Abstract
This paper is the result of a questionnaire survey about preparing and eating the New Year's special dishes, conducted in 1996 in order to clarify the change of traditional dietary custom in Japan. Most Japanese seemed to keep on practicing the custom from the fact that more than 90% of the total respondents had the dishes, zoni and osechi. Among some respondent's families of younger generation, however, another traditional special drink, toso, was just prepared for ceremonial sake or not prepared at all.70% of the respondents bought some dishes for osechi on sale at shop instead of preparing them by themselves at home. These facts suggested a trend of simplification of the dishes and diffusion of home meal replacement.
Formerly each family used to have its own style for preparing special dishes and hand it down from mothers (mothers-in-law) to daughters (daughters-in-law). Some of the respondents' families had their own styles of the traditional special dishes handed down to them from their ancestors. But since, in more than 50% of the respondent's families the special dishes are prepared by a housewife alone, this suggests the difficulty of transmitting such traditional families' dishes to next generation. Further we could find a tendency that among the younger generation, the preparation of such special dishes are not related to the gender's role difference.
