A New Year’s Wrap-up

Posted: January 3, 2010 | Author: Doug | Filed under: Cooking, Japan | 6 Comments »

Had a great New Year’s, but a real tiring one. Between Christmas, daughter’s birthday, and hosting New Year’s Eve party at our house, we are exhausted. But, here’s a wrap-up of our little New Year’s Eve celebrations.

First, my wife cooked some good oden, which is a very popular winter food. It’s usually a big pot of stew made from fish broth, soy sauce and mirin (cooking wine), which allows you to stew lots of different foods:

There’s too many things here to describe, but here’s a partial list:

• Konyaku – which is a dark, gelatin-like food made from sweet potato. Chewy but very tasty, and healthy.
• Fish cakes – usually cooked in sweet, soy-sauce combo, like inari sushi.
• Deep fried tofu
• Wheat gluten sticks (sliced), sounds better than I am describing it.
• Hard-boiled egg.
• Daikon, or Japanese radish
• Potato balls.

Oden in Japan is extremely popular as sidewalk food carts, or yatai (屋台), since you can pick which items you want to put in your oden. If you like tofu, but don’t like the fish cakes for example, you could pick what you wanted. It’s one of those things that’s actually really hard to find in the West, but if you ever get a chance to eat it, don’t miss the opportunity. It’s really, really good.

For the party itself, my wife also cooked toshi-koshi soba (年越し蕎麦) which is a kind of noodle soup primarily only served during the New Year’s eve:

Normally when I’ve eaten soba, it’s usually served cold like in zaru soba or tenzaru soba (with tempura, see Wikipedia link), but toshi-koshi soba is a light chicken/soy broth with noodles. Real simple, but the tradition is that you have to eat it up before midnight. I failed to do that (ate it the next morning for breakfast), oh well.

As for the TV show, kōhaku uta gassen, it was good watching. My wife really wanted to see a certain boy-band named Arashi (嵐), as did my little 3-year old girl, who likes one of the guys. When they finally did come on toward the end, my little girl was dancing in front of the TV. It was adorable. As usual, there were lots of good acts, some pretty cute singers,¹ and some good classic Enka music too. A real eclectic mix. The catch is that the show is 4+ hours, so at first we were real excited, and I was singing along with the enka music (since it’s slow and has subtitles I can read), but closer to midnight, we were getting tired and sleepy, so it lost some interest for me. Eye and ear candy is only good for so long, which is rather Buddhist when you think about it.²

We crashed before the clock hit midnight (show ended around 10:45pm, Pacific, hosted on cable). I think around midnight, fireworks went off nearby, which woke us up. My wife and I mumbled sleepily to each other akeome, which is a really short-hand for the New Year’s greeting: akemashite omedetō (gozaimasu), then rolled back to sleep.

The following day, we treated by my wife’s friends to some excellent osechi-ryōri, or traditional New Year’s food:

There’s too many foods to list here, but among the things shown, all of which are considered auspicious, are:

• Naruto – a kind of pink/white fish-cake.
• Shrimp, with cocktail sauce.
• Kinpira – Spicy, cooked burdock root and carrots (really yummy, good fiber too).
• Yōkan – sweets made from japanese beans (the yellow, squares).
• Oranges.

Afterwards, we went home and crashed, had some coffee, and slept like crazy. Actually, I was on-call so I had to stay up later than I wanted to, but slept great that evening.

We missed out on the first temple visit, or hatsumōde since I am on-call. This is also called the gantan-e (元旦会) service in Japanese Buddhism as far as holidays are concerned. Also, in Japan, stores would be open all three days of the New Year, but here in the US, certain coffee shops and stores were closed, so we couldn’t do as much as we wanted to.

All in all, for not being in Japan, I think my wife had a good New Year’s and I did too. Hope you all have a great 2010!

P.S. Busy today, so I apologize if this post has typos. Also slightly off-schedule.

¹ I have to admit I like the hostess, Namaka Yukie, too. Lovely and good actress.

² The Buddha was not teaching that pleasure in and of itself is bad, but that it provides no lasting satisfaction, and no matter how much you try to satisfy it, you will want more. Also, any pleasure you enjoy incurs a cost or upkeep. Or, as the Buddha states in the Dhammapada:

186-187. There is no satisfying sensual desires, even with the rain of gold coins. For sensual pleasures give little satisfaction and much pain. Having understood this, the wise man finds no delight even in heavenly pleasures. The disciple of the Supreme Buddha delights in the destruction of craving.

No rest for people in this world. The solution begins and ends with the mind.

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