee outside. He does this sometimes, now that he knows he can. ‘Come on Yamato, let’s just go inside,’ I said as I leaned the sled up against the side of the shed and tucked my unused plastic bag behind it. ‘Daddy, I’m going pee pee now...’

And he was, pants pulled up and leaking into his boots as he stood there looking back at me.

Now it is New Year’s Eve, and we are all more than sated in the mochi department so I have been commissioned to stop by the sushi place to pick up dinner for everyone. (Plus my mother-in-law might be busy making O-sechi though I haven’t seen any black beans anywhere.) Normally my wife can call ahead and place an order and all I have to do is go in, spit out my name (‘Su-mi-su’ being the standard ear-grating version) and they hand me a bag or two. Today, however, we are not the only ones with moms too busy making O-sechi to cook and bellies overloaded with mochi, and I just got an email from my wife saying the sushi shop isn’t taking orders today. ‘It’s really crowded too,’ she added, meaning I better get my butt over there. It’s just as well. This is New Year’s Eve, a time for family, food and good cheer – one form being the ‘nigori’ Japanese sake my mother-in-law has been letting me sample these past two days. There is most likely at least a few bottles of Kirin Lager still out in the shed too. These will go perfectly with an evening of sushi and silly television shows in a room full of train tracks – the only warm room in the house.

Happy New Year everyone!

Best of luck in all your New Year’s endeavors.