My First New Year’s in Japan
So this was my first New Years in Japan and I loved it. In Japan the New Years holiday or oshogatsu goes on for about a week. My boyfriend for example had about 8 days off for the holiday. So for this new years we went to visit his home town. Personally I prefer the style of New Years in Japan, its a very calm celebration. The night of people eat soba and watch tv. There is a special TV show that is a singing competition and the other show people watch is a comedy show.
The next morning we had this huge bento box and I kept this abalone shell. I’m going to make it into an ornament for our christmas tree.
A lot of people spend midnight and into the morning at the shrines so they can see the sunrise. We decided to go in the afternoon and it was very crowded. We waited in a very long line and it was super organized. Even when we were leaving it was still really crowded and busy.
We got our fortunes after making our wish for the new year. I got good luck and my boyfriend got extreme good luck. After making our prayers they had free warm sake for everyone to have.
They had food stalls lining the path where you wait for the shrine so I got fururu fries and a giant mozzarella stick. They also had a lot of yakisoba, chocolate covered bananas, and candied strawberries.
On the second of January the stores have mystery lucky bags called fukubukuro. They’re bags of mystery items depending on your size. Most stores do them and some show a chart of what the items could be. They also range in price from $100-$800. Adidas was the most popular and had a huge line waiting for these buckets of stuff.
We went into coach which had lucky bags from $300-$800. They also have most of the items everywhere on sale about 50% or 60% off if they aren’t in a mystery bag. We also went to Rayban and they had everything in store for 10% off or little clear bags with two sunglasses in them for $50. One was rayban and the other was vogue. you couldn’t try them on but you could find a similar pair in the store to try on. I don’t love the pink ones but for $50 ray bans its just an added bonus.
The lucky bags are one day only but apparently the sales go on for another week. A lot of stores are trying to clear out what they have so they do that by having these sales.
