Kagami Biraki is an event of eating Kagami Mochi at the end of the New Year, and we usually do it on January 11th. Kagami Mochi is two-round piled up rice cakes, and we decorate them in our house during the new year holiday to welcome the god of new year.
In Japan, especially in Western Japan, January 10th is a special day. It is a day for a god called Ebisu. It is a god of business prosperity.
Nanakusagayu is salt taste rice porridge made by what we call spring seven wild herbs. It is supposed to cleanse our stomach which has been filled with heavy meals during the new year’s holiday. If we have Nanakusagayu for breakfast on the 7th, we are said to have good health for the rest of the year.
We did Hatsumode, visiting a shrine on the 4th this year.
In Japan, we have a tradition called Joya no Kane which means the New Year’s Eve Bell. The bells are rung 108 times at Buddhist temples throughout the country.
For dinner, we had squashes since that is our tradition in Japan at the winter solstice.
It was a day of financial fortune today according to the Japanese lunar calendar, so I went to a Benzaiten shrine in our town. Benzaiten is Sarasvati in Sanskrit, and is said to give you wealth, and it is good to visit a Benzaiten shrine on a day like today.
I call onsen a Japanese sauna, and it has a tremendous wellness effect. I definitely think onsen is one of the secrets to Japanese longevity.
