miyagi.sg | My Very Own Glob {Curiosa Felicitas}

Did I already men­tion that Kai can stand? Well, he can, among the many other things he seems to be pick­ing up (lit­er­ally and other­ally) on a daily basis.

Before the New Year, we also received Naomi’s updated copy of her fam­ily reg­is­ter from Tokyo, which now includes Kai and myself (my name being recorded in Katakana because I’m the alien in the fam­ily). Kai also retains his mother’s sur­name in his birth records for Sin­ga­pore and Japan.

Because we were offi­cially 2/3rds Japan­ese, we decided on ozoni for the first meal of the year. It sounds sim­ple enough to make, but we wanted to see if there were any vari­a­tions on the dish, so we Youtubed it, and found this chan­nel with an alarm­ing title, called, “Cook­ing With Dog”, but our fears were unfounded because the dog just sits there doing noth­ing, and noth­ing gets done to it either.

We fol­lowed the instruc­tions for ozoni, and I’m not allowed to make fun of Japanese-accented Engr­ish, so please, don’t laugh. (You can go an use the rub­bertree if you need to pee).

But what’s really inter­est­ing was the fact that Japan­ese New Year fol­lows the Gre­go­rian cal­en­dar instead of the Ori­en­tal lunar cal­en­dar, and I found out, thanks to Wikipedia, that this was not always the case.

The Japan­ese cel­e­brated their New Year’s the same time as the Chi­nese until the Meiji period, when Japan under­went a series of sweep­ing changes aimed at trans­form­ing her into a mod­ern soci­ety (partly by abol­ish­ing the elite class).

So one of the things you eat at New Year’s is mochi — or sticky rice cakes, which are toasted before being boiled to a sticky mess in the ozoni. Wikipedia also has some­thing to say about this:

Because of mochi’s extremely sticky tex­ture, there is usu­ally a small num­ber of chok­ing deaths around New Year in Japan, par­tic­u­larly amongst the elderly. The death toll is reported in news­pa­pers in the days after New Year.