Chicago-area Japanese celebrate, adapt New Year's traditions

January 01, 2008|By Steve Schmadeke, Tribune staff reporter

Like the dozens of other people stepping through the crowded aisles of a northwest suburban Japanese supermarket Saturday, Koki and Junko Nomura were getting ready for their native country's biggest holiday.

The Lakeview couple, both 30, are celebrating their first New Year's -- a holiday that in Japan spans three days -- away from home. The couple planned a smaller celebration, which still meant that Junko Nomura would make a half-dozen or so traditional dishes, starting with soba, lengthy buckwheat noodles that symbolize long life and are eaten to usher in the new year.

"Everyone has a week off and we spend most of this time with family," said Koki Nomura, a graduate student in law and business at Northwestern University. "Here, we will have some soba and maybe go to Navy Pier at midnight."

Unlike other Asian countries -- China, for one -- that celebrate New Year's according to the lunar calendar, Japan's festivities have fallen on Jan. 1 ever since 1873, the year the island nation adopted the Gregorian calendar during the Meiji period of Westernization.

In Japan, most schools and offices shut down for a week around Jan. 1, a day most Japanese spend with their families. Homes are cleaned from corner to corner in preparation for the holiday, and decorations such as kagami mochi -- a stack of two or three sweet rice cakes topped with an orange, symbolizing family and long life; and kadomatsu, a bamboo arrangement originally intended to greet ancestral spirits -- are displayed. Many Japanese women will spend three days or more preparing food, some with red and white ingredients symbolizing happiness.

At midnight or at sunrise on Jan. 1, prayers are offered at the nearest shrine. Later in the day, children receive small envelopes with money inside, and some get their first sip of sake (a mulled version called otoso) while adults drink the unadulterated version.

For Japanese who have lived in Chicago for decades, those traditions have blended with American ones, said Kiyo Shirataki, who arrived in the city nearly 40 years ago and will celebrate the holiday Tuesday by, in part, drinking sake and watching college football.

"When you're in the U.S., things get changed and altered," said Shirataki, an Arlington Heights resident who is president of the Mid America Japanese Club. "The main thing is still making food and eating as a family. In Japan, many people are cooking enough for three days. We don't do that here."

Shirataki said his family will share cooking duties with several families, then gather at one home for a potluck dinner.

One aspect of the holiday that no one who follows Japanese tradition seems to alter is the New Year's Day breakfast that includes ozoni, a soup with ingredients that vary depending on where the cook grew up but that typically include mochi, carrots, daikon radish and kamaboko fish cake.

Erika Kono, a fourth-generation Japanese-American who works at the Japan American Society of Chicago, said neither she nor her mother knows how to make the soup, but their extended family will gather at her grandmother's Chicago home to eat it Tuesday morning.

Elmhurst residents Toshi and Naoko Hanada and their three children planned to participate in another New Year's Eve tradition: watching music program "Kohaku Uta Gassen" or "Red and White Song Battle" on satellite television. It pits Japanese pop singers against one another -- men on the red team, women on the white.

"Go red team!" cried the Hanadas' oldest daughter, Mitsuki, 9, as her father took a break from grocery shopping to explain the show to a reporter.

Naoko Hanada said she was happy her children were excited about at least one aspect of the traditional holiday.

"I try to keep up the Japanese tradition, but it's very difficult because they don't care," she said. "If I cook three days or more, they don't eat so much. They don't like [the] taste."

Masato Takai grew up in Chicago and has never forgotten his first sip of sake on New Year's Day, when everyone in his family dressed their best and ate "probably the best prepared breakfast of the whole year" off the good plates.

"I hated it," he said of his first taste of sake. "Now I'm completely fine with it."

Now he is the assistant manager of Mitsuwa Marketplace, the Japanese grocery store in Arlington Heights. Takai planned to eat a traditional meal with his parents, who now live in Hoffman Estates, Monday night because he has to be at work New Year's Day.

The Chicago area's Japanese community, which once was centered on the city's North Side, now is densest in the Arlington Heights area, said Theodore Foss, associate director of the University of Chicago's Center for East Asian Studies.

Local Japanese "have really integrated themselves into mainstream American life," he said.