I enjoyed the rest of the time with my parents. It turns out there wasn't much to do in Tokyo during the first few days of January. Almost everything was closed for a week or more around the 1st of the year. This is another interesting point that they don't tell you in orientation. In fact, I guess some exchange students who were living in apartments weren't told at all and they nearly languished from lack of food.
New Years is obviously the biggest holiday in Japan. Japanese people also celebrate Christmas (for no apparent reason), but the holidays are opposite of their meanings in America. In Japan, Christmas is time for parties with friends and lovers while New Years is a time for family. At any rate, traditionally everyone would take a week of and the country would literally be closed down. More recently the convenience stores and whatnot are open almost year-round, but surprisingly all of the big department stores were closed for three or four days. I don't know about other countries, but in America, the malls and big stores only close one day for Christmas day, if that.
Anyway, when the stores did reopen, they sure were packed. It was like the day after Thanksgiving or the day after Christmas in the U.S. Everyone was out look for bargains. Most of the stores were selling special bags of presumably leftover merchandise that that nobody wanted. People would spend an average of US100 for these "lucky bags" even though they had no idea what was in them.
Part of the reason for these crazy shoppers is the fact that kids receive rather large cash presents from relatives for New Years. Aside from these presents many families will send large gifts to other families they know as I described before. Finally, instead of Christmas cards, people here send New Years postcards to wish everyone luck in the coming year. Most households will receive a stack of at least a hundred cards that are held at the post office until New Years Day. Of course, since we had a death in the family this year, we officially didn't celebrate New Years. We still got some cards anyway from friends who maybe didn't realize that we had the funeral.
Otherwise New Years is just a time to relax in front of the TV with the family. My usually English news translator was on vacation for a week and all the TV stations had special programming throughout the holiday season. There were lots of shows replaying the highlights of the Atlanta Olympics and other highlights of the year.
Also worth noting is the special New Years food that everyone eats at the beginning of January. Breakfast on January 1st generally consists of a little sake and a rice cake. There are lots of rice cake meals that are generally only eaten at New Years. And so everyone eats and drinks and sleeps the holiday away.
But now I am back at school. We have a six week winter term before I leave on my trip to Southeast Asia on March 1st. Regular Japanese students are finishing up their school year right now with lots of exams and reports, but as the International Division was designed to adapt to the schedules of non-Japanese students (particularly Americans), we have a different schedule. As I have mentioned before, our classes are all taught in English as well. Being and brave and somewhat naive soul, I have also signed up for one class that is actually taught in Japanese. It has been all right so far. The main problem is that I can only read about half of the two thousand Chinese characters that one needs to know for Japanese. I spend a lot of time with the electronic dictionary that I bought.
I am only auditing that class, so I can afford to be a little lost now and then. Aside from my regular Japanese language class and a Japanese Architecture class, I am just taking things easy this term. I have spent a lot of my life overworking myself with too many class hours. I want to have a little more time for less structured learning. And so, I am off to karaoke with my friends. Until next time...