Winters were dry and cold in Yokohama. Lawns turned a brittle, frost-bitten brown, and the sky was a cold, white backdrop behind the glittering facades of pay-by-the-hour love hotels that lined Highway 16. On the other side of the highway from the love hotels lay a vast expanse of black soil that in the spring would be planted with root vegetables. And beyond those fields, on a small hill fenced in by wild bamboo, stood our house, one among four houses that comprised the Adventist missionary compound.

Constructed to American scale but logistically unfit for Japanese weather and the cost of living, our large, drafty house had, at its heart, a wood stove that at best heated the central living room alone. I was nine when we moved to Japan, and I remember that we caught colds again and again that first winter until we learned to dress for the weather and for the house. Our seeming physical frailties were only symptoms of the other demons we faced during those first few months in a new country: the language barrier, culture shock, politics, and changing family dynamics.

We were Christians in a country where less than 2 percent of the population was Christian; we were Americans—of Japanese descent, but Americans nonetheless—in a largely homogenous culture; we were trying to find our place in the land of my father’s ancestors and my mother’s immediate family. It was harder than we had ever imagined, perhaps harder than we could even admit to ourselves. I think there were many times that first year when we wanted to start all over again.

As our first New Year’s in Japan approached, I remember my mother recalling and resurrecting traditions and rituals that she had practiced as a child growing up in the suburbs of Tokyo. More than twenty years had passed since my mother had left Japan as a teenager, and now she passed on these traditions to my brother and me for the first time.

For dinner on New Year’s Eve, my mother cooked toshi-koshi soba, buckwheat noodles in a savory broth. "For long life," she explained. We sat down at a dark wood table, just the four of us—all four of us—and ate to long life. The house was cold; the fire never burned hot enough, but as the warm broth filled our bellies, our spirits were strong. Here we are in a new country, with exciting new traditions and foods and people all around us. We’ve survived the first few months. All the future lies ahead of us. Anything is possible.

We did not know then how almost anything would happen—how the coming years would so radically mold our family and challenge us on many levels—how we would come out of Japan different people than when we had arrived—how we would grow older and softer inside and maybe a little more scarred on the outside. But at that moment, that first New Year’s in Japan, everything was simple and new. Something like a Sabbath rest had fallen over Japan. Families all over Japan came together like ours to eat long-life noodles that night. It was a time for renewal, for fresh beginnings.

In preparation for the holiday, houses all across Japan had been repaired and cleaned inside and out; debts had been repaid; worn garments had been replaced. Stores had closed their books and doors for the year. Three day's worth of symbolic New Year’s dishes had been prepared in advance; each dish signified something auspicious, such as good health, fertility, good harvest, happiness, or long life.

And when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, the ritual of purification rang out across the land—over the black fields and city lights and love hotels, over our small missionary compound. All across Japan, the temple bells tolled exactly one hundred and eight times. Man has a hundred and eight sins, according to Buddhism, and hearing the deep ring of these gongs is said to purify him from his transgressions of the past year.

It’s a beautiful symbol, I think. I know that we needed those bells that first New Year’s in Japan. In those first few months in our new home, we had—although no more or less than at any past or future time—already sinned against each other in small, unseen ways. Seeds of hurt and growing apart had been planted. We had wounded each other unsuspectingly and carelessly. We needed to be purified, to forgive and to be forgiven—a little foot-washing of the soul. As much as anyone else, we needed to be cleansed sin by sin, a hundred and eight times over, at least.

The bells were healing that night. I was lulled into sleep by their rhythmic song.

Twenty years have passed since that first New Year’s in Japan. Over the years, I have heard the New Year’s bells tolling a half dozen times or more. Now my brother and I are more or less grown up. My parents have completed their missionary service in Japan, and ultimately all of us returned to America, where at New Year’s we join other Americans in greeting the coming year with fireworks and fanfare. We uncork bottles of fizzy apple juice and kiss each other with abandon when the clock strikes midnight.

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