A Belated New Year’s Greeting: Thinking About Osechi and the Lives of People in the Past (Mayumi Matsui)

    It’s a little late, but since we have members from overseas as well, I thought this would be a nice opportunity to share a New Year’s post.

    In Japan, it is customary to prepare a special New Year’s meal called osechi. It is a box of foods that keep well and are eaten over the first three days of the year. Traditionally, osechi consists of five stacked boxes, but today many households prepare three tiers instead.

    Each layer has its own meaning, and the types of dishes placed in them are more or less decided. That said, in modern households, people often arrange the contents according to their own tastes rather than following strict rules.

    It is said that osechi originated from the custom of not using fire during the first three days of the New Year. In the past—especially in pre-modern Japan, where most buildings were made of wood—fires were a serious concern. For this reason, people prepared preserved foods in advance so they would not need to cook.

    I imagine that during this time, people did not light their kitchen stoves at all, and only warmed mochi over a small charcoal brazier used for heating, making simple dishes like ozoni (mochi soup). With that in mind, I tried spending the New Year by grilling mochi for ozoni over a brazier myself.

    Today, of course, we have refrigerators and stoves that can be lit instantly, so it’s natural to wonder why we still go through the trouble of making osechi. However, beyond preserving tradition or enjoying it as a seasonal event, I think it is also a wonderful opportunity to reflect on how people in the past lived their everyday lives.

    If you’re interested, you might enjoy looking into what winters were like in old Japan, or the many wordplays and auspicious meanings behind osechi dishes. There is far too much to cover here, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

    I would love to learn about New Year’s dishes from other countries as well.