New Year's Eve in Kyōto: Ringing in the New Year... 108 Times

I spent New Year’s Eve at the headquarters of the Pure Land school of Buddhism, watching 17 monks cast away their sins by ringing the largest bell in Japan 108 times. It was different from my previous New Year’s experience, which involved getting trashed at a Princeton party in TriBeCa.

The tradition, known as joya-no-kane, takes place at temples across the country, where monks ring bells and sound gongs at midnight. Each sounding is meant to cleanse listeners of one of the 108 Buddhist temptations. This particular bell weighed 84 tons and was sounded by a large battering ram, from which hung 17 ropes. An old monk, in purple and gold kaftan-like robes, presided solemnly over the whole affair. The Jōdo shū temple, founded over 500 years before the United States, would have been impressive even without the massive bell. Approaching Chion-in, the first thing I saw was the temple’s colossal gate, which, I learned, is also the largest in Japan. Illuminated at night, the sight of the gate was pretty awe-inspiring.



From the temple, my friend and I walked downhill through the hundreds of colorful festival fast food rotensho stalls lining Maruyama Park. We passed Yasaka Shrine and saw thousands of people lined up behind police barricades, waiting for hatsumōde, their first shrine visit of the year. We decided to skip partaking in Japan’s version of Times Square and managed to catch a cab back to the hotel.

As I stood at Chion-in, one of Kyoto’s coolest temples in my opinion, in the cold at midnight, I really couldn’t stop thinking about how much has happened over the past year and—at risk of sounding old—how quickly the year flew by. As I mentioned, I spent the previous New Year’s surrounded by a lot of Cap friends in New York. I remember talking to a guy who was in Cap and graduated ’07; he was spending the year in China through PiA and was back just for his winter break; I remember him telling me about his experience in China, and I distinctly remember thinking that it sounded really cool but that there was no way I’d ever move to Asia after graduation. Life is funny that way, I guess.

--Rob Bernstein

The bell is 11 feet in height and 9 feet in diameter. Intense.

It took 17 monks to ring the 84-ton bell.

A huge crowd waits to enter Kyoto's Yasaka Shrine for hatsumode on New Year's. Thousands and thousands more people were lined up as far as I could see down the street.