Thursday, 26 January 2012

FUKUBUKURO (JAPANESE LUCKY BAG)





I found out about the Fukubukuro or the Japanese lucky bag when I was watching a Chinese New Year entertainment programme on Astro. It seems that during the Lunar New Year, the Japanese merchants would make a bag filled with contents that are unknown to the potential buyers. The value of the contents in the lucky bags are said to be worth more than what the customer pays for it.  Think of how fun and exciting it is to buy one of these bags as one does not know what surprise is in store on opening them.
For your information, the prosperity or lucky bags above were sold at a supermarket in Sitiawan.

Here is more info about the Fukubukuro
Fukubukuro (福袋 lucky bag, mystery bag?) is a Japanese New Year's Day custom where merchants make grab bags filled with unknown random contents and sell them for a substantial discount, usually 50% or more off the list price of the items contained within. The low prices are usually done to attract customers to shop at that store during the new year. The term is formed from Japanese fuku(福, good fortune/luck) and fukuro (袋, bag). The change of fukuro to bukuro is the phenomenon known as rendaku. The fuku comes from the Japanese saying that "there is fortune in leftovers" (残り物には福がある). Popular stores' fukubukuro usually are snapped up quickly by eager customers, with some stores having long lines snake around city blocks hours before the store opens on New Year's Day. Fukubukuro are an easy way for stores to unload excess and unwanted merchandise from the previous year, due to a Japanesesuperstition that one must not start the New Year with unwanted trash from the previous year and start clean. Nowadays, some fukubukuro are pushed as a lavish New Year's event, where the contents are revealed beforehand, but this practice is criticized as just a renaming of selling things as sets.
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