Kurisumasu in Japan

Despite the lack of success met by Christian missionaries in Japan, Christmas is almost universally celebrated here. Not as an occasion to mark the birth of Our Savior, but as an excellent excuse to have a party, or, in the case of young couples, an intimate party-of-two of the sort that young couples are best at. In other words, Christmas here is something like Valentine's Day and the Fourth of July combined, with less nationalism and more presents for the kids.

As an adopted holiday, there are a couple of places where the transfer of culture has failed which give Christmas in Japan its own particular flavor.  All of the yuletide action here occurs on Christmas Eve, whether you are an aforementioned young couple or not, and a common tradition for Christmas Eve here is to have cake. There's currently a passion here for all things French; most cheese is marketed under the name Camembert, for instance, no matter what kind of cheese-product it actually is.  Nevertheless, bouche de noel is not the standard, though it's not unheard of. Rather, one tends to get a Japanese-style cake with a few Santa decorations (see above).

One night when faced with my umpteenth meal containing parts of God's creatures I don't normally eat, I asked those of my companions who'd spent time in the U.S. if there were aspects of American cuisine that they found challenging in the same way that an American might struggle with raw octopus. I was disappointed enough in the result of my challenge to launch into the best description of chit'lins I could manage having never eaten them myself, but after more blank looks were exchanged, the only consensus opinion was cake. The color(s), in particular, were a problem. I've seen some unnaturally bright greens and pinks in prepared Japanese food, but I'd have to concede that there's nothing I've seen in the junk food here that would prepare a Japanese innocent for the Lucky-Charms rainbow of artificially colored icing on your average American birthday cake. Having now had Japanese Christmas Eve cake, I can also say that the degree of sweetness expected from cake in Japan and America is altogether different. I have an atrophied sweet-tooth by American standards, which I guess is why Japanese Christmas Eve cake was so agreeable to me, and why the mere mention of American cake elicited tooth-sucking shudders from my hosts.

Another failure of cultural transfer I noted surrounded the name of the occasion. Y-san was astonished, and my choice of that word is not an exaggeration, to learn that the “Eve” in Christmas Eve does not refer to the companion created by God for Adam. The failure of even competent English-speakers here to connect the word “eve” with “evening” is so complete that the translation for the *real* holiday as it's celebrated here is “Eve's night.”

I had a pleasant if low-key christmas holiday consisting of a small house party at Y-san's on Christmas Eve, followed by a late-starting experimental day on Christmas. The big event here, yet to come, turns out to be New Year's.

We Now Return to Our Previously Scheduled Programming

All right, all RIGHT.  Between the settling-in, and the worst flu I've had in 10 years, and getting used to the insane Japanese science work schedule, I'm a little behind in the promised posting here.  

Shut up.  Stop nagging me and read the next post.

Japanese Bureaucracy

Japan is infamous for a dense and arbitrary bureaucratic culture, and from my limited experience so far, I can report an unusual attention paid to paperwork, and a fondness for seeing it multiply.  Virtually everyone who's touched my passport here, which is pretty much everyone who's stood on the other side of a counter from me (except the cafeteria ladies), has made at least one photocopy of it: two at the airport, one at the university, two at city hall (I had to register as a resident foreigner -- they like to keep tabs on us here), one at the bank, one at the hotel.  It would have been three at the apartment company, had Y-----san, my sponsor, not grown impatient and refused on my behalf.

True fact: it is unlawful in Japan to photocopy a passport.

And when it actually comes to the cherished activity of filling out forms, official persons always get a pained or anxious look on their faces when Y-----san explains that I can neither read nor write Japanese and perhaps it would be easier for everyone if I could just use romaji?  Easier, of course, is not really the idea, so usually there can be no romaji.  It is also not to be permitted that I allow Y-----san to fill out the forms on my behalf.  I must do it myself while official person watches.  So I've now several times been through the exercise of standing there while Y-san writes down the Japanese characters for me, and I copy them into the blanks on the forms.  And yet!  While it won't do to have Y-san write in information like my address, etc., the bank official today was perfectly happy to take my signature stamp away from me, go to another room, and use it to sign my name 5 or 6 times out of my sight, on legally binding agreements that she knew I could not read.

But at least there was no cheating on the address part.