Adventures in Japan

Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu!

Which is, of course, the way to say "Happy New Year" in Japanese. I hope you had a nice Eve night. Ours was pretty okay. We spent the early part of it finishing up all our cleaning. Man, I'm kinda dreading owning a house. It took us two days to clean a little box, I don't even want to think about how much effort house cleaning is gonna be. The room isn't totally without dirt, we still have a lot of dirty laundry but that is hardly our fault. Rain has been forecast for the last week and we have found that rain inhibits the clothes drying process. Other than that, though, our pad is nigh spotless. I'm sure it's way cleaner than any other apartment in the Orange House. Well, maybe the apartments of the Japanese tenants are cleaner. Whatever. Our room is really clean.

After the cleaning, we took a breather by watching some TV. New Year's Eve is a big television watching night in Japan. All sorts of specials going on. From what we could tell, most of them involved a lot of comedy acts. Since we couldn't understand most of what they were saying, we didn't watch TV for all that long. We set out for the nearest Temple to see what was going on.


A whole bunch of long lines is what was going on. And a lot of bell ringing. It was all kind of eerie, with it being dark, and the wind being all blustery, and the streets being much more deserted than usual, and the spires of the temple looming in front of us, lit up in a vibrant yellow light, with the BONG of the bells sounding out every once in a while. Then we made it to the temple grounds proper and saw the lines. The bells start ringing at 11:30 and they just keep going. The first 108 bell rings represent the 108 earthly desires, all the ringing after that is just people ringing in the new year. But not really. I took a deeply Japanese belief and custom and slapped an ill-fitting American equivalent on to it. Yay me!

We didn't stand in line to ring the bells, we just poked around taking pictures and all that. We did stand in line to get some warm liquid. It was good, and free. It was like rice pudding, but hot and more liquid-y.


Did I mention that the last day of the year was also the first day of snow here in Osaka? It was.

Our original plan for New Year's Eve, involved us making our way to a nearby hill or mountain and taking in the first sunrise of the new year. That didn't happen, and that's probably for the best. We took in the sunrise from the roof of the Orange House and this is what we saw.

Not worth spending a miserable couple of hours camped out on the muddy side of a soggy mountain to see. It reminded me a bit of the one New Year's where Trev and I decided to stay up and see the sunrise and it was too cloudy anyways. Except with way less alchohol. Way less.


I think that the sun was rising somewhere off in this direction.

But still, we had a good time. Happy New Year!