Unfortunately I came down with a cold on New Year’s Eve. Not such a big deal but a little different in Japan. The air is a lot drier in the winter so I had quite a sore throat that made sleeping difficult. I managed to get some medicine from the chemist and so on but the lack of sleep curtailed any New Year’s plans I had.

One of the things I did do was buy a lot of food. New Year in Japan is a very big deal (kind of like Christmas for us). There are a variety of special foods Osechi that are made. I will make another post about these.

The last meal of the year is traditionally noodles and the supermarket were heavily promoting these soba with tempura prawns. The little white and pink thing is a fish cake. I also had some of the mashed sweet potato I had left over from Christmas.

In the evening I watched Kohaku Uta Gassen. This is a music show where a red team and a white team compete against each other. The teams are composed of music acts, some of them very popular like AKB48, but the competition element of it is not particularly obvious. I missed the end (went to bed early) so I didn’t see who won. It was kind of a like a mix between Jools Hollands Hootenanny and the Royal Variety Performance.

It started off, somewhat predictably, with that most annoying song “USA” by Da Pump. Later came Little Glee Monster with a song that seemed a little familiar.

It was mainly pop stuff like this but there were also older performers. One of my favourite bands Superfly were playing but not one of their better songs. My favourite song of theirs is Tamashii Revolution.