Hatsumode is the first visit to a Shinto shrine (or Buddhist temple) of the new year, one of the most widely observed of all Japanese customs, undertaken in the opening days of January by the great majority of the population regardless of the depth of their religious commitment. The worshipper comes to give thanks for the year past and to pray for health, happiness, success and safety in the year beginning, making the customary shrine visit, purifying at the water basin, offering a coin, bowing and clapping before the sanctuary, and voicing a prayer. The first days of the year see enormous crowds at the major shrines, and the visit is as much a shared national and family observance as a personal religious act.
The occasion has its own attendant customs: worshippers buy new protective amulets and arrows for the year and return the old ones to be ritually burned, draw paper fortunes that forecast the year's luck, and write wishes on votive tablets. Food stalls and a festive atmosphere surround the great shrines. Hatsumode exemplifies the characteristic texture of Shinto in modern Japanese life, an observance kept by many who would not describe themselves as religious, woven into the rhythm of the calendar and the family year, expressing a diffuse but real sense of gratitude, hope and connection to the kami and to tradition at the threshold of the new year.