Happy New Year from SoraNews24!

Here’s to a tiger-rific 2022!

In Japan, New Year’s is the most important holiday of the year. It’s a time for going back home to see your family, offering prayers and asking for blessings at temples and shrines, and basking in the possibilities that lie ahead as you don’t just turn the calendar page, but start a whole new calendar altogether.

At the same time, New Year’s is also the most relaxing time of year in Japan. Sure, there’s some scurrying around involved in all those visits to relatives’ houses and holy sites, but there’s a pretty solid consensus that the best way to spend the rest of the holiday is snacking, snoozing, watching TV, and not forcing yourself to do anything more productive than crafting excuses to remain sitting at the toasty warm kotatsu and not making any decisions more difficult than whether you want to eat a mikan or a manju…or both, if you share our sensibilities.

So with your permission, we’ll be taking the day to be luxuriously lazy and responsibly recharge, and if you need something to tide you over, here are a few collections of our top stories from last year.

Thank you all so much for reading in 2021, whether you’re an in-Japan local or an overseas Japanophile keeping your fingers crossed for international travel to open up again soon (and if you’re in the latter group, know that we miss you every bit as much as you miss Japan). We hope you’ll continue to visit SoraNews24 in 2022, and we can’t wait to share more stories from Japan with you…just as soon as we finish our New Year’s cat/tiger nap.

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