Random Memories: First Christmas Meal in Japan

I think this had to be our second Christmas in Tokyo. The T.V. was tiny so it had to be early on, but there were too many decorations for it to be the first one.  There were also too many videos in the cabinet for it to be within 7 months of our having moved there.

I will be returning next week to my "Tales From a Japanese Office" saga, but it was too good an opportunity to pass up to go back and explore some of my earliest Christmas memories from Japan.

When my husband and I moved to Japan in 1988, we took several books along to help us adapt to living there. One of those books was a book called "Food Buying in Japan" (linked book is newer than the version we used). This book endeavored to educate you such that you could go into a Japanese market and not be totally confused and overwhelmed. It may seem strange to people living there now to think that it could be so disorienting, but there were far fewer imported food items back then and far less English. It was the wild, wild East as far as figuring things out in supermarkets.

This guide, hard as it tried through pictures and English with Japanese and Chinese characters, did not really solve our problems. It didn't help that the book was in black and white and the pictures weren't the best, but the hardest thing was comparing squiggles in the book to squiggles in the store. We couldn't learn to read Japanese based on what the book presented.

The bottom line was that the book simply did not - and likely could not - cover all of the bases we would have wanted covered. It seemed to assume that we wanted to understand and prepare Japanese dishes for the most part so it focused on a lot explaining about what those things were. What we really wanted back in those early days was for it to mainly help us find Western food and avoid the "weird" Japanese stuff.

Most of the time, we resorted to visual assessment with the occasional tactile evaluation. Those round things that look like bread? We gave them a squeeze and they were hard as a rock. It wasn't until  many years later that I learned that they were wheat gluten.

Our very first Christmas meal in Japan.

Sometimes, our evaluations failed us. It looked like a duck, walked like a duck, but, man, it was not a duck. This was something which revealed itself to us during our first Christmas. No, we weren't trying to eat duck. We were looking to eat turkey.

We went to local markets and there was no joy on the turkey front. Even by the time we left Japan in 2013, it was very hard to locate such birds. Japanese people don't tend to eat them and they are too enormous to fit in most small Japanese ovens. We checked out KFC, and the answer to our needs appeared in the pictures on their menu. There was what looked like a large, roasted turkey leg. Hurrah!

We purchased the "turkey' and took it home for Christmas dinner. We also picked up a tiny Christmas cake (note the box behind the leg). After peeling back the foil and catching the aroma, something seemed very amiss. It didn't smell anything like turkey or even chicken for that matter. In fact, it smelled very much like ham. A taste showed that, despite all superficial appearances, we'd bought ourselves a bird-leg-shaped hunk of ham.

At that time in my life, I was not eating pork. The truth is that I still eat it rarely, but I was avoiding it entirely at that time so that meant I wouldn't partake of this repast. I do recall that, even if I had been forgiving of its porcine nature, I couldn't have bore the intensely sweet and smokey flavor. It was the most flavor-intense ham I'd ever tasted and I passed entirely.

The next year, we were so "scared" of buying the wrong thing that we completely gave up on anything resembling our own traditions. In order to be safe rather than sorry, we went for steak for my husband (as I don't eat beef) and a tiny little pizza for me. It ws somewhat deflating, but we had years ahead of us making the best of things rather than following our old family customs.

Over the years, one of our enduring difficulties was finding food which was appropriate for festive meals while living in Tokyo. When the Foreign Buyer's Club made turkey available, we often bought a turkey roll which they had available that was small enough for our oven (it was a de-boned turkey which had all of the rest of the bird intact - you'd be surprised how small it gets when you remove all of its supporting infrastructure). Now that we're back in the U.S., it seems almost too easy to get anything we want to eat. Of course, that applies only as long as "anything" isn't something Japanese. ;-)

Merry Christmas to all of my readers. I hope you have a lovely holiday.

Will Miss #514 - skinny Santas

Santa didn't used to be fat. This is something that I learned with a little research. It seems that the image of Santa which has become quite popular comes to us courtesy of Coca-Cola. They thought that a jolly, chubby Santa was more fun than a severe, skinny one. I don't know if the rotund Santa is popular worldwide, but I do know that that is the only way that I ever saw him growing up in the U.S. and that is the way in which he's generally portrayed in popular culture.

In Japan, Santa is depicted at times as amazingly slim and trim. That's because they are working with the mannequins they have and they don't care about padding him out to fit some Americanized image. Besides, the Santa costumes at hand were sewn with a Japanese physique in mind. If you're going to dress up a figure, you don't want to have to custom order an outfit for the portly gentleman.

Among the many things that said, "Japan" to me, were the skinny Santas that popped up in various displays. I miss seeing the slender Santa as one of many little reminders that Christmas is something rather different in Japan.

Random Memories #20

I'm not sure why the cat is the one sweating here, or why it is on a gift tag doing so.

It may be hard for people who have been to Japan to understand just how much it has changed in a short time. Sometimes, frankly, I find it difficult to believe or accurately remember. Fortunately, my 1987-88 books of memories are there to shake the cobwebs out of ancient memories and to remind me that Christmas as it is now is not as it has always been.

I guess the joke is that the cat is afraid the mice are going to eat it. Someone is unclear on the exact relationship between mice and cats. 

For starters, during the first year I actually lived in Japan (in 1989), it was very difficult to find much of anything in the way of Christmas cards or decorations, and what I did find was expensive. The commercial potential of this Western holiday was not being tapped because it wasn't really being celebrated much at all. Students who were children during that time told me that they got one gift placed near their futon. That was the extent of things for them. There wasn't a lot of Christmas partying and the old KFC route of celebrating was not yet in the cultural mainstream (if it existed at all). 

The girl is saying something like "how terrible" as she looks in the box, as someone appears to have abandoned this cat near the trash.

In 1987, when my boyfriend and future husband and I were spending our first Christmas "together" 3000 miles apart, he sent me 5 enormous packages with a great many more presents inside of them. He couldn't find any appropriate Christmas themed tags or paper, so he bought these tiny little cards with Japanese written on them which he could not understand at all. He chose them based on the fact that I loved cats and cats were on them.

The messages my husband wrote me are blurred, because my mush is none of your business. ;-)

Now that we understand enough Japanese to know what the cards are saying, the stories and themes on some of them seem a bit strange for gifts. Perhaps they are jokes that language understanding alone will not help me "get". Perhaps it is something about Japanese sensibilities that escapes me despite my many years in the country (certainly a possibility). Or, maybe the fact that these are "present for you" cards and the illustrations and the stories they tell are utterly unrelated. The intent may be to entertain the receiver, not to necessarily convey a message.

So, the first Christmas gifts I ever got from Japan were uniquely Japanese in every conceivable way and did not even reflect the spirit of the season. They did, however, reflect a unique mentality and a time when Western culture hadn't encroached quite so deeply into Japanese culture. The lack of unique Christmas items at one point made me sad, but now, I think the memories are all the better for it. 

Happy holidays to all of my readers!

Won't Miss #506 - vanishing Christmas decorations

Last night, my husband and I were walking around a street (in California) that is known for putting up elaborate Christmas displays. When we were finished looking at the beautiful displays in front of people's homes, I remarked to my husband that I was looking forward to the holiday displays living beyond the 25th. In Tokyo, every little sign of Christmas tended to vanish by midnight on December 25th. In the U.S., at least in the past, such things tended to live on until New Year's (sometimes beyond). The way in which such things instantly disappeared in Tokyo always made me a little depressed. The holiday feeling felt as it it was washed away the minute it had lived its commercial course. Note that this was not the case with New Year's decorations. They tended to hang around for quite some time, as would be expected for a holiday that the Japanese themselves had an emotional investment in as their biggest celebration. I certainly don't "blame" them for that at all, but it did make me sad.

The way in which all vestiges of the holiday vanished by daybreak on the December 26 underscored how unimportant the holiday was for the Japanese and reminded me of my cultural isolation and I won't miss that. 

I hope all of my readers are having a happy holiday season, and that they leave their trees up until New Years. ;-)

Random Memories #3

Click to see a bigger version.

My very first exposure to teaching in Japan came second-hand through my husband's experiences. At the time that he was dipping into the world of ESL in Japan, he was my boyfriend rather than my legally recognized partner of 23 years. He signed on for a 1-year hitch at a company called AMVIC and it's safe to say that he operated rather cluelessly in the job for most of his tenure there. Looking back on some of the things he did with the cultural understanding and perspective I now have, I'm sure that the Japanese were pretty irritated by what he viewed as fully rational choices at the time, like going out and walking around the local area when he had no lessons scheduled rather than sitting in the office and frowning at lesson preparation materials and pretending that he actually had work to do.

AMVIC split into two different schools some time after my husband returned to California. Those two schools were Aeon, which still exists, and Geos, which sunk a few years before I left Japan. I visited his school a few times during my month of vacation there in 1988. The Japanese office staff were gracious to me, but I think, in retrospect, that they may have been uncomfortable with a girlfriend popping in to meet her boyfriend for lunch. We didn't exactly fondle each other in front of them, but such things tend not to happen much in Japanese offices.

The picture above is a memory of AMVIC. It's a postcard that the school produced for Christmas to send out to their students. My husband and I also have a poster of this picture which he saved as a memory of his earliest days in Japan. Seeing it reminds me not only of what was one of the best months of my life and the reason I decided to live in Japan, but also of how staying there for a short time is not enough to really understand the culture. AMVIC is where my husband did many things wrong, not because he wanted to, but because nobody explained to him that things were different there as part of his training. Too often, the focus is on the minutiae of getting along in Japan like how to use chopsticks, bowing, or greetings, and not on the broader aspects like communicative indirectness and the expectations of your particular workplace. If many foreigners fail to get along, a big reason for that is that they have no idea how to succeed.

Will Miss #404 - the blue forest

Worldwide, there are a lot of incredible places with illumination. Sometimes they are ostentatious and ridiculous and sometimes beautiful. I'm not a huge fan of the gigantic over-the-top displays and am more of a fan of places which manage to generate a mood. For me, the most magical display in Tokyo is the Blue Forest in front of the Caretta building in Shiodome. During the day, it's a bunch of metal and wires that resemble modern sculpture. At night, it's a magical field with trees. The atmosphere after dark when the lights go on is incredible. The care with which the lights are strung to create a perfect illusion of  hedges of light surrounding trees all made up of electronic glows is something I also associate with Japanese meticulousness. 

I will miss being able to see this magic made by strings of light and electricity. 

Will Miss #400 - east meets west xmas cards

Click for a bigger picture of Santas carrying a mikoshi in front of a temple. 

I realize that sending Christmas cards is a dying custom, but I still love them. Living in Japan affords me the chance to buy and receive unique designs that mix and match Japanese culture with traditional western Christmas imagery. Seeing this marriage between east and west, particularly when Santa is involved, is always a delight. There is virtually no place that the Japanese won't put old Kris Kringle, no matter how sacrilegious the juxtapositioning of the imagery may appear to be. There was once a story in The Japan Times about a department store that wanted an authentic nativity scene in their display window and sought the advice of a foreigner on the newspaper's staff. After setting up a manger with the  requisite components, the store decided it was all too solemn so they placed jolly old Saint Nick amongst those witnessing the savior's birth.

I will miss the amusing, quaint, and cute culturally mixed imagery that appears on Japanese Christmas cards.

Won't Miss #64 - working Christmas day

Every year I've spent in Japan, I've known that Christmas day won't be a national holiday and that my husband and I will be working. It shouldn't be a big deal, especially at my age, but it always makes me a little melancholy to find myself working as if it were just another day on December 25. It's not that I'm a Christian and it's a holy day to me, but rather having a lifetime of experiences that have shaped the notion that this is a very special day when everyone is home together celebrating.

I won't miss having to work on Christmas day.