Explore everyday life in Japan
It’s the end of the year, and in Japan, that means there is a lot to do.
The house must be cleaned—thoroughly. The protective talismans, good luck charms, and household decorations that have been used for the year must be gathered and taken down so that they can be brought to a local shrine and burned in an outdoor fire. Osechi, a type of traditional cooking that is eaten only on New Year’s Day, must be either ordered or made. Nengajyo, a New Year’s postcard that is typically decorated with a family portrait of some kind and the animal that corresponds to the Chinese zodiac for the following year, must be designed, ordered, written, and posted.
And bounenkais, or year’s end parties, must be gone to.
In Japan, one doesn’t merely move from the old year to the new year. There is an idea here that one should close out the old year, tie up one’s loose ends, clean one’s house, body, and spirit, and enter the new year fresh and clean. This means saying goodbye to friends and co-workers one final time before the year ends and promising to renew your bonds in the following year. Doing so typically takes place at a bounenkai, which is almost always held at a restaurant, an izakaya, or a banquet hall.
What makes a bounenkai different from a regular dinner outing? In many cases, not much really, but in my experience, when it comes to the work bounenkai, there is usually a real sense of release. The rigidity of the office and the business relations that define people there are dropped. As a result, people are free to interact very openly and, in many cases, drunkenly.
Sometimes skits are performed to celebrate or poke fun at an event or occurrence that happened during the year. Sometimes they are performed to lift morale and encourage everyone to continue working hard throughout the coming year. Sometimes songs are sung as a tribute or a gesture of appreciation from the boss to his/her employees. Sometimes songs are sung by an employee (or a group of employees) and are dedicated to a group of co-workers, a manager, or a boss. From what I have seen, the work bounenkai often involves speeches and theatrics of some kind to help put an end to the old year and welcome the promise of the new one.
In a way, December in Japan can be thought of as bounenkai season, a time to have dinner and drinks with old friends and new. And because Japan has a such a group-oriented society, I have found that many people continue to keep in touch with those who they once spent a considerable amount of time with: their nursery school classmates, their elementary school classmates, their junior high school classmates, their high school classmates, their university classmates, the people they work/worked with, the people they took a cooking class with or the other mothers in the new mother group they once joined, the members of the swimming group from their youth or the members of the dance group they entered in order to participate in a summer festival, etc. The bonds formed in these group settings last a lifetime. This means that many people, in December, have one or more bounenkais to attend every weekend.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.