Happy Holidays from Japan!

Happy holidays to all, whatever holidays you might celebrate! (If you don't celebrate any holidays then you better get with the program or we're going to send a couple Fist of the North Star villains to live with you until you do.)

The Holidays in Japan

Christmas isn't really a holiday in Japan, but the end of the year is a time for gift-giving and revelry nonetheless. New Years (shogatsu) is a major holiday and even the most hardworking companies take time off at the beginning of the new year. (There are, of course, insane companies and individuals who still work through it. I remember desperately trying to order a new DAT backup drive from a US mail-order company for a flaky network at Artland at 4 a.m. on New Year's day).
One of the year-end traditions is to go to a shrine and buy good luck charms and various items to make New Year's wishes on. At the end of the next year you burn them before buying new ones. An example would be a Daruma, which is essentially a papier-mâché head with two blank eyes. You paint in the black pupil of one eye when you make a wish then the other when the wish comes true. (If you think about it a Daruma is essentially a disembodied, grumpy looking, ugly head and a very astute editor once noted that they look a lot like MODOK.)
A few years ago I went with some friends from a Noted Animation Studio who were then producing a Noted Anime Movie (not Ghost in the Shell) to a shrine to burn and buy. Most people would walk up to the fire pit, drop in their charm and say a very quiet little prayer. The Very Noted Anime Movie Director walked up to the fire with an arrow that had a little MODOK Daruma on it, threw it in, said "Money" and went home. No cutting corners for this one!
The end of the year is also a time for year end parties. The bounenkai ("forget the year party") is arranged by a company so that all the workers can get together and put the problems of the year behind them so they can start afresh. Some companies arrange trips to resorts and others just have small get-togethers in local restaurants. Last year I.G.'s bounenkai was at an onsen (hot springs resort) and it was a big party with around 100 people. Big parties like this make me nervous because I'm the one very obviously DIFFERENT one in the room. The waitresses sometimes don't deal with this easily. "Does he want to drink beer or tea?" they ask the person sitting next to me. As we are seated at random, the person next to me is usually somebody who doesn't know me so they say, "I don't know him," which makes all three of us wonder if I am with the wrong party. They are usually quite relieved that I can understand Japanese.
There are usually party games and prizes and gifts and lots of fun. (I almost always end up with a set of cheap plastic chopsticks or a Crayon Shinchan pillow or something else that should be a leading contender in the "Most Useless Prize of the Year" category. Last year I was very lucky and scored a Patlabor Laser Disc set that our art director won. He had no interest in seeing anything Patlabor related again so he was happy when I traded him the play money, fluorescent shoestrings and Kodak t-shirt that I won for the LDs.)
Another Japanese custom is the sending of nengachou, or Year End Cards. They are usually post cards that have an image of the new year's Chinese Zodiac animal (next year is the cow) and a wish for the receiver's happiness and prosperity in the new year. They are sent by the last few days of December and delivered in one big batch on January first. (Anything with the kanji "nenga" is held and delivered on the first. A friend sent a Christmas card from the US with "nenga" written on the envelope and sure enough they delivered it with the others!) Sometimes they have pictures of a baby born during the year or a change in address. (I know a few people who don't even keep address books referring to their shoebox of nengachou instead).
Animators and their ilk often have interesting cards. They do original illos and make lovely and bizarre cards. I've received "Year of the Mermaid" cards and ones with pictures of new cars bought during the year. The weirdest one I ever got was from a camera director. It said simply, "It's not 1992 anymore" and had a brush and ink drawing of what looked like a stereo speaker. This card was sent for the 1994 new year. I never did find out what it meant.
The end of the year is also the annual "Here, taste this" festival for me. There are many special foods that are only eaten at the end of the year or on New Year's Day and my family, friends and coworkers are always trying to get me to try them. As with many special Japanese foods I find them interesting but I'm not experienced enough or taste-sensitive enough to notice any difference from the normal stuff.

"Here, try this special New Year's rice cracker." "crunch chew chew" "Well, what do you think? Do you notice the difference between this one and that other one I gave you last week that you said tasted like tawny colored stuff from the sea?" "Yeah. This one has little green curly things stuck in it." "No! I mean the taste!" "Nope. Tastes exactly like the other one. Tastes like tawny colored stuff from the sea."

I am then accused of being the oral equivalent of color blind. I can sense large changes but the little stuff ends up in one of the big categories. If my sense of touch was like this, somebody would have to shoot me with a .357 magnum to get my attention.
It is traditional to clean homes and offices near the end of the year so the new year can be started in a clean place. This is when you find those 20 drawings that a key animator forgot in an envelope under his desk and somebody else had to redraw or the car keys that one of the production assistants lost in May. This is also the only time daylight is let into camera rooms and we sometimes find piles of ashes that are the remains of camera operators who couldn't get into the darkroom fast enough to avoid disintegration.
As it takes three months to produce the average anime video and most companies want to have their work out for the sales in December, the anime industry is very busy from August. Companies producing movies for the summer also need to start in August as it takes a year or two to do a film. Companies wanting to produce videos for the summer start in February or March so the end of the year can be very quiet. As shown in Otaku no Video there are some people with no lives who virtually live in studios, even through the end of the year, but the major studios actively discourage such things. The line between work and outside life fades and they cease to be productive members of a team, which is what is necessary to produce high quality work. Studio Ghibli goes a step further and locks its doors at midnight and before holidays with all the staff on the outside. They don't want people living at the studio and disappearing into the black hole of creativity. At I.G. we don't lock the doors but we watch for people who look like they are sliding into the burnout cycle of work-sleep-work. There are hard schedules that require long hours but there is a difference. I've found that there has to be some distance between a worker and the studio sometimes so that they can retain an interest in what they are doing.
And no, I cannot confirm the weird rumor that in Ginza a department store once displayed a crucified Santa Claus surrounded by the Seven Dwarves in a window during the Christmas season.