Japan Navigator

Here is some practical advice I followed this year with New Year in Japan to make life more pleasant (comparable to my advice to stay indoors at midnight on New Year’s Eve when you are in Europe, as private fireworks (worth 65 million euro in Holland alone) will be blasted in your face):

• Don’t watch television on New Year’s Eve. The “Red and White Song Competition” (Kohaku Uta Gassen) on NHK is getting more infantile every year and the “Yukitoshi-Kurutoshi” where temple bells tolling out the year on various locations are shown around twelve o’clock, is always larded with morbidly melancholic commentary – especially when the economy is down.
• Buy the ingredients for osechi, the cold New Year food by yourself instead of getting a ready-made set. In this way, you can concentrate on things you like instead of having a box stuffed with over-priced inedibles.
• Skip the Hatsumode shrine visit on the first and second of January, but instead wait until the third, or even better, the fourth. On the fourth, there will be no crowds to speak of.

P.S. I realize I should repost this at the end of December this year!