Happy Bags

Celebrating the New Year is a big deal in Japan. The whole country shuts down for almost a week. Your house has to be super clean. There are special foods you need to eat. You have to fly a kite and play badminton. Oh, and watch really bad TV.

But, given the crazy consumerism that Japan is famous for, I like to think of the arrival of the fukubukuro. These “lucky bags” (for some reason, almost universally mistranslated by the Japanese themselves as “happy bags”) are simply grab bags — various items thrown in a sealed bag and sold, sight unseen, to the customer. In theory, the bag contains items worth, together, significantly more than the bag’s price tag. Of course, since the items are sold sight unseen (peeking inside of a fukubukuro is verboten), they tend to be full of junk that you don’t need.

Almost everyone gets into the fukubukuro act. Clothing stores, book stores, music stores, even our local grocery store is selling happy bags. Some pictures of various fukubukuro: