~~~ NOTE: I write captions on many of the photos.  Please click on them to view them in full screen to read the captions. ~~~

To celebrate the holiday, I invited one of my ALT friends to come over for a proper Japanese celebration.  We started off the night with Toshikoshi Soba and watching the NHK Kouhaku Uta Gassen.  I've also added my photos here of the zenzai soup and traditional new year's sweets that we ate on January 1st.

We woke up really early the next morning to watch the first sunrise of the new year, hatsuhinode.  Unfortunately, with the cold weather comes incredibly dense fog.  So we couldn't really see the sun at all.  So we ended up visiting a shrine that was near by where we parked.  It was a surprise first temple visit (hatsumode).

So here are pictures of Bundahachimangu (分田八幡宮), with the inshrined kami Homudawake no Mikoto (3rd century emperor Ōjin).

If you know me at all, then you know I love holidays.  Well, one of the most important holidays in Japan is coming up, and that's New Year's, or Shōgatsu (正月).  So I've been doing a lot of research on how to celebrate the New Year in Japan.  I will not really talk about the history or get into too much detail explaining what things are.  This is more a practical guide on what to do and when.

One of the more obvious things you'll learn about me is my absolute obsession with all things pumpkin.  In America, I am quite limited to essentially October and November.  Which can lead me to getting quite carried away while I have the chance.  

​Lucky for ME Japan has pumpkin all year round.  Also Japanese pumpkin is delicious!  To top that off, Japan has a pretty fantastic Halloween season.  It's still a pretty new holiday and it's totally unheard of to see little kids going door to door.  But Halloween decorations appeared in stores half way through September.  So that's not too far off from American stores.  Plus, a lot of people love the excuse to dress up in weird costumes.  So it ends up being more a thing adults do for fun.  Or often you'll see Halloween events at schools as sort of a Western cultural lesson.

Well anyway, as I'm basking in the glow of pumpkins and ghosts, I want to share with you a little of Japan's Halloween flavor.  Now, as you may recall, I live in a very rural town in Kyushu, so it just goes to show you that the commercialization of holidays knows no boundaries.  

So here I have for you pictures of all the Halloween products I found in just ONE TRIP to the grocery store.  Some of the food products have special Halloween flavors, but you'll see a lot of them are just Halloween packaging with no change to the flavor.  You'll also notice that Japan doesn't do pumpkin spice flavor, as they don't really have pumpkin pie and pumpkin spice.  Everything is just actual pumpkin flavor.... which... is pretty gosh darn awesome.  I mean I like pumpkin spice too, but to put ACTUAL pumpkin in the food?  Revolutionary.