Adventures in Japan

Now this is a holiday!

Besides a trip to a Buddhist temple to hear the bell toll on the new year, many Japanese people will also visit a Shinto shrine. Covering all their bases, I guess. We thought we should do the same, so on the 2nd, we took a tram down to Sumiyoshi Taisha, which is a sorta famous shrine in southern Osaka. Supposedly it has some pretty unique architecture, but we couldn't really see it. The grounds (which were surprisingly large) were covered in stalls and tents and throngs of people. Like a carnival, but without the rides. There was food everywhere, and games with prizes, and a maze, and a haunted house, and a pony, and other fair-type stuff. Inside the shrine proper, people were telling fortunes and selling good luck charms and making wishes and praying. It was all very festive.


We've been warned many times that everything in Japan is closed over the New Year holidays and we'd better be prepared. Well that's so very untrue. Banks may not be open (I dunno, we didn't check) but commerce was alive and well on New Year's Day. When we walked to catch the train, I'd say we passed more places that were open than closed. Mostly restaurants. And then starting on the 2nd, department stores and shopping centres are all open for "bargain" which I guess is their way of saying that everything's on sale. At 7:00 on Sunday morning, we saw people lined up across the whole front of the building waiting to get into Hankyu department store. Security guards were everywhere. I imagine we could have seen scenes like that all over the city. And here we thought the Japanese were missing out by not recognizing Boxing Day.

Keep in mind, though, that we live in Osaka. People around here love to shop. Other, smaller cities and towns might have been shut right down.

Other highlights of our New Year holiday included Nintendo, cheap, cheap Korean hooch, and drinks with my pen pal from Tokyo.