This house-cleaning, even with the small amount of furniture found in a Japanese house, is an elaborate affair. Every box and closet and rubbish-hole in the house is turned out and put in order, the _tatami_ are taken up and brushed and beaten, the woodwork from ceiling to floor is carefully washed, the plaster and paper walls flicked with the paper flapper that takes the place in Japan of our feather duster. All the quilts and clothing must be sunned and aired, the kakémonos and curios belonging to the family unpacked, carefully dusted, and put back into their wrappings and boxes, and the house and garden put into perfect repair. This work, if thoroughly done, takes about a week. When all is finished, even to the final purification by beating everything in the house with a fresh bamboo, games and festivities and _soba_ are in order. In the old daimiō houses, where great numbers of men and women were employed, and where the women's quarters were in a distinct part of the house, it was considered a great joke to catch a man on the women's side any time between the close of the cleaning and the beginning of the new year. The intruder was promptly seized and shouldered by the women, who carried him about the house in triumph, finally returning him to his own quarters. If, by any chance, they could catch the chief steward, they sang as they carried him about:-- "This is the great pillar of the house! May he be happy till the stone foundations rot!" The week following the house-cleaning is devoted to the preparation of food for the festival. Of this, the most characteristic is _mochi_, a sort of dumpling made of rice steamed and pounded, the preparation of which is so difficult and protracted a process that it is not lightly undertaken. It is so distinctively the festival food of Japan that if you find _mochi_ in a friend's house at any time except the new year, you immediately ask what has happened, and are pretty sure to be told that it is a present received in celebration of a birth or a marriage, or some other domestic festival. It is, to Japanese children, what turkey and cranberry sauce are to American children, not only a delight to the palate, but a dish the very smell of which brings back the most cheerful occasions in the year.