Japanese preparing for New Year’s holiday season in mixed mood

Dec. 28, 2014

Japanese preparing for New Year’s holiday season in mixed mood

With Japan’s economy coming to a crossroads to pull out of the years-long deflation, Japanese people are preparing for the New Year’s holiday season in a mixed mood.

Some of Japan’s major economic indicators, including the  closely followed Nikkei stock price index, are picking up, but many Japanese consumers are uncertain about whether the economy is actually on a recovery track, allowing them to loosen their purse string toward the year-end and New Year’s shopping season.
 The coming year of 2015 is a year of sheep, one of the 12 zodiacal signs in Chinese astrology. The sheep is a rather gentle animal. The saying is that big changes will occur in society in the year of sheep, with old things in people’s life to be replaced with new ones.
 In Japan, public offices and major businesses are closed for six days around the turn of the year--the last three days of the passing year and the first three days of the coming year. To be happier to holiday goers, the forthcoming six-day period is sandwiched by weekends on both side.
Shop operators are hoping that the longer string of holidays will help generate more consumer demand in a festive mood.
Food stores are filled with ingredients for “osechi” dishes for the New Year, such as beans, shrimps and seaweeds. But the yen’s depreciation in the past months has made imported ingredients costlier.
 In front of a florist on the Kawabatadori shopping street in Fukuoka, the most populous city in Kyushu, southwestern Japan, were a variety of New Year’s decorations and items, including “kadomatsu” pine branches with bamboos. At a nearby doll shop were miniature lucky figures of sheep.
A few beaming young girls were seen drawing fortune telling lots before a statue of the god of marriage on the street.

To celebrate the beginning of the new year, let’s accumulate happy things toward 1,000 years of prosperity, just like piling up sacred “sakaki” branches. 
(A personal translation)


 This is a waka poem composed by an unknown author and contained in the Kokinshu waka anthology edited in the 10th century.
Government people insist that the economy is definitely getting out of deflation, but critics say that the apparent improvements in economic activity, are benefiting only the rich.
The coming year represents the 70th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, which broke out between Japan and the United States and its allies in December 1941. Battles between Japan and the United States came to a point of no return in 1943, a year of sheep, when Japan started following a path toward a defeat.
 The forthcoming year of sheep is hoped to bring about happiness to as many people and as many regions as possible, closing　a division between the haves and the not-haves in Japan.