First, Happy New Year! As a New Year’s tradition with my family, I usually go home to my parents and celebrate it the Japanese way. This always gives me a quick excuse to leave early after the countdown. To my confused friends, I usually describe it as “New Year in Japan is like Christmas in the West. You spend time with family.” You eat specific foods, go to the temple to pray for a good year, etc*.
Today, I thought it would be fun to share a common Kakizome tradition: Kakizome.
Calligraphy
As with many traditions, there are regional differences in details. I don’t think I’m far off when I describe it as:
First calligraphy written at the beginning of the year, usually writing the wish or ambition prepared for the year.
I will not mention the long traditional details, such as the use of the first water from the well, purified in the temple, and for that reason, it is always done on the 2nd of January rather than the first…. because I don’t do it and I think (like many things Zhen) many Japanese are a bit lax with all the details.
Calligraphy is usually limited to a single word (1-2 kanjis) or yojijukugo, a Japanese lexeme consisting of four kanji, often forming an idiom. This is a little fun in practice, in my opinion, because it makes it difficult (or boring) to make what you write, very concrete.
A few years ago, CGP Gray made a point about replacing the New Year resolution with a New Year theme. Instead of “I will read one book at least, every week” you can do “This is the year of reading”. Instead of X days per week in the gym, it’s the “year of fitness”. The argument is: “When you’re trying to make yourself a better version of yourself, the exact data points don’t matter. Only the trendline matters.”
you can watch the video for good arguments for this idea.
I like this principle. I think the tradition of the kakizome kind embodies this idea. This is a better guide to follow when going through the fog in the future. A New Year’s resolution feels like a “path laid out on a map”, and the theme feels like a compass. For most of us, the coming year may not be as predictable, or some obstacles may suddenly appear. A path on an old map is not as helpful as a compass that gives us even a direction to follow when we come to a junction or suddenly encounter obstacles.
3 days in the gym a week, or run a marathon as a New Year’s resolution, but your knee hurts after a month? If your theme is exercise or health, there is no problem you can adapt it. If it’s a resolution, now you have to mark it “fail”, or another item on the to-do list will remain undone.
My mother had a practice of always putting the calligraphy near the entrance of the house, and when the end of the year came she asked how we lived what we wrote. This is also a fun practice because it lets you know what you can do for the next year.
My 2025 Kakizome. Calligraphy is not good for the left hand.
This year I wrote onkochishin an idiom that means
develop new ideas based on the study of the past
I spent my last year revising my (rusty) knowledge of robotics, reading freely available online materials. The year before I was tired of reading and reading new papers after papers in the field of Robot Learning to the point where I lost everything. It is a good practice to go back to the basics, which is well packaged by smart people. It also helps in the process of separating the wheat from the chaff when you are constantly bombarded with new papers and hype demos from startups that promise everything.
So I intend to continue to do that, so 温故知新 it is to remind myself of that, and that this theme can be applied to many things, in life.
I still have many ideas of what to write, but like my hurried and hasty calligraphy, I decided to just go with what stuck the most while looking for different yojijukugo.
If you had to write it down: what is your theme for 2024, and what do you want your 2025 to be as a theme? Even if you don’t write it down (although I encourage it) the practice can be fun. Usually, when I do this meditation practice last year, I can remember what I was doing and find some theme, but I can’t remember. what inspired me? to do those things.
*side story: It was fun to explain this to my friends back in 2017 when my friends and I went on a road trip to Tokyo for the New Year’s countdown, and everyone was shocked at how the crowd quickly disappeared after the countdown, at the Shibuya crossing (they returned to their families)
*side point: I believe other east asian countries have similar traditions. I would love to know more about it.
2025-01-02 17:27:00
