Decorations: Hybrid Ropes
Once the house is clean and last year’s business had been dealt with, New Year’s decorations, which temporally transfer the home into a sacred space, are put up. A typical New Year’s decoration is the sacred rope or shimenawa. These are straw ropes (nawa) decorated with paper festoons (shime) and an orange-type fruit that are used to demarcate sacred space (Figure 11.1).
Except for the four students in my sample, all other participants hung a shimenawa outside their home during the New Year’s period. Half of these ropes were hybrid objects: half Christmas wreath, half sacred rope. Decorations for the New Year advertised in the pamphlets included pine arrangements and sacred ropes, but most prominent were the hybrid New Year’s Wreaths (Figure 11.2).
The hybrids come in a large variety of sizes and styles, ranging from models to hang outside the house to miniatures that can be attached to car windows or even bicycles. The pamphlets stress the convenience of these kinds of ‘festive goods’ because they can be left outside throughout the Christmas and New Year’s period (Hashidate 2002: 48). However, Mrs Terayama, who hung a hybrid rope outside the door of her flat in Itami City, offered another explanation for their increased usage. She explained that their housing association had forbidden ‘traditional’ ropes because the straw and grains attracts birds. Whatever the case, one important factor to take into consideration is that sacred straw ropes place a burden on the inhabitants of the home concerned because they belong to a category of objects that need to be ritually disposed of at religious institutions at the end of the New Year (around 7 January) in order to avoid calamities. By contrast, many informants saw no ill in using the same hybrid New Year’s wreath during consecutive years.
Seasonal and Commercial Rhythms
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