Category: Food

Autumn Nights in Japan: Otsukimi and Juya-E

In the old Chinese lunar calendar, on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month (i.e. full moon on the 8th month), many cultures across East Asia celebrate something called the Mid-Autumn Festival. This has various names depending on the country and language:

  • Zhōng-qiū-jié (中秋節) in Mandarin Chinese,
    • Tiong-chhiu-cheh in Hokkien, by the way
  • Tết Trung Thu in Vietnam, and
  • Chuseok (추석) in Korea

In Japan, this festival is called formally the Jūgoya (十五夜, “15th night”) festival, but in popular culture is known as Otsukimi (お月見, “moon viewing”). This year, due to the lunar calendar, Otsukimi falls somewhat late on October 6th. This festival is about viewing the moon with friends and family, while enjoying some dango (rice dumplings) using displays like so:

A stack of dango treats, photo by evan p. cordes, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

According to this excellent book on Japanese culture, people also decorate such displays with pampas grass (susuki, ススキ), edamamé beans and taro potatoes. Unlike cherry-blossom viewing, people do not usually get drunk.

Chinese moon cakes, called geppei (月餅) in Japanese, are sometimes eaten as well, though it’s more of an exotic treat. Here, moon cakes are easy to obtain, and quite delicious. Highly recommend. We also get the Korean version of dango (tteok, 떡) too.

In any case, Otsukimi is about relaxing, enjoying the autumn vibes with the ones you love. As my family and I live in the Pacific Northwest, weather here isn’t reliable, and so we often get stuck with cloudy weather. But the image of Otsukimi is still popular. You can even find an emoji for it: 🎑.

Also, fun fact: there are traditionally two days of moon-viewing in Japan. The main one is Jūgoya (十五夜, “15th night”), but traditionally there is also a Jūsanya (十三夜, “13th night”) viewing on the 13th night of the ninth (not eighth) lunar month. This year, 13th night falls on November 2nd. On the 13th night of the lunar month, people enjoy chestnuts instead. Traditionally, people felt you should view the moon on both nights, otherwise, according to my book, you only did katamitsuki (片見月, “one-sided viewing”), which wasn’t ideal.

By the way, there is one other tradition around this time that’s specifically Buddhist: Juya-é (十夜会, “ten nights ceremony”), which is ten nights of observance of Pure Land Buddhist practice, starting from October 5th to 14th in the Western calendar. I usually try to recite the nembutsu a full 1080 times using my old Jodo Shu rosary for ten nights. Easier said than done as a parent, but it’s nice to have a challenge from time to time. Traditionally, people try to attend temple services if possible, or just focus on good behavior.

Anyhow, wishing you all a fun Otsukimi, Mid-Autumn Festival, or Juya-e, etc., or all of the above!

Zen Verses for Mealtime

As I write this post, I am in Dublin, Ireland on a short trip (business, not pleasure), helping my daughter get settled in for college. Thanks to timezone differences my daughter and I were awake at 11:30pm on a Friday and starving.

Taken near Trinity College and the main Bank of Ireland building (right).

Since a lot of pubs close their kitchens early, we went over to the local Supermac’s1 :

My daughter took this photo of her food. Mine is at the far end of the table (upper right corner).

It’s Friday night, so as we’re seated, people are stumbling in drunk looking for some cheap food, and there’s a steady stream of food delivery guys picking up orders. Still, even here, as I open my bag and eat my food, I try to still take a moment and appreciate the food, so I discreetly did gassho.

In Japanese culture, people will usually say itadakimasu before eating food, and gochisōsama deshita after finishing. The word itadakimasu is just the humble form of the verb “I receive”, and gochisōsama deshita means “It was a wonderful meal”.

But there’s also a set of verses that in the Zen tradition are recited before meals called the Shokuji Gokan (食事五観, “five observations at mealtime”). When I was watching a documentary recently, during mealtime, one of the Eiheiji monks walked the documentary host through the five verses. The five verses in Japanese for the Rinzai tradition are:

  1. 一つには、功の多少を計り、彼の来処を量る。
    hitotsu ni wa, kō no tashō wo hakari, kano raisho wo hakaru
  2. 二つには、己が徳行の全闕を忖って供に応ず。
    futatsu ni wa, onore ga tokugyō no zenketsu wo hakatte, ku ni ōzu
  3. 三つには、心を防ぎ、過貪等を離るるを宗とす。
    mitsu ni wa, shin wo fusegi, togatontō wo hanaruru wo shū to su
  4. 四つには、正に良薬を事とするは形枯を療ぜんが為なり。
    yotsu ni wa, masa ni ryōyaku wo koto to suru wa gyōko wo ryōzen ga tame nari
  5. 五つには、道業を成ぜんが為に、応にこの食を受くべし。
    Itsutsu ni wa, dōgyō wo jōzen ga tame ni, ō ni kono jiki wo uku beshi.

The verses in Soto Zen appear to be slightly different. I am fairly certain, these are descended from Chinese Chan Buddhism, but I wasn’t able to find much information.

There are a lot of fine English translations available, though for now I am using the one from Sotozen.net:

  1. We reflect on the effort that brought us this food and consider how it comes to us.
  2. We reflect on our virtue and practice, and whether we are worthy of this offering.
  3. We regard it as essential to free ourselves of excesses such as greed.
  4. We regard this food as good medicine to sustain our life.
  5. For the sake of enlightenment, we now receive this food.

In either case, the meaning is the same: before we take in the food, we should first reflect where it came from (and the countless people who made it possible),2 and whether we are living up to the practice or not. Finally, the verses remind us that food is essentially medicine (hence don’t be a pig), and that it helps us along the path toward Enlightenment. Even some chips (fries) at Supermac’s is something to be grateful for.

So, hello from Ireland, and will post more soon! 🇮🇪🖖🏼

1 The local version of McDonald’s, but ten times better.

2 The Jodo Shinshu tradition focuses on the concept of “gratitude“, so there’s a lot of overlap here.

Ando Momofuku: The Inventor of Instant Ramen

The Ramen Museum in Yokohama is a great way to spend an afternoon, and I have visited a couple times in recent years. I even bought the manga biography about Ando Momofuku (安藤 百福, 1910 – 2007), the creator of “instant ramen”:1

I’ve had a long fascination with instant ramen, and with Ando Momofuku. As a poor kid with a single mom, we ate a lot of “Top Ramen” when times were tough. To be honest, I loved it. I would cook my ramen with an egg, and some frozen peas. In college, my roommate would cook with spam (salty, but tasty).

The story of Ando Momofuku and of instant ramen is pretty interesting. Momofuku was born in Taiwan, at a time when it was still part of the Empire of Japan (1895 – 1945), and thus while he is Taiwanese Chinese, he was also a Japanese citizen. He was born into a merchant family, and from an early age showed an aptitude for business. He took part in knitted textiles (meriyasu in Japanese, メリヤス), and in time was able to expand his business into Osaka since it all belonged to the same empire. From Osaka, the business grew, but then WWII came and many resources were increasingly rationed. His factory was destroyed in the air raids.

Rice production was carefully rationed as the war turned against Japan, and after the war, food supplies were still very limited. During the postwar period, people ate a lot soba noodles and ramen, since they are not made from rice. Ando Momofuku started a partnership business, but this collapsed due to some sketchy financial schemes, and he was jailed for a couple years due to tax evasion (supposedly helping provide scholarships for local students). Bankrupt, but inspired by the idea of making ramen noodles more accessible, he learned how to make ramen, and how to make it more portable and easier cook.

After considerable trial and error, he determined that flash-frying ramen noodles dries them out in a way that’s easy to rehydrate later with hot water. Thus, by August 25th 1958, the first instant ramen was made. Momofuku’s new company, Nissin Foods (Nisshin Shokuhin in Japanese, 日清食品) quickly sold the instant ramen to great success.

Early examples of “Chicken Ramen” sold in 1958, courtesy of the Cup Ramen Museum in Yokohama. Taken by me in 2023.

The “cup style” ramen came later in the 1970’s after Nissin realized that people outside of Asia didn’t eat ramen the traditional way (ramen bowls, chopsticks, etc). After some research, a styrofoam cup was invented, and carefully engineered to keep the brittle noodles safe from crumbling, and also keep the sauce and seasoning together. This allowed people to simply add water, and eat from a fork.

Examples of both packaged “top ramen” and “cup ramen” from the 1990s. Taken at the Cup Ramen Museum in Yokohama.

One of the things, in my opinion, that makes Ando Momofuku more than just a clever businessman is that as the instant ramen business succeeded, and copycat products flooded the market, Momofuku didn’t punish other companies, but instead started a industry-wide standard for instant ramen, and sold licenses to others companies to ensure consistent quality. For Momofuku, the most important thing was that instant ramen help contribute to food availability, and not just pure profit.

Starting with the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, Nissin was responsible for distributing food aid to many sites around the world, and Momofuku often famously said the phrase 食足世界 (shoku tarite yo wa taira ka) which means something like “if there’s enough food, the world will be at peace”.

Speaking as a poor white kid in the 80’s and 90’s, I am grateful to Ando Momofuku for his innovation, and for his commitment to humanity. 🍜

My designed cup at the Cup Ramen Museum in Yokohama. Reads “thank you Ando Momofuku” with my poor handwriting. Taken in 2023.

1 I am using Asian-style naming convention, so family name then given name. Thus, Ando Momofuku’s family name is Ando, which he adopted from his Japanese wife, and his personal name is Momofuku. This is a Japanese name, not his family birth name. In his native Taiwanese-Chinese (aka Hokkien), his name was Go Pek-Hok (吳百福). Taiwanese Pek-Hok (百福) is read as “Momofuku” in Japanese. I want to do a side-post about Hokkien language sometime because I realize lately that it’s pretty underrated but influential, but research will take time.

Healthy Living: Eating Like A Monk

McCoy: “It might eventually cure the common cold, but lengthen lives? Poppycock. I can do more for you if you just eat right and exercise regularly”

Star Trek, “The Omega Glory” (s2ep23), Stardate unknown

Healthy eating is not difficult, at least in theory.

Of course if it were that easy, how come many of us are overweight? Myself included.

I talked about this recently, but I do not have very good self-control. I work a desk job, so I don’t move around much, and I snack a lot. I don’t eat particularly unhealthy: no alcohol, no soft drinks, etc., and I eat minimal red meat. But I tend to just eat too much junk food, or too many portions.

Recently, I dug out an old book of mine from many, many years ago,1 titled What Is Zen? 禅ってなんだろう. It’s a bilingual book I bought in Japan that explores Rinzai Zen life as a monk, but also includes some general thoughts about the tradition for lay followers. My copy has been covered in stickers when my daughter was a little girl, so I kept it both for nostalgia, and because such down-to-earth books on Zen are hard to find in the West.

This is what happens when little girls get a hold of daddy’s books… 😅

Anyhow, this book shows things like daily routines for monks, how they eat and so on. I wish I could repost the photographs because they’re really neat, but obviously that’s inappropriate. Instead, let me shiw you a different example:

An example of shōjin-ryōri (monastic food) at Tenryuji temple in Kyoto, Japan. Photo by 663highland, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This photo, shows a meal served at Tenryuji Temple, which I coincidentally visited last year. This kind of monastic food is called shōjin-ryōri (精進料理, “ascetic food”) in Japanese, but is a common part of Buddhist cuisine across East Asia. It’s not limited to monks and nuns only, devout lay followers can eat such a lifestyle if they wish. The photos from my book show that the monastic version of this meal is somewhat simpler in presentation (they are monks after all), but essentially the same.

Similarly, when we visited Ryoanji Temple (another Rinzai temple) waaay back in 2005, we enjoyed their version of tofu stew:

Taken by me in 2005, at Ryoanji Temple. This is a vegetarian tofu stew, with turnips artfully sculpted to look like lotus flowers.

This kind of diet is similar to a vegan diet in that it contains no animal products, even the dashi broth is vegetarian. Certain flavors like curry and onions are not used either.

But as with any diet changes, this is not something that should be done hastily or without consulting a physician. The key I wanted to convey here is that (partly as a reminder to myself when I read this six months later….) is that a healthy diet consists of the following:

  • More vegetables than protein
  • Minimal processed starches
  • Little or no animal protein
  • Small portions per meal2
  • Little or no snacking.

But I’ve been inspired by these examples of good Buddhist eating, and so I have been gradually trying to “eat like a monk” lately: smaller portions, avoiding or minimizing animal protein, limit starches, and eating more veggies.

Will it work for a Western desk-jockey like myself? We’ll see.

1 I mentioned this book on my old blog, that’s how long I’ve owned it.

2 My doctor had previous suggested intermittent fasting as a potential solution, or alternatively eating four small meals per day, instead of three big ones. Say, portions the size of two-three fists. The issue hasn’t been the diet, but my lack of diligence especially during the holidays. So, that may be the bigger issue.

Gardening with Shiso

Since the Pandemic started in early 2020, my wife and I took up very small-scale gardening in our backyard. My wife likes growing flowers and herbs, I like growing vegetables. This year, we both experimented with growing a popular Asian herb called shiso (シソ) in Japanese.1

Shiso, also known as Perilla frutescens, is a member of the mint family and is also related to the sesame plant. Its taste is hard to explain, but the leaves are often shredded, or cut very thin and eaten raw along side things like natto, sushi, or cooked meat. It tastes very refreshing, but also kind of strong.

Anyhow, it turns out that there are many varieties of shiso, and my wife and I each planted a different variety. My wife chose this variety from a starter:

I grew this variety, aojiso (“green shiso”) from seeds:

The plants look similar, but are somewhat different. My wife’s variety is more ruffled, and green on the underside, while mine is flatter, more heart-shaped and reddish on the underside. Her shiso plants have a lighter flavor, mine are pretty strong tasting.

Both shiso varieties seemed to struggle to germinate in the colder PNW climate, but suddenly when June came and the weather warmed up noticeably they started growing much faster. They also get thirsty quickly, so they require water often.

Once they start sprouting leaves though, they sprout a lot. We keep harvesting and the plants keep growing more. Shiso is delicious, but it’s not possible for us to finish this much.

Shiso is not something Westerners often eat, but it’s widely used in Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese cuisine, and it is fun to grow. It just needs a much warmer environment, and plenty of water.

Ordering Dashi

My wife of 20 years is from Japan, and we cook a mix of Japanese food and American food in the house.1 The key to Japanese cuisine is using good dashi (だし), or powdered fish stock. Most Japanese foods that you’ve probably tried use dashi as the base even if you don’t notice it.

Needless to say, we use dashi almost daily at home. However, getting good dashi can be tough. Sometimes, you will find dashi sold in supermarkets, but it is usually filled with MSG, and not always good quality.

Thankfully, we discovered that the Japanese brand Kayanoya has a nice online store available in the US. From the web store, we ordered a batch of regular dashi, and a batch of vegetable stock. The packages arrived a week later:

The package also comes with some nice Japanese-style wrapping paper. This sheet features several flowers: chrysanthemum (kiku), irishes (ayame), bamboo (také) and so on. I saved this paper and decided to use this as a makeshift bookcover (more on that in a later post). Anyhow, the paper is seasonal, so depending on what you order, you may receive different wrapping paper.

The dashi is terrific, and well worth the purchase, but the real surprise was the vegetable stock. It was delicious, more so than other domestic vegetable broth I’ve purchased before, and makes a really good lentil and vegetable soup.

If you are in the US, and cook Japanese food regularly, or want to make a nice vegetable soup, definitely consider ordering from the online store if you can.

1 My wife loves Korean food a lot (I do too), so we cook that too. We are lucky to have an H-Mart nearby, and a large number of Korean restaurants. I also experiment with making Indian-style curries, but I am still a long ways off from mastering it.

A Day at the Cup Noodles Museum!

Sometimes the best experiences are the ones you don’t plan. Early after arriving in Japan, and still pretty jet-lagged, my family and I met up with some friends back home who happened to be in Japan too. We spent the day in Yokohama, which is a large port city in Japan that has a long history as a port of call for Western traders (hence it has a more western look than the rest of Japan). First we went to the Aka-Renga Sōko (lit. “red brick warehouse”), a famous historical building now turned into a small shopping mall. However, there wasn’t much there for kids, so we wandered around Yokohama a bit. Then we stumbled on this:

This is the Cup Noodles Museum, dedicated to the famous product. The museum, sponsored by Nissin, covers the invention of Cup Ramen Noodles (カップ麺, kappu-men in Japanese) by Andō Momofuku (1910-2007) and its growth ever since. As a poor kid growing up with a single mom, we relied on instant noodles frequently, and later in high school/college I ate them while on a limited budget. So, it’s no exaggeration to say instant noodles have been a part of my life.

I knew a little bit about Andō Momofuku, a Taiwanese man who grew up when Taiwan was part of the Empire of Japan and started a business in Japan later in life. I even watched a drama about him and his wife in Japanese (with my wife). Andō Momofuku was a fascinating man who had a strong business sense, but also a commitment to his ideals. His efforts to invent freeze-dried instant noodles took years, and there was no precedent for it before, but finally he succeeded.

Anyhow, the museum isn’t very big, but it’s a great way to spend half a day or so. There are plenty of English services, and it’s pretty easy to following along. One room shows a timeline of cup noodle products over the years:

The first products
When I was in high school
Now

Further, there’s an optional feature at the Museum that lets you design your own ramen. You have to pay a bit extra, but you get a cup that you can decorate, then you choose your flavors, addons, etc. As someone who grew up with instant ramen, I drew the following:

And on the side, I tried to write a short message on the cup. It was meant to say 安藤百福、ありがとう！ (“thank you, Andō Momofuku”).

For my ramen flavor, I picked curry flavor with some corn, green beans and dried meat. When done, they seal it for you, and you can carry it inside of an inflatable bag. Since you have to eat within a month, I finished it before coming back to the US. The curry flavor was delicious.

While there I picked up various goods in the gift shop, including a manga (Japanese only) about the life of Andō Momofuku:

It’s been a pretty good read so far, and shows how he was a sharp businessman even before he moved to Japan.

Anyhow, I highly recommend the museum if you’ve ever enjoyed instant noodles. While not very large, it has lots of neat features in it, and helps you appreciate the man who started it all. 🍜

The Ultimate Japanese Winter Food: Oden

Usually when people think of Japanese food, they think of sushi, or ramen, but these are luxury foods that aren’t normally eaten at home. There is one food though that’s very popular in Japan, eaten on special occasions at home, and truly a wonderful food for winter: Oden (おでん).1

Oden is hard to explain, but it’s basically a kind of hot pot or stew where you cook various foods in there, and the family eats out of the same pot. We only cook 2-3 times a year, usually winter, since it requires a fair amount of preparation to make. I’ve also had it with my wife’s relatives in Japan during cold months.

Here’s my wife’s pot, with the oden having stewed for hours:

Inside, you can see may different foods, some skewered with bamboo sticks, others just cooking in the pot.

Oden always has a strongly brownish color due to the soy sauce and fish broth (dashi) based that’s used, similar to Udon and other foods. The items in our pot include Japanese radish (daikon), boiled and peeled eggs (yudé-tamago), fried tofu, Korean fish cakes (odeng-tang), Japanese fish cakes, noodles (harusamé) among many other things.

What’s fun is that there’s a large variety of things you can put into the pot and cook up. When you go to a convenience store in Japan, especially in Winter, they often have take-home oden, where you pick the foods you want to put in, they provide the broth, and you just carry it home. Alternatively, if you manage to find a traditional yatai food-cart,2 you can also enjoy oden there. As with the convenience store, just pick your ingredients, and enjoy. You can also mix in some Chinese hot mustard (karashii), too, but like wasabi that stuff can hurt if you add too much.

Oden sets are also available, both overseas and in Japan. These are usually frozen, and come with all basic items, but my wife likes to further embellish with boiled eggs, daikon radish. My wife doesn’t make from scratch (it would be too difficult), so using the frozen sets as a base works well for her.

Oden is a heavy comfort food, but is great on a cold winter’s evening, and well worth the opportunity if you can get it.

P.S. The Korean word odeng for the equivalent dish may be a loanword from Japan, probably during the colonial era (1910-1945), but beyond that, I am not sure.

1 I’ve never seen “oden” written in Kanji (Chinese Characters). If there’s kanji for it, it’s definitely not widely used. Shops that serve oden also write using hiragana script, not kanji.

2 I’ve been to Japan many times, but have never see one. They definitely seem to be a dwindling tradition / business model.

Christmas Takoyaki

While I am still on my last day of quarantine in the den, trying to keep myself busy, my wife and kids are celebrating the Christmas season why decorating a gingerbread, and making takoyaki:

Takoyaki (たこ焼き, “cooked octopus”) is a Japanese food that originates from the Kansai area (think Osaka and Kyoto) of Japan, and is hard to explain in English. If you tell someone that this is “cooked octopus balls”, it doesn’t sound very appetizing, the problem is the translation.

Takoyaki are small pastry-like things with a small sliver of octopus in there (like sushi), and cooked on special griddles that allow you to flip the little pastry balls when you need to:

Takoyaki at the Richmond Night Market, photo by SqueakyMarmot, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We have a small griddle at home, and my wife will sometimes take it out to make takoyaki for the family. We call those nights takopa nights, short for takoyaki pātī (“takoyaki parties”),1 because the family can help prepare the ingredients, cook them together, and of course eat them together. My kid’s Japanese school also has summer festivals every year, with lots of takoyaki to go around. The preparation is a bit time-consuming, so not something you can do on a whim, only on special occasions.

You can top takoyaki with many things: mayonaise and Worcester sauce are the most common, but also shaved, dried bonito flakes (katsuo-bushi 鰹節), powered, dried seaweed (aonori 青のり), and more. You can also replace the octopus inside with cheese or ham depending on preference. The end result is delicious no matter what.

… and now I am going to enjoy my dinner. Itadakimasu!

P.S. Hard to see from the photo, but the plate features a pug and Christmas lights. My wife loves pugs. 🥰

P.P.S. Feeling a lot better than I did a couple days ago. I think the vaccines helped a lot to minimize symptoms, but it still felt like a pretty miserable head cold.

1 Japanese language tends to abbreviate by syllables a lot.

Japanese New Year: a shopping list

If you, or a loved one, are celebrating Japanese New Year, Oshōgatsu (お正月), you may need to do some shopping. During the December in 2021, we got snowed in really bad, and my wife couldn’t go to the local Japanese supermarket to buy goods and ingredients herself. So, I went on her behalf using public transportation to downtown, got the goods, and came back.

To save other husbands (or anyone else who likes to celebrate) some uncertainty, here’s a recommended list of things to get and why. I purposely took photos of my own at the local Asian grocery store, rather than stock photos, because I felt this would help readers on the ground more, especially if they can’t read Japanese.

New Year Altar

A common tradition in Japan is to get a kagami-mochi, kind of like so:

Kagami-mochi are a pair of mochi (rice cakes) stacked one on top of the other, usually with a ribbon around it, and a bitter orange or other decoration on top. I’ve talked more about it here. These are often available at any Japanese grocery store, and include instructions on how to set it up. Remember, on January 11th, there’s a separate ceremony to break open the mochi and cook it for good luck.

Soup Ingredients

There are several items, often available in your local Asian food store, that are essentials for Japanese cooking during New Years.

First, is naruto, shown on the left:

This is not to be confused with the manga series. Naruto is a food that usually comes in a long roll and is sliced thin and added as a topping to soups and ramen during New Years. A similar food, shown on the right, is kamaboko. Kamaboko often comes frozen, and has to be thawed out first, then sliced and added to soup, including toshi-koshi soba which is eaten the night before New Years.

Another food often used, especially in ozoni soup (eaten on New Year’s morning) are mochi rice cakes:

There are many kinds, and cuts, so just find something that’s suitable for your needs. Out of the package, they are hard little bricks but when added to warm soup or baked in a toaster oven, they have a taffy-like consistency. Keep in mind that it’s possible to choke on mochi if you don’t chew thoroughly. They’re delicious but consider yourself warned.

Osechi

During New Year’s day, it is considered auspicious to eat certain foods on the first day. These are collectively known as osechi-ryōri, or just osechi. There are many possible foods to use in osechi, but one common one is kuro-mamé:

These are just sweetened black beans, and something I enjoy eating in particular. In the same picture, shown below are yellow kuri-kinton which is a kind of walnut paste.

Another great choice are lotus root, or renkon. They look like huge tubers at the store…

But when peeled, sliced thin and cooked in broth they look more like this:

They have a nice consistency like potato and are delicious to eat. Highly recommend.

Finally there are special chopsticks you should pick up for osechi:

The chopsticks themselves are nothing special, but using bright, clean chopsticks with auspicious decorations on them, I believe that this helps symbolizes a fresh (and positive) start for the new year.

Conclusion

This not an exhaustive list of goods for Japanese New Year, but I hope this helps cover basic foods and goods you might need to enjoy New Year. Your mileage may vary. I will also try to update and polish this up as time goes on.

Good luck!