New Year's Food!

As mentioned in our previous post, there are many important parts of the New Year's celebration here in Japan. We were invited to one of my student's houses to partake in some "New Year's food" with her and her family. The foods are usually prepared on Dec. 31st and are meant to be eaten from January 1st - 3rd. I'll try to get as many details correct as I can - please note that most of this information is coming to us through friends that speak only a bit of English....so I won't guarantee that we understood everything!

We joined Midori and her family on the 2nd for a colorful array of Japanese "delicacies" made to welcome in a new year of good health and good fortune. Everything has meaning - from the colors of the foods to the way in which they are arranged and the order in which they are eaten. We sat in a tatami room on pillows around the dining room table. (which is about 2 feet high) We began the meal by taking a small sip of sake - which had been flavored with spices - from a dish that we passed around the table. Then we moved onto dried fish, beans, and seaweed...a small taste of each to promote good health, prosperity, and love (maybe?!?) in the coming year.

After that we were free to take food from any of the boxes on the table. Our friends were able to explain most of the things to us, but we kept the Japanese/English dictionary close-by just in case. It was definitely an evening of taste surprises - meaning that Josh and I tasted many things that we had probably never planned on eating!! Several of the vegetables were new to us - including lotus root, bamboo slices, and some type of sticky squash. We also tasted some varieties of shell fish (oysters, clams, and such) and even got to experience herring eggs - yikes!!! We were very glad for the large plate of sushi - because at least those things looked familiar! At the end of the meal we were served mochi (rice that is beaten with a mallet until it sticks together in a "rice cake") served in a soup. I liked the broth a lot - but the rice cake was really hard to get down!

After the meal was finished we each had a mikon orange (kind of like a Japanese version of a clementine) and we moved on to the sitting room to talk about jobs, school, and language learning. All in all it was a very interesting and enjoyable cultural experience!