Japan Through the Year

About this book

Festival books tell you where the parades are. They do not tell you why your neighbours are eating porridge on 7 January, what the grass ring at the shrine is for on 30 June, or why the whole country cleans house in the last week of December.

This book does. Japan Through the Year is a month-by-month almanac of 200 annual traditions — the five seasonal festivals (sekku), the twenty-four solar terms (sekki), equinox weeks, first tastes and household rites — each in one uniform, practical format: When, Where, Type, the custom itself, At the Table (what is eaten, drunk or displayed), and Good to Know (etiquette and tips that let you join in rather than just watch).

Open it in January for first shrines, lucky bags and seven-herb porridge. Keep it by you through plum blossom, clam digging, plum work in the rains, star-festival noodles, eel day, Obon lanterns, moon-viewing dumplings, mushroom season, chrysanthemum exhibitions, Shichi-Go-San, persimmon strings, solstice yuzu baths and the bells of New Year's Eve. A complete regional index gives a second way in when your destination is decided before your dates.

Companion to Matsuri: The Complete Guide to 500 Japanese Festivals — that book takes the great public spectacles; this one takes the year as it is actually lived, in homes, gardens, markets and kitchens. Dates that move are given by their rule, and every entry carries its check date, because a guide to a living calendar owes you honesty about what is fixed and what is not.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.