New Year's Eve in Tokyo

New Years are a big deal in these parts of the world and it is celebrated on the Lunar New Year. However, during the Meiji Restoration, in an effort to turn away from the old (China) to the new (the West), Japan switched to celebrating the Gregorian New Year, January 01, in 1873. And it's the biggest holiday of the year.

For New Year's Eve there are various countdown events all over the city; we opted for the more Japanese celebration at Zojoji Buddhist Temple. While it's a rather low key affair, it draws a lot of people, with excellent crowd control, and various queues all over the temple grounds. There were queues for getting into the temple at the strike of midnight for making new year wishes. There were queues for joining, for a fee, assistants to the monks to strike the sacred bell. There were queues at various food vendors. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. For my pyromaniac self, the favorite by far was the ritual burning of offerings, a veritable bonfire.

In our jetlag craze, we then took the train to Oji, trying to catch the end of the Oji fox parade that ends at the Oji Shrine at 1:30 am. It turned out our intel was incorrect - the parade ended an hour before we arrived. We were then stuck at the station - the trains were too crowded to get on. We finally got back to our hotel at 3am, on top of jetlag. I don't know when we'll be able to get on a regular schedule.

Our hotel in Tokyo is located in the Kanda District. The Kanda Train Station was almost deserted as we headed south to Zojo-ji Temple on the JR Yamanote Line at 10:30pm on New Year's Eve. For the holiday, this line runs all night, albeit, with reduced trains, which means the coaches can be veryfull when revelers return home after midnight. But for now, all is quiet.


From the station its a 10 minute walk to the main gate of Zojo-ji.


It's very busy inside the temple's main courtyard, but the Japanese have a "keep moving slowly" habit in these situations so it's not scary at all. The iconic Eiffel Tower-ish Tokyo Tower looms behind the temple.




The bonfire. Where 3 men are tossing "the old" into the flames.










Check out the video below taken just after the stroke of midnight. The men toss some big pieces into the fire. Then I happened to catch the rush of people into the temple to make their first offering of the year.


A photo and a video of the bell ringing.




We left Zojo-ji Temple at 12:15am and headed north on the now busy train to the Oji Shrine.


Not much happening at the Oji Shrine except for burning old ropes.


AFter leaving the Oji Shrine we ran into some international students who had participated in the fox parade.


Earlier in the day we ate our New Year's Eve noodles at a Udon Noodle place. Yummy!