The fish are emblems of good luck, and are set up in the courtyard of every house where a son has been born during the year.

On this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed into eighty square miles of aquarium.
For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particular anniversaries.

Then everybody congratulates everybody else upon everything in general, and incidentally upon being alive.

Such substitution of an abstract for a concrete birthday, although exceedingly convenient for others, must at least conduce to self-forgetfulness on the part of its proper possessor, and tend inevitably to merge the identity of the individual in that of the community.
It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage.
Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in the result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever.

In fact, it is not his affair at all, but his father's.