A remainder of the New Years time. My partner got this hatsuyume eye mask as a gift at work. We didn’t use it, so I decided to discard of it, however, before doing so, I looked up the story behind it.
As far as I understand, hatsuyume is the first dream of the new year. People hope that the content of their dream will include a lucky vision for the year to come. Apparently the luckiest symbols everyone hopes to dream about are
1) Mount Fuji — ichi fuji
2) A hawk — ni taka
3) An eggplant — san nasubi
While doing my research, I came across several explanations for the hatsuyume custom and its symbols. Here and here you can find two of them.
katazukete 