Odd man out

THE longest, most important holiday in the Chinese calendar is under way. The new lunar year is celebrated across Asia, in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and everywhere there is a Chinese community. Everywhere, it seems, except Japan.

Another sign of renewed Sino-Japanese tensions? Not quite. As it happens Tokyo scrapped the Chinese calendar, and with it the spring festival that marks the start of the new year, 142 years ago. During the country’s Meiji-period dash to modernise Japan had come to look down on its prostrate, corrupt neighbour to the immediate west (at the same time it began to emulate the industrialising West) and sought to usurp China’s traditional role as the hegemon of East Asia.

That shift meant that in Japan the year 1873 would begin on January 1st, be damned the fickle timing of the first new moon! Japan’s emperor switched to wearing suits instead of robes, and the Japanese, alone in Asia, began using their names in reverse order—with the family name last, like the colonising Europeans did. This is why traditional Japanese new-year decorations, like the kadomatsu (pictured to the right) are put out in the first week of January.

The traditional holiday is still marked in Yokohama and Kobe—Japanese cities with large, established Chinese populations—and also on Okinawa, which was an independent kingdom floating between China and the “home islands” of Japan, until it was formally annexed by the Japanese empire in 1872.

China’s historical influence still permeates Japan of course, and is to be seen almost everywhere: in the writing system, religion, bureaucratic government, and hellish school exams, for a start. The imperial calendar system (nengo) remains, along with many of adaptations of China’s lunar rituals, including the setsubun, when millions of Japanese schoolchildren symbolically chase away a demon by tossing about roasted soyabeans.

Japan’s retooled state could have retained the Chinese New Year as a ritual. But its Western-trained officials wanted to avoid associations with feudalism, says Roger Pulvers, a writer and veteran chronicler of Japanese culture. “The only model for modernisation was the European one. Customs linked to China were seen as a force that dragged the country backward.”

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)

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