Japanese New Year

The Japanese celebrate New Year's Day on January 1 each year. Before 1873, the date of the Japanese New Year (正月) was based on the Chinese lunisolar calendar and celebrated at the beginning of Spring, just as the contemporary Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese New Years are celebrated to this day. However, in 1873, five years after the Meiji Restoration, Japan adopted the Catholic Gregorian calendar, so the first day of January is the official New Year's Day in modern Japan. It is considered by most Japanese to be one of the most important annual festivals and has been celebrated for centuries with its own unique customs.

Osechi-ryōri
Japanese people eat a special selection of dishes during the New Year celebration called osechi-ryōri, typically shortened to osechi. A popular soup is ozōni, consisting of miso, boiled kelp), fish cakes, mashed sweet potato with chestnut, simmered burdock root, and sweetened black soybeans. Many of these dishes are sweet, sour, or dried, so they can keep without refrigeration — the culinary traditions date to a time before households had refrigerators, when most stores closed for the holidays. There are many variations of osechi, and some foods eaten in one region are not eaten in other places (or are even banned) on New Year's Day. Today, sashimi and sushi are often eaten, as well as non-Japanese foods. To let the overworked stomach rest, seven-herb rice soup is prepared on the seventh day of January, a day known as jinjitsu.

Nengajō
The end of December and the beginning of January are the busiest times for the Japanese post offices. The Japanese have a custom of sending New Year's Day postcards (年賀状, nengajō) to their friends and relatives. It is similar to the Western custom of sending Christmas cards. Japanese people send these postcards so that they arrive on the 1st of January. The post office guarantees to deliver the greeting postcards by the first of January if they are posted within a time limit, from mid-December to near the end of the month and are marked with the word nengajō.

It is customary not to send these postcards when one has had a death in the family during the year. In this case, a simple postcard is sent instead to inform friends and relatives that they should not send joyful New Year's cards, in order to show respect for the deceased.
People get their nengajō from many sources. Stationers sell preprinted cards. Most of these have the Chinese zodiac sign of the New Year as their design, or conventional greetings, or both. The Chinese zodiac has a cycle of 12 years. Each year is represented by an animal. The animals are, in order: mouse, cow, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and boar. Even with the rise in popularity of email, the nengajō remains very popular in Japan.

Otoshidama
On New Year's Day, Japanese people have a custom of giving pocket money to children, which is a custom from China. This is known as otoshidama (お年玉). It is handed out in small decorated envelopes called pochibukuro, descendants of the Chinese red packets.

Mochi
Another custom is creating rice cakes (餅, mochi). Boiled sticky rice is put in to a wooden shallow bucket-like container and patted with water by one person while another person hits it with a large wooden hammer. By mashing the rice, it gets sticky and forms a sticky white dumpling. This is made before New Year's Day and eaten during the beginning of January.
Mochi is also made into a New Year's decoration called kagami mochi (鏡餅), formed from two round cakes of mochi with a bitter orange (daidai) placed on top. The name daidai is supposed to be auspicious since it means "several generations."