New Year’s Day is the hardest holiday to make sense of precisely because it’s the easiest one to sleep through; as the most arbitrary of designations — New Year’s falls on different days in Nepal or Ethiopia or China or California — it asks us, even compels us, to find its meaning within ourselves. Hanukkah, Christmas, Ramadan, Diwali: They all follow a larger calendar and come with their own rites and duties. But what to do with a day that, in our Western culture at least, involves mostly snoozing through the bowl games and resolving to remember the resolutions that you know you’ll forget by next Tuesday?

My answer is as arbitrary as anyone else’s, but it is to see what “new” and “year’s” might really mean, by taking myself off to see the grandfather cultures of the world. In Japan, where I live — old enough to think carefully about new beginnings — chic girls in kimonos, with stylish stoles around their necks, stream through the orange torii gates of a Shinto shrine soon after a bronze bell tolls in the new year, swains in rock-star suits beside them, to observe the ceremonial first sunrise and to gather sacred fire and pure water from the holy place with which to cook an auspicious first meal. To many in the Westernised nation, though, one of the most popular shrines to visit on New Year’s Day is Tokyo Disneyland, where priestly duties may be performed by Mickey and Goofy.

Yet the most crucial rite of what is the most important day of the year in Japan — even if you begin it in Tomorrowland — is to go pay your respects to Grandma and root your newness in the old. Like most traditional cultures in the world, Japan knows that “new” is not always the same as “improved” and that “old” does not quite translate as “outdated.”

... contd.