What is the best way to start your New Year? A full of mystery gift bags from Japan is one of the most exciting ways to give your New Year’s Eve more fascinating.
Japan is a country known for being the cradle of many interesting cultures. From anime, manga to dressing styles, Japan knows how to make its culture stand out from others. Due to its multiple interesting culture and customs, many of us only know the common culture that we see on social media and TV. And like other countries, Japan also has its own New Year’s Eve custom, that custom is called “Random Gift Bags”
Meaning of the Japanese name
Random gift bags are also known as Fukubukuro in Japan. Fukubukuro is a combination of fuku and fukuro which means good fortune and bag respectively. The “fuku” in fukubukuro originates from a Japanese saying: “ There is fortune in leftovers”. These lucky bags is a way for stores to unload leftover merchandise from last year. It is a common concept in Asian countries to remove old items from last year before the new year comes.
The content inside the bags
Depending on the store, the content of the bags may vary. The content is not just one type of merchandise, sometimes the content of the bags is a mix of sweets, comic books and daily objects. Many stories have been spread about extremely luxurious or expensive items inside the bags such as purses from famous brands, tickets for a holiday trip, or a discount voucher for merchandise at a certain store. The exciting part about these bags is you never know what you will get inside, one may say that these bags are a welcoming surprise for the new year. The price for these bags is cheap, mostly 50% or more off the list price of the items inside the bags. Despite the fact that these bags contain items that the store sell since last year, these bags still attract a lot of customers to the store. There is another counterpart of the lucky bags called fukobukuro, also known as misfortune bags. These bags are from stores that have nothing much to offer to their customers, the price for this bag is very cheap compared to its highly sought-after counterpart, only from 500 to 1000 yen.
There are some exceptions to the price of these bags. In 2006, the most expensive fukubukuro was sold at the price of 200 million yen at a jewelry store in Ginza. Another example was the fukubukuro bags in Mitsukoshi which were sold at the price of 150 million yen per bag.
Influence and origin
This custom was practiced by Ginza Matsuya Department Store since the late Meiji era. Nowadays, this custom has been adopted by other places around the world such as Honolulu shopping center Ala Moana Center and many Sanio Stores in the United States as well.