Japanese Word for Today: Osechi Ryōri (おせち料理)

Also shortened to osechi (おせち), this is food for the New Year celebration. During my first New Year in Japan, my adult students explained that おせち dated back to a time before refrigerators. The female head of the household would prepare dishes that would last for days so that she could relax during the 正月 (Shōgatsu, or formally Oshōgatsu), from New Year's Eve through January 3rd. To help the food keep during those days, a lot of it was sweet, sour, marinated, and dried.

That was pretty much all my students told me about it back then. That, and how much trouble it was to actually prepare these dishes. This was twenty years ago, and supermarket osechi was becoming the preferred option; or maybe it had been that way long before I arrived to Japan, I don't know. In 2002, a lot of my students didn't much like osechi and it seemed to be falling out of favor, as was the modern tradition of watching the New Year's Eve television show, Kōhaku (short for Kōhaku Uta Gassen, translated as Red & White Song Battle).

I think the pendulum has swung back, as many of my teenage students watch and talk about the song contest when I ask them about their New Year celebration. And everywhere I went this year seemed to have images of osechi.

This was what I had over the holidays. The best was the red shrimp, which is actually sashimi from Argentina, so maybe it isn't technically osechi ryōri, since it wasn't prepared in a special way. But shrimp is heavily featured in osechi. Symbolically, it represents a long life (like the long noodles of toshikoshi soba), as the curvature of the shrimp evokes the stooped posture of an elderly person (in my mind, hopefully not a result of osteoporosis).

Oh yes, that's the other thing about osechi. Different dishes symbolize different things, hopes for the future. Health, effort, prosperity, academic achievement, fertility...There are so many well-written and photographed web pages of osechi, the best thing for me to do would be to list some of them. Not all of the information is identical; I tried to choose a variety that would cover the spectrum of osechi that I know. Below are links with short descriptions.

Nice photos and succinct explanations

https://savvytokyo.com/osechi-ryori-hidden-meanings-behind-japanese-new-year-food/

Also nice photos and explanations, content a little different from above link

https://www.tsunagujapan.com/a-guide-to-osechi-ryori-japan-s-traditional-new-year-food/

easy-to-understand table format

http://kikuko-nagoya.com/html/osechi.html

This page explains the 3-tiered osechi jubako (the boxes in which the food is packed). Respectfully, I think that the writer might not be a native English speaker; I also think that this could be a good thing, as (if s/he is a native Japanese speaker) it includes some bits of information not included on the English websites that I viewed.

http://qto.co.jp/en/garden/qto46_osechi.html

Another page with excellent photos and information about some soup (ozoni) and fish dishes that the previously mentioned links don't contain.

https://www.justonecookbook.com/osechi-ryori-japanese-new-year-food/

Below is an NHK video about osechi