Last time I was in Japan I lived in Ishikawa-ken where I played a kind of live computer game on New Year's eve. Crowds of us gathered outside a three story temple with long balconies and loads of sliding doors on all sides from which monks dressed as badgers shuffled out in file, scattering beans into the crowd which we had to catch in special nets and then take home and hide in a 'rarely looked-at' corner. The beans would, for the coming year, subtly emit good luck radiowaves - but not for oneself, only for neighbours you hadn't met. It was widely acknowledged in the Ishikawa prefecture that one's good luck came from one's neighbour's secretly generous beans.

This new year, in Kurashiki, was a more sombre, squid-based, affair.

On the stroke of midnight the temple bells were rung 108 times to clear away the 108 defilements. We were gathered in the square, hundreds of us, dressed in red. As the bells rang we remembered times this year when we had dirtied ourselves with ungrateful complacency over good health, the false generosity of begrudged giving, prawn-greed, intimacies dishonoured with weak gagging, bland robotic anecdotes, unconscious repetitions of old facial tics, grey daymares of morbid self-pity, the excitement of complaint and bad news, loved ones tortured because we didn't have what we wanted and were too cowardly to make a dash for it, and for all the trees, clouds and sparrows we'd ignored, lost in trivial thoughts. By the simple act of recognition we purged ourselves. The monks chanted 'recognition is to really see is all we ever need to be free is recognition is to really see...' over and over, resonantly harmonising while, together, the crowd made the ten-handed sign of the squid, symbol of liberation and mystery. The crowd began to press, our sombre waggling limbs entangling into a vast web and we hummed together in collective warmth until the final bell was struck whereupon we backed out of the temple, reverent and cleansed.