Happy New Year
Unlike the Chinese, who celebrate the lunar new year, January 1 is the start of the year for Japanese and Japanese Americans. For my family living in Hawaii, the week between Christmas and New Year’s was a time of frenzied activity — cooking and cleaning in preparation.
We wiped down cabinets, washed windows and screens, did all the laundry and made our house sparkle. We decorated the front porch with bamboo and pine branches.
New Year’s Eve was the thrilling start of the celebration, with firecrackers exploding sporadically from every front yard. Kids and adults set off Roman candles, sparklers, cherry bombs — a cacaphony of noise and sulphrous smoke filled the air — culminating in a mighty roar at the stroke of midnight.
New Year’s Eve was time for soba noodles which we ate to ensure a long life. The next morning, we had ozoni, (mochi soup), along with sweet black beans for good health. Mizuna, now a popular salad green in trendy restaurants, is a basic ingredient in ozoni.
Mochi, Japanese rice cakes, are the iconic food of the New Year. Sticky mochi rice is cooked, pounded into a smooth paste while steaming hot, then shaped into flat cakes. We went to our friends’ house and made mochi communally — all the men taking turns with the rhythmic pounding of the mochi; all the women and girls standing around a large table, shaping the cakes as the hot blob of mochi was poured out onto the table and the next batch begun.
Our family hosted an annual, all-day open house on New Year’s Day, with guests dropping by for lunch or dinner. My mom spent days in preparation, making sushi, nishime (a soy-sauce-based mixture of carrots, konbu, beef, lotus root and other delicacies), tempura, whole fish in soy sauce and other traditional fare. We also had mayonnaise-based macaroni-potato salad, a uniquely Hawaiian invention with a distinctive Island flavor profile. Inexplicably, through the years, the Japanese in Hawaii discovered that the flavor of soy-sauce-based foods were complemented by mayonnaise-based foods and salad became a prominent dish at Japanese feasts.
It was the one time of the year when soda was plentiful; a wooden case of mixed flavors of soda pop in glass bottles was brought home by my dad for the festivities. We ate on paper plates with wooden chopsticks, sitting on the floor at low tables made by laying wooden boards on sawhorses covered with butcher paper.
Food traditions are a rich and enduring part of a family’s heritage. We have had this kind of New Year celebration, or a variation, living in Hawaii, in New York City and in San Francisco. And we will continue to maintain this tradition — sometimes more elaborately; sometimes less so, depending on what’s going on in our life. My son will be in New York for the New Year but he, too, will replicate this feast in some less formal way.
No matter what part of the celebration we choose to honor, we will definitely have mochi and sushi, we will eat on paper plates using wooden chopsticks. And yes, we will sit on the floor.
INSIGHT: Food traditions are powerful and evocative and are the threads that bind generations. Understanding and respecting an ethnic group’s food traditions is a way to build a bridge in food marketing.
