On November 30, in the reading room of the Scientific and Technical Library of Lviv Polytechnic University, an evening of the Japanese culture – Bōnenkai – was held. The bōnenkai party (literally «forget the year gathering») was held for a close circle of friends, where the students learned about the New Year’s tradition of the Japanese and played their games.
At first there was a little bit of theory:
– The purpose of the party, as its name implies, is to forget the woes and troubles of the past year, and hopefully look to the new year. For this purpose, during December the Japanese visit restaurants, bars, and organize corporate parties. Such meetings are usually held at the end of the week, and often the celebration smoothly goes from one place to the other. During them people discuss with their business partners some working moments and make plans for the year to come, told Ihor Zorii, Head of the Ukrainian-Japanese Center of the Scientific and Technical Library at Lviv Polytechnic, to the third year students of ICSIT and IHSS, who are interested in Japanese culture and study the Japanese language.
The second part of the evening in the library was the games. Vasyl Trushchak, the Japanese teacher at the Department of Foreign Languages of Lviv Polytechnic told and showed how to play Kendama (the aim of this game is to catch one object with another, where both are joined by a string), Hanafuda (cards), games with a belt, hands, finger sumo wrestling, etc. Students had a lot of fun and learned that the Japanese also play board games in the centers for children and libraries.
