Time for Big Cleaning

We hope everyone had a nice Christmas, with many wonderful presents and warm memories with friends and family. Now that Dec. 25th has passed, everyone in Japan is turning their eyes to the most important day on the Japanese calendar, New Years Day. Called oshogatsu, January 1st is a day to relax at home in the morning while reading through the nengajo or traditional New Year’s cards your friends sent you. Afterwards, you go out to the local Shinto shrine for hatsu-mode (ha-tsu-moh-day), the traditional first prayer of the New Year, then go visiting with family or return home and eat traditional osechi bento meals that have been made ahead of time. The Japanese like to enter a new year with a clean slate, and everyone does oh-souji or “big cleaning.” To companies that sell cleaning supplies, replacement shoji door paper and so on, the week before New Year’s Day is, well, Christmas, as everyone stocks up on what they need to make their house spic and span. J-List will be doing “big cleaning,” too, taking a few hours off from our normal work tomorrow to vacuum, dust, wipe and wash every square inch of J-List, so we can have a great 2011.

We’ll be cleaning J-List from top to bottom for the New Year.