The Japanese New Year's Festival, Games and Pastimes

Here is a frozen moment of Japan in the early twentieth century, captured before modernity swept away centuries of ritual. Helen Cowen Gunsaulus recorded the customs of the Japanese New Year with an anthropologist's precision and an enthusiast's delight, documenting the decorations that welcomed the kami to household altars, the special foods prepared for luck in the coming year, and the ceremonies that marked the renewal of time. The book unfolds the layered meanings hidden in every gesture: why certain colors repel evil, why the first dream of the year carries prophetic weight, why children receive coins in decorative purses. Beyond the solemn rites, Gunsaulus populates her account with the lively pastimes that made the holiday joyous: the games played in snow-covered gardens, the poetry competitions, the blindfolded struggles in temple grounds. The illustrations scattered throughout show readers a world of formal kimono and paper lanterns, of families gathered around hearths, of a Japan where the New Year was the most sacred date on the calendar. This book endures because it captures not merely what people did, but what those actions meant, how a whole civilization oriented itself toward renewal, fortune, and connection to the divine.