The Year of the Boar

Ushering in the New Year was a pretty low-key affair this year, probably because we don't know anybody here well enough to gate-crash their New Year's Eve celebrations, but at least we were spared another year of Hootenanny! and Jools Holland's jazz-been chums on BBC2.

We'd been warned that the New Year holiday is pretty much the only time of the year that Japan actually stops to take a breath, effectively shutting down for a full three days. Certainly only a handful of shops were open, but it didn't seem to deter the crowds from roaming the city centre shopping arcades in a curious, Romero-esque kind of way.

But there was no need to panic because you can always rely on the hyper-industrious Chinese to offer a supporting hand to the inveterate shopper, and Motomachi Chinatown proved to be a hive of activity.

We did manage something more commendably traditional though, when we came across what seemed like a trillion Kobe-ites queuing to enter the Ikuta shine. This event is called hatsumoude, or 'first shrine visit'. The Ikuta shrine is one of the oldest shrines in the country, reportedly dating back to the beginning of the third century. Despite being nearly two thousand years old, it boasts a website with Shockwave Flash. Now there's progress for you.

High up on the gate to the shrine was a troupe of taiko drummers of varying ages - The Partridge Family meets Kodo - whose skilful, metronomic thumping really added to the sense of occasion.

On entering the shrine, visitors queue to purchase a fortune scroll. If it's good, they keep it. If it's indifferent, or indeed bad - and there are apparently some real stinkers - they fold it and tie it to a tree for the gods. So, bit of a win-win scenario all round then. They then approach the main altar and cast coins, perhaps by way of compensating the gods for all the rotten luck they've just sent their way.

There is also the opportunity to purchase good luck charms, arrows - necessary to ward off demons - and have a go on a good old-fashioned tombola, with the chance to win a Nintendo Wii game console (natch..). We won a can of cold coffee and an oversize 1,000,000 yen banknote sponsored by Kobe Sauna & Spa. Jessica was impressed though, even more so when a helpful couple explained that if you pin it to your wall upside down it would ensure that money would fall into your home in the New Year. Jessica wanted to know whether that would be coins or paper money...

Japan uses the same animal zodiac as China, but in the late nineteenth century switched to the Gregorian calendar, so their shogatsu (New Year) kicks off on January 1st too. 2007 is the Year of the Boar, by the way. Although you might be forgiven for thinking it is the Year of the Cheetah here, thanks to the total over-exposure of the Cheetah Girls - an irritatingly catchy, somewhat podgy girl band - on the Disney Channel.