Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "The Ultimate Guide to New Year's in Japan" video.

  1. From Brazil here, Japanese descendant family, most converted to some form of Christianity all over... but up until I was younger, the tradition of getting the family together on new years' eve was kinda kept, in the way Japanese descendent families in Brazil kept it going somehow. So the separation was, x-mas to be spent with your smaller nuclear family or perhaps the family of members that are not of Japanese descent, but new years had to be with the larger Japanese side of the family. xD I never went to big new years' parties or to see fireworks shows because of that. Some of my cousins when they reached adulthood just managed to convince their families to skip to celebrate elsewhere, but at least some portion of the family was always there with our larger group. I imagine what we do is closer to what traditions were during the time my grandparents and grand-grandparents immigrated to Brazil, few years before WWII, so it looks nothing like modern Japanese customs, but getting the family together was a thing. Up until my grandparents generation, we used to still see things like Kamidana, and a few more traditional things. We didn't have osechi, but it was a huge collection of dishes that mixed Japanese stuff with local and that of other traditions... I think early on Japanese immigrants tried to adapt and remake a ton of Japanese dishes using local ingredients which results in this mess of different things. xD Someone makes nabemono, someone else makes mochi, someone cooks fish, some pork dish, someone orders or makes a bunch of sushi, and then you have an assortment of Brazilian dishes and other stuff so that people who dislike Japanese food had something to eat... xD It was always all over the place. I remember back when I was a kid a few older relatives still gave otoshidama to kids of the family, but this also kinda died off and got mixed up with different traditions over the years... we also had Secret Santa style gift givings, years we did Bingo games and other types of games, plus a bunch of other different stuff. But the family gets older, the festivities get shorter, and things change. One aunt of mine, the one we usually stay at, still does Ozoni in the first day of the year... but it's mostly me, my mom and her that enjoys it, most of the family either don't like, or cannot eat (case of my uncle who is allergic to everything sesame seed related... super unfortunate considering almost all Japanese dishes use sesame seeds, or sesame seed oil xD ). He's from Italian descendency though, so it's not like he cared all that much about Japanese food already. xD Anyways, this will no doubt end in my generation. Most of the cousins my age or younger already don't care much about participating in all of this, most of them don't know the significance of most of these things, and most families of my parents' generation didn't care much about pushing, enforcing, and keeping Japanese traditions that came from their parents and whatnot... it just got so diluted and bastardized over the years that it simply doesn't make much sense. It's also the case like I said that most Japanese descendent families ends up going towards some form of Christianity, so there is little left of traditions rooted in Shinto and Buddhist origins. There are some stuff that I experienced as a kid that I only came to understand and realize where it was coming from after I got older and the Internet was here... xD Over the years, the larger entire family broke apart, got separated, moved to different parts of the country or even abroad, and started celebrating new years and x-mas with family that is closeby. When I was a kid, we used to get together in either some rented place, a big farmhouse of some relative, or something similar because it used to be a huge group of 50+ people. Particularly when my grandparents were still alive, the larger family got together around them... because from my dad's side, it was 11 between brothers and sisters, and from my mom's side was 9 between brothers and sisters. So, huge extended family. But most of them only had one or two kids. After my grandparents died and each portion of the family moving away to different corners of the country, it just made it harder to justify traveling long hours to get together... kids got older, lots of them didn't adopt Japanese traditions, and so things starts diluting away. Before the pandemic we were getting closer to less than 20 people groups.... during the pandemic the core group was reduced to less than 10 I think. We weren't there because it's a long trip away, so I ended up celebrating me and my mom only. :P My mom and dad were the son and daughter that moved to a different state after graduation, so it has always been us to travel to the grandparents state... so from when I was baby up to now end year celebrations has always meant 16 hour trips by car or bus to visit relatives. Anyways, just to give an idea how things are from my pov, and perhaps the experience of lots of Japanese descendant families. Some traditions were kept as much as possible for a couple of generations or so, but it's likely not lasting much longer than this. Well, apart from some of my cousins that got back to Japan and formed families there... xD
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