It Wishes You a Happiness New Year

I always wanted to have a White Christmas. I finally got to a cold enough country and decided to stay in it in December... but I was too late. The globe had already heated up too much, making it wet rather than white. Christmas didn't really feature here anyway. I had to begrudgingly go to work like all my other culturally indoctrinated western friends. We got together in the evening though and played Monopoly (such an apt way to celebrate a Christian festival).

New Years, on the other hand, is big in Japan. Having gone to the worst New Years party in the world last year (celebrating mankinds ability to trash its pristine environment by mixing bad music, buckets of alcohol and motorbikes... see "Trouble in Thailand" in last years fractalmindscape archive), I thought it would be a good idea to go to a party that doesn't measure its success by the size of its death toll. It was at Myouin temple, 5 minutes walk from my house. I was given a free cup of steaming udon noodles upon my arrival. There were less than 150 people and no music, just the intermittent donging of the large bell that is rung the auspicious number of 108 times to bring good luck to the new year. Every now and then a priest would chant something over the PA system. I have picked up a bit of Japanese since I've been here, but the language goes all funny at this time of the year as all the annual wellwishing phrases come out. One is supposed to wish happy new year one way before the fact, and another way after. I met up with some of my young students dressed to the nines in what Eminem was wearing in his last music video, smsing each other on their keitais (mini laptop computers, the advanced version of what we know as cellphones). It was funny to see them faithfully following the motions of this cultural event dressed like gangsters glued to cyberspace. I joined their little group for the bell ringing and was given a little ceramic inoshi ishi (wild boar: 2007 is the year of the boar) for my troubles by one of the temple elders. Midnight passed and no-one noticed. At that very moment, people in Sydney were pouring alcohol all over themselves in a drunken frenzy, hippies in Cape Town were scoring acid at trance parties so they could say Hi to God at midnight and New Yorkers were having their morning coffee before going out to book their piece of pavement in Times Square. At Myouin, only the bell and the priest made any noise louder than the muffled voices in the cold evening. I could even hear the beeps on my students cellphones as they played mahjong with people just like them in Nagoya or spread some rumours about other kids they didnt like. I wondered back home in the chilly moonlit night, safe in the knowledge that I'd be waking up the next day without the crashing hangover that so many millions of my western brethren would be experiencing.