But that's not why I'm posting.
Words cannot describe the New Year's I just had. But ima try.
So I made us a huge New Year's dinner of okinawasoba and tempura and we watched Fright Night until 10:30, then switched on NHK to watch a Japanese celebrity impersonator competition which included a male Lady Gaga and a Simon and Garfunkel manzai duo. Hilarity. Japanese TV is awesome. But it is unimportant to the story. Anyway!
HP brought me out to the balcony during the countdown because it was "more romantic, gawd." And as we kissed, we heard the gong of the first of the 108 bell tolls of the Buddhist temple. We strained to hear the reverberations, and then he turned to me and excitedly asked if I wanted to go find it.
We raced to get our shoes on.
We wandered via echo, jogging and stopping like meerkats to listen for the reverb against the buildings (sometimes it lies!) and winding our way through the backstreets and over canals in the absolute silence except for the giant bell.
And then we found it.
It wasn't a big temple, nor was it fancy. It was pea-green in the odd nighttime light, in fact. It had its big golden altar in the middle floor, and a spiral staircase to the top floor where, under the roof, the enormous bell was being struck by a mounted log, battering-ram style. From the street, we could see the abbott (honest-to-goodness, robes and rosary and everything abbott) and one of the monks, and HP tugged on my sleeve with this look on his face and said "let's go up and see."
I protested, but my feet said otherwise as we walked up the spiral steps and to the top, where we bowed to the monks awkwardly and when they bowed back, they waved us over and handed us the reins to the bell.
I must've looked absolutely petrified, as I protested "Is it really okay? I'm a foreigner!" in Japanese and they laughed before showing me how to do it. So the husband went first, then I did (and I could feel the vibrations in my toes and in my chest), and after dropping money in the donation box, we bowed, wished the monks あけましておめでとう, and descended the stairs...
...only to find the local shinto shrine right next door with the festival in full swing. Booths, snacks, lanterns, garlands, and tons of people. It was pretty packed, but I vowed to come back and take pictures some other time.
We wandered home holding hands, listening to the remaining tolls and talking about how absolutely fucking cool that just was, and when he mentioned that he wished I'd had my camera, I agreed at first, then corrected myself. I was glad I didn't have my camera, in the end, because I had this odd feeling that stopping to shoot would've kept me from really enjoying where I was and static pictures would've cheapened it. Maybe this post does, a little. But I needed to share how I'm feeling right now, because it's awesome.
We made it up the steps, poured some sake and grabbed some mochi, and toasted to the new year. And now we're sitting here, warm and dry and pantsless with chai and ginger tea, mellowing out and remembering how the wet pavement looked and the chilly sea air on our faces and the crowded, labyrinthine neighborhoods and the bridges over the canals and the lantern-covered shrine and the lime green temple and the abbott who welcomed the wide-eyed foreigner in flip flops and a messy cardigan to ring in the new year with him in his temple.
In a little while, I'm going to go salt the salmon filet in preparation for being broiled for breakfast tomorrow morning, which will be the first day of 2012. We'll probably visit a shrine with his family to welcome the new year at some point in the day. There will likely be a crowd, and maybe some noodle stands, and perhaps even a taiyaki vendor or two calling me over with their fish waffles like a siren song.
But it won't be nearly as epic as the adventure we just had, chasing bells in the middle of the night.
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| Edit: Tiny cellphone snapshot of the pea-green temple. |
