Japanese New Year

The Japanese New Year (正月, Shōgatsu) is an annual festival with its own customs. Since 1873, the official Japanese New Year has been celebrated according to the Gregorian calendar, on January 1 of each year, New Year's Day (元日, Ganjitsu). However, the celebration of the traditional Japanese New Year is still marked on the same day as the contemporary Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese New Years.

History

Prior to the Meiji period, the date of the Japanese New Year was based on the Chinese lunar calendar, as are the contemporary Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese New Years. However, in 1873, five years after the Meiji Restoration, Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar and the first day of January became the official and cultural New Year's Day.

Traditional food

Japanese people eat a special selection of dishes during the New Year celebration called osechi-ryōri (御節料理 or お節料理), typically shortened to osechi. This consists of boiled seaweed (昆布, konbu), fish cakes (蒲鉾, kamaboko), mashed sweet potato with chestnut (栗きんとん, kurikinton), simmered burdock root (金平牛蒡, kinpira gobō), and sweetened black soybeans (黒豆, kuromame). Many of these dishes are sweet, sour, or dried, so they can keep without refrigeration—the culinary traditions date to a time before households had refrigerators, when most stores closed for the holidays. There are many variations of osechi, and some foods eaten in one region are not eaten in other places (or are considered unfortunate or even banned) on New Year's Day. Another popular dish is ozōni (お雑煮), a soup with mochi rice cake and other ingredients that differ based on various regions of Japan. Today, sashimi and sushi are often eaten, as well as non-Japanese foods. To let the overworked stomach rest, seven-herb rice soup (七草粥, nanakusa-gayu) is prepared on the seventh day of January, a day known as jinjitsu (人日).

New Year

New Year is the time at which a new calendar year begins and the calendar's year count increments by one. Many cultures celebrate the event in some manner. The New Year of the Gregorian calendar, today mostly in use, falls on 1 January (New Year's Day), as was the case both in the old Roman calendar (at least after about 713 BCE) and in the Julian calendar that succeeded it. The order of months was January to December in the Old Roman calendar during the reign of King Numa Pompilius in about 700 BCE, according to Plutarch and Macrobius, and has been in continuous use since that time. Many countries, such as the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the United States, mark 1 January as a national holiday.

During the Middle Ages in western Europe, while the Julian calendar was still in use, authorities moved New Year's Day variously, depending upon locale, to one of several other days, among them: 1 March, 25 March, Easter, 1 September, and 25 December. These New Year's Day changes generally reverted to using January 1 before or during the various local adoptions of the Gregorian calendar, beginning in 1582. The change from March 25 – Lady Day, one of the four quarter days – to January 1 took place in Scotland in 1600, before the ascension of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England in 1603 and well before the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. In England and Wales (and in all British dominions, including Britain's American colonies), 1751 began on March 25 and lasted 282 days, and 1752 began on January 1. For more information about the changeover from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar and the effect on the dating of historical events etc., see Old Style and New Style dates.

New Year (film)

New Year (Chinese: 過年) is a black-and-white Chinese animation made in 1924 by Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan.

History

It is a cartoon short produced under the "Shanghai Tobacco Company" (上海菸草公司). The clip was an advertisement. It is very likely that the company was actually the British American Tobacco Company given the time frame and location.

See also

References

External links

New Year (A Silent Film EP)

New Year is an EP by British alternative band A Silent Film, released on April 21, 2015 .

Track listing

Personnel

A Silent Film

References