It’s time to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit!

Here in Japan, New Year’s Day is celebrated like Christmas Day is in the West, only instead of going to church we visit shrines and temples, instead of presents there’s otoshidama, instead of Christmas dinner there’s osechi, and in place of wreaths and trees we have kadomatsu and kagami mochi.

It’s a day filled with tradition that’s usually spent quietly with family, and one of the few days of the year where people actually take time off work, so we’ll be taking the day off to enjoy the festive occasion…and our latest lucky bag hauls.

Wherever you may be, and however you choose to celebrate, we hope you’ll be enjoying the day too, and we’d like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to all of you for reading our articles and supporting our site this past year.

Whether we’re writing about anime, food, tech, or Frappuccinos, we always have the motto “readers’ first” in mind, and it’s a tradition we’ll be continuing in the years to come as we bring you even more weird and wonderful stories about Japan!

So we’ll be raising a glass of sake to you, wonderful readers, as we celebrate New Year’s today. We’ll be back with more news from Japan tomorrow, and until then…Happy New Year! May this be our best year yet!

Top image: Pakutaso
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