Toshikoshi soba: a bowl to see the year out

Most celebrations end with something rich. Japan's year ends with a bowl of buckwheat noodles.

On ōmisoka (大晦日), New Year's Eve, households across Japan sit down to toshikoshi soba (年越しそば), "year-crossing soba". There's no banquet attached and no single recipe. Often it's just noodles in a hot broth, maybe with a piece of tempura on top. I think that modesty is exactly what makes it one of my favourite food customs anywhere.

The last meal of the year

New Year, shōgatsu (正月), is the biggest holiday in the Japanese calendar, a time for family, rest and fresh starts. The days before it are busy. Homes get a thorough end-of-year clean, ōsōji (大掃除), and special New Year dishes are prepared in advance.

Toshikoshi soba belongs to the evening of the 31st, once the work is done. Some families eat it as dinner, others as a late snack while they wait for midnight. There's no fixed rule. The custom is usually traced back to the Edo period (1603–1868), when soba was a popular everyday food in Edo, the city now called Tokyo, though exactly how it began isn't certain.

Why soba? The traditional explanations

Ask why it has to be soba and you'll meet several answers. None of them needs to be historically proven to do its job.

• A long life. Long, thin noodles stand for a long life. Some put it more gently: a life that's "thin and long", modest but lasting.
• Cutting off the old year. Buckwheat noodles break more easily than wheat ones when you bite them. Eating them is said to cut off the hardships and bad luck of the past year, so you don't carry them into the next.
• Gathering good fortune. One story says gold craftsmen used buckwheat dough to pick up stray flecks of gold dust in their workshops, so soba came to be linked with gathering money.
• Resilience. Some point out that buckwheat is a hardy plant that recovers after wind and rain, and wish the same for the year ahead.

These are the kind of explanations that gather around a custom over generations, and I find them charming precisely because they overlap. A long life, a clean break, a little luck, a little toughness: it's a fairly complete list of what anyone wants from a new year.

Some households take care to finish their soba before midnight, since leftovers carried into the new year are said to bring bad luck. Others are more relaxed about it. Either way, the bowl is meant to close something.

How the night goes

Soba is only one part of a New Year's Eve that has its own gentle rhythm.

Many people spend the evening in front of Kōhaku Uta Gassen (紅白歌合戦), NHK's long-running New Year's Eve music show, in which singers are split into red and white teams. Toward midnight, Buddhist temples ring their great bells in a ceremony called joya no kane (除夜の鐘). The bell is traditionally struck 108 times, a number linked to the 108 worldly desires of Buddhist teaching, and the sound carries a long way on a cold, still night.

After midnight, or over the following days, many people make hatsumōde (初詣), the year's first visit to a shrine or temple. New Year's Day then brings its own foods: tiered lacquer boxes of osechi (おせち) dishes and a bowl of ozōni (雑煮), the soup with rice cakes that we cover in our ozōni article.

Seen this way, toshikoshi soba is a hinge. It's the last plain meal before the feasting, the quiet bowl between the cleaning and the bells.

How to eat it

There's no fixed recipe, which is part of the appeal.

• Hot or cold. A hot bowl of kake soba, noodles in broth, suits a December night, but cold soba with dipping sauce is perfectly traditional too.
• Toppings. Shrimp tempura, a mixed vegetable fritter called kakiage, green onion and slices of fish cake are all common. In Kyoto, nishin soba, topped with sweet-simmered herring, is a popular choice.
• Fresh noodles at home. At the end of December, supermarkets and soba shops in Japan typically stock up on fresh noodles, and many people simply buy them, along with ready-made tempura, to cook at home.
• Eating out. Soba shops can get very busy on the 31st, so if you're in Japan and want to eat out, plan ahead. You can search the map for soba to see what's near you.

If you're new to buckwheat noodles, our beginner's guide to soba covers how to order, what the menu words mean and what to do with the pot of hot water that arrives at the end.

I like that the year ends not with a banquet but with a bowl you could eat on any ordinary day. The noodles are simple. The meaning is whatever you bring to the table: the things you're ready to let go of, and the things you hope will last.