Another New Year in Japan

Photos:

• Top left: Since apparently Japanese people don't care about count-downs to New Years', we left home after midnight to head to the shrine, which is where all the big events take place for "Oshogatsu" (New Year) in Japan. This is a photo from Haneda Jinja (the local shrine for "airtraffic safety" among other things), where everyone is waiting in line to say their prayers at the top of the shrine steps.
• Top right: After our visit to the shrine we walked about 30 minutes, across the river and into Kanagawa-ken, where we visited Kawasaki Daishi. This temple is one of the 3 most popular in the entire country when it comes to New Years prayers. One of the officers let me into a special area so I could take a picture of the crowd. Lucky me. The people you see here are waiting for the next group to be allowed to approach the front of the temple, where offerings are made and prayers said. At 2 am, there was a wait of longer than an hour to get to this point.
• Bottom left: after fighting your way through the crowds once you finish at the temple, there are loads of vendors selling an assortment of things including religious amulets, calendars, spices and traditional food like yakisoba (fried noodles with vegetables) and steamed potatoes with butter. This is from the area selling traditional Japanese sweets; the men are chopping the candy, which is first made on something similar to a taffy-pull, to a special rhythm that sounds like drumming. They use their knives on the cutting board to produce the sound that is so familiar to Japanese people that the candy itself is named after that sound.
  
• Bottom right: my second year to partake in the Japanese tradition of eating "osechi-ryori", or New Year's dishes. (Use this link if you want to see the pictures from last year.) Osechi-ryori is incredibly sweet food. The sugar is used as a preservative, as this type of New Years' food dates all the way back to before refrigeration was available and the people needed the food to last 3 days when all the shops were closed for the holiday. In the photo, you can see Hiroko's (my host mom's) family. L-R: Yoshiko's husband, Hiroko's sister Emiko, Hiroko's father, Hiroko's mother, Hiroko's sister Yoshiko, and finally, Hiroko herself. Good times!