Dear diary,

My name is Aiki which means love song and I am a 16 year old girl from Tokyo Japan. As I woke up today
I realized that it was January first and that today was the start of the biggest holiday of my country. It is
Shogatsu or New Years. It really is the most important holiday in Japan. I layed in my bed remembering
the festivities from the night before. We ate our Toshiko soba which are buckwheat noodles. We eat
them on New Year’s eve because they symbolize longevity. While we ate them last night we watched
the music show “kohaku uta gassen.” It is a popular television program that features many of Japan’s
most famous J-pop and enka singers. They perform amazing performances. I love watching them
compete. I finally decided to get up and meet my family. We start every New Year by watching the sun
rise. It is the first sunrise of the new year and it represents that the new year just commenced.
Businesses are beginning to close today and they will be closed until January third. The years in Japan
are considered to be completely separate from each other. The new year will provide us a fresh start.
With that everyone’s duties and jobs before the new year needs to be completely by the end of the
year. Good thing I have finished all of mine. I defiantly want a new start with the new year. After
watching the sunrise I went back into my home and admired all of the decorations we put up. Our home
and entrance ways are decorated with ornaments that are made from pine, bamboo and plum trees.
Everyone decorates their home that way. It such a fun time and a nice tradition. I love looking at other
houses and their decorations when we go and visit friends. I swear our house is never as clean as it is
during the new year. It’s a tradition to have our house and clothes clean. That is because today is
supposed to be full of joy. It is also free of stress and anger so we clean everything before the new year.
No work at all should be done on this day. I go and get ready for the day as it is time to go visit a shrine.
That is tradition here in japan. We decide to go visit one of the most popular shrines here in Japan. We
go and visit Tokyo’s Meiji Shrine. There is a ton of people here but it does attract several million people
over the three days. Once we got home from the shrine we went to our friend’s house decided to play a
few traditional games. These games are not as popular as they used to be but my family and friends love
them. We played hanetsuki which is Japanese badminton and karuta, which is a card game. After the
games we ate our special dishes. We had osechi ryori, otoso and ozone. After we ate we went home and
read the New Year’s cards we received. We send them out so our friends and family receive them on
January first. They are so fun to read and write. After all of out fun festivities I decided to get ready for
bed to start again tomorrow.

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