On the second day of the New Year, the rain shutters open and the cold air of the pine-decoration season comes in. In a room where the spiced-sake flask has just been cleared away, a married couple meets the year’s first occasion anew. A hand stops while clearing the cups, glances cross, and an act passed over in the rush of the year’s turning is performed again as a rite marking the new year’s start. In Edo-period almanacs the characters for hime-hajime were printed in red, and a housewife would trace them with her finger: the meeting of a sign on paper and an act in the bedroom lies around this word.

Hime-hajime is a Japanese calendar term for the first activity of the New Year, prefixed with hime. In modern colloquial use it means a married couple’s first intercourse of the year. Recorded in Edo-period almanacs under several spellings, the word has more than one proposed origin, none settled.

The competing etymologies

Several explanations stand side by side, and which is the original sense is undecided.

One reading is hime-ii-hajime (soft-rice first): hime-ii is softly cooked rice, and the term marked the day of returning from the hard festival rice of the year’s end to ordinary soft rice, a domestic turning point. A second is hime-nori-hajime (rice-paste first): hime-nori is paste made by boiling down rice, and the term marked the day of resuming laundry and sewing with starch after the New Year, a practical turning point in housework. A third is hima-hajime / hime-hajime read as first horse-riding, an annual warrior practice of beginning equestrian training in the New Year. A fourth is himegoto-hajime (secret-affair first), reading it as a married couple performing the bedchamber anew at the year’s start, the sense that connects directly to the modern usage.

The original almanac usage was probably the first or second (soft rice or rice paste), but a folk re-reading as “secret affair” was already current in the Edo period through the similarity of sound, and from the modern era the folk reading became established, the standard view in folklore study.

In the almanacs

Almanacs widely used in households from the Edo into the Meiji period printed annual events alongside the dates. Hime-hajime appeared as one such entry on the second or third of the New Year. The character forms can be confirmed in Terajima Ryoan’s Wakan Sansai Zue (1712) and in various Ise and other almanacs. The entries were short, often a date with no explanation, so readers supplied the meaning from context. The bare printing was one cause of the folk reading’s spread: with no stated meaning, household and regional interpretations ran in parallel, and the folk reading gained ground from the late Edo into the Meiji period.

Late Edo and modern usage

From the late Edo period, senryu, comic verse, and shunga increasingly treated hime-hajime in a sexual sense. A series of shunga depicted the New Year bedchamber, in the lineage of Utagawa Kunisada and Kitagawa Utamaro, joining the New Year scenery of spiced sake, pine decorations, and battledore with the scene of the sleeping quarters, presenting a view of “sex as annual event.” From the modern era, references in comic verse and short comic tales grew further, and the almanac word and the colloquial word effectively separated. Annual-event handbooks from the 1970s onward standardised a double treatment, explaining the original meaning while noting the now-common sexual sense.

Present position

In present-day Japan, almanacs rarely print hime-hajime in the New Year column, and the word’s use is limited to the colloquial sense. The custom of being conscious of the year’s first intercourse survives as a private matter without ceremony, an unspoken topic between couples. The form also appears lightly in advertising copy and column headlines as a metaphor for “the year’s first,” as in “first writing of the year.” As a sexual annual event, hime-hajime ties to a calendar sense distinguishing festive-day sex from everyday sex; consciously marking the act within the non-everyday of the New Year works as a device for placing a turning point within a familiar relationship.

See also

• Edo-period sexual culture
• Yobai (night-crawling)
• Shunga