NAJC New Year Highlights

NAJC New Year Highlights
By Lorene Oikawa, Past President NAJC

Akemashite omedetō gozimasu.

Happy New Year!

2025 is the Year of the Snake. A time to shed our old challenges and to start fresh in the New Year.

The NAJC is continuing with our Capacity Building Initiatives including assisting our member organizations with processes, group initiatives, and projects to strengthen their capacity. We are proceeding with some hiring including a new Executive Director, Administrative Assistant, Project Manager – Capacity Building Initiative.Our customized NAJC Japan Tour 2025 will take place in May and late September. More info at https://najc.ca/programs/japan-tour/ , Our Japanese Canadian Family History Program started last November. If you missed the first session, you can see the recording and slides and resource information at https://najc.ca/programs/jcfamilyhistory/

Our committees – Endowment Fund, ACE (Arts Culture Education), Human Rights, Japanese New Immigrant, Young Leaders, Membership Committee will continue their outreach and programming.

We will continue our work on heritage supporting the preservation, maintenance, dissemination of Japanese Canadian history and ensure the voices of Japanese Canadians are represented. If you have ideas on some little known or untold stories of Japanese Canadian history, please email [email protected]

Here’s to a happy, healthy, fulfilling 2025!


My social media feed has been full of photos of Japanese food enjoyed by families across Canada. Many are celebrating with traditional family dishes made with recipes passed down through the generations. Food is more than sustenance, it’s a celebration of our families, tradition, and culture.

 

As a fourth generation Japanese Canadian, my food traditions are different for the holidays. For Christmas, it’s turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce, brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, gravy, and various side dishes. For New Year’s, it’s all Japanese food. I and others posted our New Year’s food on social media. There were lots of similar comments about remembering (and missing) the big family gatherings. People remembered their “moms and Bachans [grandmothers]” working long hours to get the food ready. One remembered his obachan’s fridge “full of mystery jars.”

The food tradition starts with eating noodles on New Year’s Eve. I do it every year. So did my mom and my obaachan. The Japanese tradition, Toshikoshi Soba, may have started in the 13th century and became popular by the 17th century in the Edo period. Obaachan said you must eat the noodles before midnight for a long, peaceful life. Doing so will allow you to leave behind the hardships of the year and cross over, fresh, into a New Year. I love noodles so eating them is one of my favourite traditions. Obaachan would make everything from scratch including the noodles, broth, and fishcake. Green onions came from her garden. I do make the broth from scratch, and I have grown green onions and made fishcake. I haven’t tried making noodles yet.

Obaachan and mom would make a New Year’s Day feast for all the family, aunts, uncles, cousins, and sometimes extended family and friends. The house would be filled with people sitting upstairs and downstairs.

Obaachan would make Osechi Ryori (special lucky New Year’s Day food) and everything was made from scratch including Kamaboko (fish cake) and Kombumaki (cooked kelp wrapped so it looks like bowties). She would cook saitoimo (Japanese potato), Konnyaku (black flecked jelly-like pieces), renkon (slices of lotus root with holes to see a clear future), takenoko (bamboo shoot), gobo and carrot salad (gobo is a long root symbolizing strength and stability), shitake mushroom, nejiri ume (carrot shaped like blossoms), kinusaya (snow peas), datemaki (egg omelette roll), tazukuri (candied anchovy), and kuromame (sweet black beans).

My mom would make salmon and chicken teriyaki. There would be sashimi (tuna), kazunoko (herring roe), ikura (salmon egg), whole ebi (cooked prawns with their bent backs to resemble old age), and tako (octopus). We would also have pickled daikon (yellow pieces of radish). Obaachan made futomaki (rolled sushi with five ingredients as part of the filling) and inari (seasoned rice in tofu pockets). This was the favourite of the family. My cousins would (and still do) call it bag sushi.

My obaachan was from Cumberland (north Vancouver Island) prior to the incarceration. She would make Japanese style chow mein, which I know some people call Cumberland chow mein. Did your family have a special maybe regional dish?

Obaachan also made mochi. Sweet rice is soaked, steamed and then pounded into a dough. She make rounds and then wrap it around a smaller round of sweet bean pasted. She also made steamed manju, a round airy cake-like sweet also filled with sweet bean paste. The third type was yaki manju – a baked cake-like sweet filled with sweet bean paste. I almost forgot yokan. My grandmother would soak and cook adzuki beans. She would put it through a sieve to remove the skins. She would add it to a mixture of boiled water with sugar and kanten (plant-based gelatin made from seaweed). She would put it in a mold and then into the fridge. When it was set she would cut slices to serve.

Since many of the guests came early in the afternoon, we did have non-Japanese appetizers and sweets. When I was old enough, I was in charge of the appetizers. I set up the charcuterie platter, but that’s not what we called it back then. It was also my chance to try out new recipes for appetizers. My mom would have trays of mincemeat tarts, butter tarts, Christmas cake and Nanaimo bars and other sweets.

My mom would also fill a crystal bowl with mikan, Japanese oranges from Japan. They were the best, so sweet. I haven’t seen Japanese oranges in years. This year, I was lucky to find a box at a local Japanese grocery store.

I remember hearing stories about the annual arrival of Japanese oranges to Vancouver. I recall one newspaper clipping referring to nine ships delivering 3 million crates of oranges to Canada in 1965. The arrival of Japanese oranges in late November was a signal that Christmas was near. An ad in the Vancouver Sun newspaper from 1953 referred to the “Famous Sun Brand Japanese Oranges” for $1.39 per box. The first Japanese oranges arrived in the late 1800s. Their popularity was probably initiated by Japanese Canadians who would receive them from Japan and share them with their neighbours. Who could resist the easy to peel, sweet oranges. Originally, they were in wooden crates and many elders have shared how they would repurpose the wooden crates. I remember the oranges coming in cardboard boxes and individually wrapped in green tissue. As a child, I would flatten and smooth the green tissue and make ornaments and decorations.

Everything our moms and obaachans made was delicious. They made a variety of dishes and they made it in huge quantities for the large gatherings. I am always amazed at how much they accomplished. I make a few dishes, and it’s a lot of work.

Also, I didn’t mention that they did major cleaning before New Year’s Day. Everything from top to bottom had to be cleaned. My obaachan said that the old year’s dust had to be cleared out before New Year’s Day. You can’t throw out anything on New Year’s Day because you are throwing out your luck. Also, my mom said that the preparations for the food was done before New Year’s Day so that you could rest and have food to eat for three days. I know there was always plenty of food. My mom would jump up from the table and insist she had to make another dish or two. Everyone would shout out, “Mae, Auntie. There’s plenty, please sit down.” There was always too much. Everyone left with a dish or two of food.

What made it special? Love is the secret ingredient. My obaachan and mom may be gone, but their spirit lives on in our memories and the food.

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