Festivals and traditions

Open it after playing: the correct answers are here.

1. Question 1. Which festival closes the Chinese New Year celebrations, fifteen days later?

   • The Lantern Festival
   • The Dragon Boat Festival
   • The Mid-Autumn Festival
   • Qingming

   Answer: The Lantern Festival falls on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, at the year’s first full moon. People eat round glutinous rice balls, yuanxiao, whose shape suggests the moon and family reunion.

2. Question 2. What does the red envelope of Chinese New Year traditionally contain?

   • A written wish
   • Money
   • Melon seeds
   • A bamboo sprig

   Answer: Money. The hongbao holds money, given by elders to children and unmarried adults. The amount avoids the number four, a homophone of "death", and favours even numbers; the digital version, launched by WeChat in 2014, now runs to billions of transfers.

3. Question 3. What does the Korean Chuseok celebrate?

   • The lunar new year
   • The autumn harvest
   • The birth of Buddha
   • The founding of the nation

   Answer: The autumn harvest. Chuseok falls on the full moon of the eighth lunar month. Families return to their ancestral village, honour their forebears through the charye rite and make songpyeon, rice cakes steamed on a bed of pine needles.

4. Question 4. What is thrown in Japan during Setsubun to drive out demons?

   • Salt
   • Roasted soybeans
   • Cherry petals
   • Coins

   Answer: Roasted soybeans. Mamemaki means throwing roasted soybeans while shouting "demons out, fortune in". You then eat as many beans as your age, plus one for the year beginning.

5. Question 5. Which tea is served during the Japanese chanoyu ceremony?

   • Sencha
   • Matcha
   • Hōjicha
   • Genmaicha

   Answer: Matcha is a powder of shaded leaves, whisked into water with a bamboo chasen rather than infused: you drink the whole leaf. The ceremony codified by Sen no Rikyū in the sixteenth century makes it the centre of an entire ritual.

6. Question 6. What does a torii mark at a shrine entrance?

   • The passage into sacred ground
   • The founder’s grave
   • The edge of the imperial estate
   • The start of a pilgrimage route

   Answer: The passage into sacred ground. The torii separates ordinary space from the kami’s domain. Custom is to bow before passing through and to walk at the sides of the path, the centre being reserved for the deity.

7. Question 7. What do the floats of the Nebuta festival in Aomori depict?

   • Fishing boats
   • Warriors and deities in washi paper
   • Carved wooden mountains
   • Woven straw animals

   Answer: Warriors and deities in washi paper. Each float is a wire frame stretched with washi paper and painted from the inside, lit by hundreds of bulbs. A nebuta-shi craftsman spends a full year on one.

8. Question 8. What does the Chinese Qingming rite involve?

   • Sweeping the ancestors’ graves
   • Floating lanterns on the river
   • Offering tea to neighbours
   • Fasting for three days

   Answer: Sweeping the ancestors’ graves. Qingming, "pure brightness", falls in early April. Families clean the graves, leave food and flowers and burn spirit money for the dead. It is also a spring outing: the day lends itself to kite flying and picnics.

9. Question 9. The hanbok is the traditional dress of which country?

   • Japan
   • China
   • Korea
   • Vietnam

   Answer: Korea. The Korean hanbok is recognisable by its high waist, curved lines and absence of pockets. Chinese hanfu and Japanese kimono follow different cuts: the kimono, notably, always closes left over right, the reverse being reserved for the dead.

10. Question 10. What do people do during the Japanese hanami?

    • Contemplate the cherry blossom
    • Climb a sacred mountain
    • Keep vigil on solstice night
    • Offer rice at the shrine

    Answer: Contemplate the cherry blossom. Hanami means "flower viewing". The custom comes from the Heian court, which composed poems under the cherry trees; it became a collective picnic in the Edo period. The weather agency publishes an annual blossom front that moves up the archipelago from south to north.