Happy Year of the Dog!

Happy New Year! This is always a big night here. First we sit around the kotatsu, which is just a low table with a heating element on the underside and a quilt over it to keep your legs warm, and we watch the Red and White Song Contest. This is a New Year’s program in which many of the most famous singers in Japan split into women's and men's teams and try to outdo one another. Usually a few terrible performances and some that are just astonishingly good. This year the men won, which is as it should be.

After that we walk over to Sumiyoshi shrine, the nearest Shinto shrine to our house. At midnight there's a long line of people waiting to pray for good fortune in the coming year. You walk slowly to the front of the line, shake a heavy rope to make the bells clatter overhead and draw the attention of the god, and then pray while a young girl serving as an attendant wishes you well and touches your head with ritually purified paper streamers attached to a wooden staff.

Drink some sweet sake, buy this year's hamaya(demon breaking arrow) and then linger by the fire for a few minutes talking to any neighbors you know before going home. There are always lots of young couples treating it as a date, and kids with their grandparents. People reading their fortunes on little slips of paper bought at the shrine, and tying any bad ones to the tree branches and fence posts to keep bad luck inside the shrine precincts where it can be handled by experts. Basically everyone, out and happy past their normal bedtimes. It's fun, and it must be especially nice if you've done it since childhood.

One bad thing is that Keiko tells me February is the beginning of a three year stretch of bad luck for me. Three years seems a bit oppressive. I really think I should get some time off here and there. Say, six months bad and then one month when I keep tripping over large sacks of unclaimed cash and baked goods. I'll keep you informed. Unless my luck is truly bad. In which case, hey, carry on and have a donut for me.

In the meantime, though, I've installed the demon breaking arrow right over my end of the sofa. Of course, that may just mean it will fall and hurt me. I'm getting paranoid. Time for bed. Except that's probably just where they want me…