Japanese food on New Year

Japanese people eat a special selection of dishes during the New Year celebration called osechi-ryōri, typically shortened to osechi. This consists of boiled seaweed, fish cakes , mashed sweet potato with chestnut, simmered burdock root?, and sweetened black soybeans .Many of these dishes are sweet, sour, or dried, so they can keep without refrigeration—the culinary traditions date to a time before households had refrigerators, when most stores closed for the holidays. There are many variations of osechi, and some foods eaten in one region are not eaten in other places (or are even banned) on New Year's Day. Another popular dish is ozōni a soup with omochi  and other ingredients that differ based on various regions of Japan. Today, sashimi and sushi are often eaten, as well as non-Japanese foods. To let the overworked stomach rest, seven-herb rice soup is prepared on the seventh day of January, a day known as jinjitsu

Another custom is creating rice cakes .Boiled sticky rice is put into a wooden shallow bucket-like container and patted with water by one person while another person hits it with a large wooden mallet. Mashing the rice, it forms a sticky white dumpling. This is made before New Year's Day and eaten during the beginning of January.