As you can see in the photos on the upper row, there is a rooster design for 2017 New Year's greeting cards section at a shop, a big votive wooden board with a rooster design for a Shinto shrine, and a rooster figure on a rice cake for a New Year's offering.
However, the Japanese word of "Year of Rooster" is "Tori-doshi" and actually it just means "Year of Bird" phonetically. Thus people tend to stretch their interpretation and use other kinds of birds designs as same, although they know it originally meant "rooster".
Please look at the right end photo on the lower row. It is a display windows of a department store for the new year located in Shibuya. The left-hand side window shows "A Happy New Year" in Kanji (Chinese characters), and the right-hand side window shows many Kanji (Chinese characters) for various birds. The photo would be too small to read, but here are characters for crane, hawk, swan, heron, bush warbler...
You might think they seem to be too complicated characters to understand. Actually we don't have to know all of them to recognize the characters mean some kinds of birds. Kanji (Chinese characters) are ideograms, and there is a part of Kanji (Chinese characters) means "bird". So when passersby find the part in these complicated characters, they can tell they means different kinds of birds even though they don't know all of them exactly. Perhaps, some people would slow down to read them, then it can be a good idea for a display window.
If you find some bird designs after the New Year, they may be designs which meant this "Tori-Doshi (Year of Bird)"!
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