Happy New Year!

The year of the Rabbit, 2011, arrived in Nagoya with our first floury of snow. Before New Year, thousands of people crammed our local streets to get to the nearby, Heiwa Park Cemetery. By January 1, all the individual graves were adorned with posies of pine branches and flowers. Every single grave had been visited by their family. Tradition is an enormous part of Japanese life. No wonder this place is so crowded all the time. I actually think the Japanese like being surrounded by others. It is just what you do here, tradition, tradition, tradition. Get in the car and sit in a traffic jam. Go to where everyone else is going. Queue in an orderly fashion to take a peak at a special Buddha, maybe rub his shoulder for good luck. During autumn like everyone else, we got in the car, drove to the nearby prefecture of Gifu to look at the Autumn leaves. Are we becoming Japanese? We spent weekend after weekend in ridiculously slow going traffic jams. Was there an accident? No, just everyone in Japan driving around trying to get back home, merging traffic, slowing and stopping. At least we can watch the TV in our car when we stop:)

All the workplaces build up to new year with "Forget the Year" celebrations. Every man, (women stay at home and clean, wash and cook meals - another tradition)  has a number of evening events to attend.  Before New Year there is a scurry of emptying out unwanted goods, many of them perfectly functional. Every house and workplace is decorated with pine and twine decorations. We think about doing it too, but are cautioned that all decorations must be removed by January 10th and burned or some awful bad luck might happen. OK, the pressure, what if we forget to take it off the door? How will we burn it?

New Years Eve (unlike Australian culture) is a reflective evening, a time to be with your close family. At midnight, families visit their Shinto Shrine or Buddist Temple to ring the bell, 108 times I think it was, all for good luck. Before dawn, they wake back up again to greet the New Year. It is a tradition to climb to the peak of a mountain to see the first sunrise of the New Year. We joined our friends to climb such a  mountain. The sun rose at 7am.We climbed to the top, stood and waited to see the sunrise. It was pretty unremarkable, a little cloudy, but again we were not alone, at least 200 people stood with us and hoped for a spectacular visual event. We cooked Omachi with the locals in the fire. Omachi is a rice cake that is as hard as a rock until it is roasted. It is a tradition to do this too. Careful though, 1000 people choke on Omachi every year.

We welcome the year, 2011, the year of the Rabbit.
Happy New Year!!

Christmas in Japan

Samui desu yo. It is cold. But not cold enough for us, we head to Hokkaido for a guaranteed White Christmas. Christmas is not a public holiday here in Japan, we could be excused to miss the whole occasion if it wasn't for a skiing Santa and kitsch Christmas carols being aired at our Japanese hotel. Christmas is celebrated as a present giving event but it is really only a party, unlike New Year's Day which is one of the biggest family occasions of the Japanese calender. At time of writing people are celebrating the end of the year with, "forget the year" parties and women "spring clean" the house, throwing out as much as possible to make way for a new year and new things. We did manage to put on a Christmas lunch on the 19th December with our friends who are practising hindus. They were great company and helped bring a little family to our Christmas luncheon. We found a turkey leg, bright red inside with a curious flavourless taste, not much better than a plastic toy.(I think it said turkey on the packet) We were very proud of our Christmas cake though,  it took many supermarkets to find the right ingredients. It is difficult to locate sultanas around here. The cook at the kids school informed me that he has been requested not to use them when making scone like cakes. Squishy sultanas embedded in flour is not a local delicacy. So with 8 packets of the little squished flies, 100g per packet, somehow, we produced a great big Australian Christmas cake. We packed it in our luggage and took it to the airport, got on the plane with a 25kilo bag full of Christmas cake, smiled a lot to avoid excess baggage and away we went for our skiing holiday of a lifetime.

Ice was floating in the sea before Sapporo airport. It set the scene for our week of negative temperatures. What was even more surprising was watching two F18 aeroplanes landing on the same runway as us. Wow! Have you ever seen an F18 land? It is all about the rear tyres. These military planes looked like they were performing at the Paris airshow, pointy nose tip in the sky at a 45 degree angle, running down the tarmac for most of its' length. Incredible first time sight!

Niseko was as beautiful as expected. The air was always crisp and snow fell almost non-stop.The snow was the driest snow ever seen. Powder. Now I get it. Powder is different to snow, slush, rocks and roots. This was seroius skiing at its' best. The illusive Mount Yotei revealed himself rarely. A huge Fuji-san look alike just across the valley. Arriving by bus on the 21st of December, we had a clear view of the full moon, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and a partial lunar eclipse. Spooky!

We had a feast of Japanese cuisine for a week, 12 hours of skiing a day with plenty of breaks, much of it by artificial light and a sulphourous onsen if we chose. Bliss!