A New Year's visit to the Meiji Shrine

New Year's Day is an important holiday in Japan. Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese new year is celebrated on January 1st rather than the lunar new year. Soon after the temple or shrine bells ring out the New Year most Japanese pay their first visit (hatsumode) to the temple (Buddhist) or shrine (Shinto) to pray for a good year. Many people do this right after midnight but most do it sometime during the first day. The crowds at the Meiji Shrine today were enormous.

As I approached the entrance to the park where the Meiji Shrine is I suddenly found myself enveloped in a flowing mass of people entering under a giant torii gate and moving like a river toward the shrine down wide walkways through a forest. As the river thickened with tens of thousands of people I took an off ramp through the forest and escaped the traffic jam. I'm not keen on huge crowds. I circled back and toured the many pop-up stands serving traditional new year food and crafts such as arrows with white feathers and Daruma dolls.

When I went to the Meiji Shrine at Harajuku today there were a lot of sign-wielding Christians, mostly foreigners, surrounding the shrine. Some of them had recorded messages blaring from bullhorns. The signs and the recordings urged people going to the shrine to turn to Christianity. Nothing unusual or wrong in the message but I thought it was not the right time or place. The Japanese were engaged in their religious practice. They weren't harming anyone else. How would these Christians feel if a bunch of foreigners, say Muslims or Hindus, surrounded their church on Christmas Eve and harangued them to switch religions as they entered their church? Can you imagine how that would go over?

The Japanese reaction was to just ignore the signs and the bullhorns and go on about their business. There weren't any shouts, mean looks or any visible negative reaction from the shrine-goers. There was a lot more restraint than what I think would have happened if the shoe was on the other foot.