Hatsumode

Hatsumode is the first visit to a Shinto shrine (or Buddhist temple) of the new year, one of the most widely observed of all Japanese customs, undertaken in the opening days of January by the great majority of the population regardless of the depth of their religious commitment. The worshipper comes to give thanks for the year past and to pray for health, happiness, success and safety in the year beginning, making the customary shrine visit, purifying at the water basin, offering a coin, bowing and clapping before the sanctuary, and voicing a prayer. The first days of the year see enormous crowds at the major shrines, and the visit is as much a shared national and family observance as a personal religious act.

The occasion has its own attendant customs: worshippers buy new protective amulets and arrows for the year and return the old ones to be ritually burned, draw paper fortunes that forecast the year's luck, and write wishes on votive tablets. Food stalls and a festive atmosphere surround the great shrines. Hatsumode exemplifies the characteristic texture of Shinto in modern Japanese life, an observance kept by many who would not describe themselves as religious, woven into the rhythm of the calendar and the family year, expressing a diffuse but real sense of gratitude, hope and connection to the kami and to tradition at the threshold of the new year.

Hatsumode in its present nationwide form is considerably younger than it looks, and its modern scale owes a documented debt to nineteenth and twentieth-century transport infrastructure rather than to unbroken ancient custom alone. Historians of the practice note that in the Edo period, visiting a shrine at the New Year was generally a strictly local affair, residents visiting the shrine of their own district or the shrine associated with the year's auspicious direction, rather than a nationwide movement of pilgrims to particular famous shrines regardless of where they lived.

The expansion of Japan's railway network from the Meiji era onward changed this directly: railway companies, recognising an opportunity, began actively promoting travel to specific well-known shrines and temples for the New Year visit, running special services and advertising the journey, a commercial push credited by historians of Japanese popular religion with substantially broadening hatsumode from a local neighbourhood custom into the mass, long-distance pilgrimage it is today, with millions travelling specifically to sites such as Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, Naritasan Shinshoji and Kawasaki Daishi rather than only visiting whichever shrine happened to be nearest. The omikuji fortune slips widely drawn during these visits, printed paper strips ranking from great blessing down to great curse and traditionally tied to a designated tree or wire rack at the shrine if the fortune drawn is unfavourable, are themselves a fixture that shrines actively print, sell and restock in vast quantities specifically to meet the concentrated demand of the New Year crowds, a modern commercial operation running alongside the religious observance rather than separate from it.