Winter Holidays in Japan
Happy New Year!!! Akemashite Omedeto Gozaimasu!! All the leaves have dropped off the trees and the fields have all been burnt which means that it is officially winter here in Japan and time for a brief respite from the work and school for winter holidays. This is the second time that I have spent the Christmas holidays in a foreign country and it's always interesting to see how a Western holiday like Christmas is interpreted and celebrated in a place like Asia. On the outside, it looks a lot like Christmas in Canada, albeit a little tackier. While most people don't decorate their houses with lights like we do, there are a few people who do and there is a large public Christmas tree that is lit up every night. The stores are decorated with the tackiest possible Christmas decorations including life-size dancing Santas (or Santa-san as they call him here) and there are lots of Christmas-y commercials on TV. Here is where the similarity ends. If you ask a Japanese person what kind of holiday Christmas is they will inevitably say that it is a romantic holiday. Yep, that's right! Christmas was made for romance. Japanese people like to go out on dates or stay home with their beloved and eat traditional Japanese Christmas food: Christmas cake and fried chicken, preferably from KFC. We even got to eat chicken and cake for a special school lunch on the 24th. (By the way, I still had to work on Christmas). Perhaps the fried chicken is meant to be a substitution for the North American Christmas turkey which is quite a rare bird in this part of the world. As for the reason why the Japanese celebrate Christmas, well, I couldn't tell you, but I suspect that it may have something to do with the Japanese obsession with anything Western. However, I found it interesting that most of the students in my classes seem to know very little about how Christmas is celebrated in Western countries and were rather shocked and amazed when I told them that Santa has a mailing address in Canada and that my family eats reindeer for Christmas dinner. I think that like with many things that Japan has adopted from foreign countries, the Japanese have truly made Christmas into a uniquely Japanese holiday.
However, I did get to celebrate Christmas in a more traditional fashion; Hoff and I threw a Christmas party for which I made several of my family's favourite Christmas dishes. They were a big hit and the next day, a few of us got together to exchange presents and eat some real turkey which one of our well-connected friends was able to find for us. We all ate at least three helpings. On the 26th, my school had its closing ceremony marking the official beginning of the Christmas holidays. Hoff headed off to Korea and well, I headed to bed for some much needed rest before the ‘Goenkai' later that evening. A ‘Goenkai' is a "forget the year" party. The party was being held for all of the teachers of my school, meaning that I was going to be the only gaijin there. So we all got onto a bus and headed out to Tanigumi. The enkai was set up in a traditional manner with superb food as usual (I got to try ‘koi' or carp for the first time; apparently it is very expensive, but delicious!), and the "forgetting" part of the enkai started when the liquor began to flow. The Japanese become entirely different people during enkais; the usual seriousness and decorum of the teacher's room is abandoned and people are free to say things and behave in a way in which they ordinarily wouldn't be allowed. In an effort to be sociable, practice my Japanese and avoid getting drunk myself, I grabbed a bottle of beer and started circulating around the room, pouring drinks for the other teachers. I began with my principal and vice-principal who don't speak any English really and rely on the English teachers to translate for them. My principal was very insistent on finding out how many times per day a man says "I love you" to his wife in Canada. He wasn't very pleased when I said that I didn't know and actually asked me about how it is in my parents' case!! I think that he is a very intelligent, but very conservative man who for some reason is very interested in the relationships between men and women in Western countries. From there I moved on to one of the music teachers, a very loud and boisterous middled-aged woman with a wacky sense of humour. She was very willing to speak to me in Japanese, but in her excitement to tell me all about the students' graduation ceremony this coming March, she became frustrated and called over one of the English teachers to translate line by line the song which the graduating students will be singing. Then I moved on to speak with some of the other Gr. 2 teachers, one of whom was a quite "forgetful" PE teacher who speaks a little bit of English. In a very loud voice he proceeded to ask me which one of the male teachers present I liked the best. I told him, "You, of course!" and he starting whooping with the other teachers. He then offered me his sake which I polished off in one gulp much to their delight and I taught them the English expression, "chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug". Then in his excitement, he asked me the same question again and then almost fell over on me. Fortunately, I was saved by another teacher who was very excited to tell me about how he had been skiing in Canada twice. When I told him that I didn't like downhill skiing, he jokingly asked me, "Are you Canadian?" I found this quite humourous as we gaijin often ask Japanese people who don't like Japanese things (ie. fish), "Are you Japanese?". Then I moved on to a couple of the Japanese teachers. They admitted that they couldn't speak any English, but that was fine. The older woman asked me about if I had a boyfriend in Canada and when I said that I didn't, she asked me about what I thought of Japanese men. The Japanese are always very interested in knowing about your marital status and one sometimes gets the feeling that they might be interested in getting you set up with someone. Anyhow, the conversation then turned to food and I was explaining that we have ‘matcha' or green tea flavoured ice cream in Canada. The other teacher started laughing because he thought that ‘matcha' sounds a lot like macho. Macho, of course is an English word, but the Japanese have adopted it and it seems to have a similar meaning. This particular teacher is a very buff and handsome man that many of the students have a crush on. So I asked him, ‘Macho desu ka?', "Are you macho?" to which he replied by flexing his pecs for me. I was just about rolling on the floor laughing and then me and the other teacher teased him about how the young female students always come up to him, hoping to cop a feel of his muscular arms. Unfortunately, this was to be the last of my interesting encounters with the teachers. The enkai ended abruptly at 9pm which was kind of disappointing for me as I was hoping to enjoy some karaoke with the teachers. It's not so much that I wanted to subject the teachers to my horrible warbling, but I was hoping to see some of the teachers do some singing. Earlier in December, I went out to karaoke with a few of the English teachers and got to watch the two younger ones sing Japanese punk rock music and mosh together on the small karaoke stage. Something I will never forget!!
So well, this was the beginning of my holidays... A couple of days later, I taught a special class at another junior high school where I taught them some stuff about Canada and we made Christmas cookies. It was a lot of fun and then I went to visit an English teacher from a nearby junior high school who had invited me to her house to watch her family make their home made mochi for New Year's. Mochi is a delicious, soft, sticky rice cake that is traditionally eaten at New Year's and also presented to the gods as an offering. Now while Christmas is considered a romantic holiday in Japan, New's Year's is just the opposite. It's all about family. Being in their home reminded me of Christmastime with my family when we would do our lefse making and everyone in the family would hang out together and help out. Here, the father pounds the boiled mochi rice (they use a special type of rice for making mochi) in the large stone basin with a big wooden hammer, while the wife intermittently kneads the rice as it becomes more doughy. Then when it is finished, she starts pulling off clumps of it and throws it onto a small square platform layed out on the kitchen floor and covered with rice flour. The other family members sit around the platform and roll the mochi into round shapes, covering it with the flour or with a tasty powder made from soybeans. They invited me to help out with this part which was kind of messy, but throughly enjoyable. When the work was finished, we all sat and had a simple lunch of rice and nabe, which is a delicious winter stew cooked in a special pot over a portable burner with lots of green vegetables, kimchee (Korean hot pickled cabbage), and white miso (fermented soybean paste). Then we spent the rest of the afternoon chatting about religion, etc. and I discovered that her teenage daughter had been to Canada and spoke pretty good English as well. I also discovered something else that is quite interesting. Japanese people are always interested about what foreigners think about Japan and for some reason often think that most foreigners really don't care for Japan too much. The English teacher started talking about previous ALT's who had lived and worked in the area and mentioned about how many of them didn't like living in the countryside and didn't like Japanese food, etc. From her conversation, I realized something that I hadn't really noticed before; when a foreigner doesn't like Japan or Japanese things, Japanese people seem to take it quite personally. Maybe it's insensitivity on our part and I'm sure that I've been guilty of it too, but even the most objective criticism seems to weigh heavily on the Japanese heart. For the most part, I have found most Japanese to be extraordinarily soft-hearted and to be highly subjective in their thinking. It's interesting to note that the Japanese use the same word for heart and mind; this is also true of Tibetan and Sanskrit, while in English we have two separate words for these concepts. Maybe this says something about the nature of Asian thinking and makes me wonder why we as Westerners have chosen to separate the two. (By the way, the English language comes from Sanskrit, so I wonder historically when the split occurred). Anyhow, it makes me want to be more careful about how I choose to express my opinions to Japanese people.
After a nice relaxing weekend, I went to Kyoto for a day with some Japanese friends. They're both teachers with pretty good English. The wife, especially is really smart and has taught me a lot about Japanese culture and history. So what did we go to Kyoto for? Well to visit temples of course!! In Japanese there is even a special verb just for describing the act of visiting temples and shrines. There is so much to see in Kyoto, so we just confined ourselves to an area on the western edge of the city, nestled in the mountains. Unfortunately all of the leaves have fallen off of the trees, so we couldn't enjoy the fall colours, but it was beautiful just the same. Each one that we visited had some different wonderful attraction: beautiful scenery, a picturesque graveyard, wonderful statues and even sublime poetry. I'll save you the boring nit-picky details, but it was quite an enjoyable day and I even got to see my first Japanese monkey. Believe it or not, many Japanese don't realize that we don't have monkeys in North America and always wonder why we get so excited about seeing them.
Now the real topper for the holidays is Oshogatsu. Oshogatsu is Japanese New Year's. My Japanese teacher invited me to got to her home to eat traditional Japanese New Year's food with her and her husband. Her husband cooked some delicious soba noodles and tempura for us and since he doesn't speak English, I got in some good Japanese practice. Then we went to a mutual friends' place where we hung out for a while and played cards and I got to show them why one shouldn't play cards with a Keeling. Then at about 11:30, we went to our friends' father's place to ring the bell for New Year's. Her father is a Buddhist priest and it is the Japanese custom to ring the temple bells 108 times before midnight. The belief is that there are 108 worldly desires that people should rid themselves of and that by ringing the bell 108 times, these desires should be dispelled. When we got to her father's temple, we stood around a nice fire outside, drinking cloudy sake heavily spiced with ginger. We each got a turn to ring the bell and place a marble in the box to keep count of the number of tolls. Japanese temple bells do not have a ringer inside the bell, but rather are struck on the outside by a small log suspended by chains beside the bell. I got to strike the bell twice. Then we headed off to Kegon-ji in Tanigumi, the largest temple in the immediate area, to get our New Year's fortune. Now in Japan, this is truly the thing to do at New Year's. It is almost like a festival with the approach to the temple lined with food stalls selling delicious food and people from every Japanese social group come out to pay their respects at the temple. There were a lot of people, but it wasn't as bad as some places where apparently you have to wait for several hours to get up to the temple. So we went up, deposited our coins and picked a piece of folded paper from the box next to the coin tray. Then we eagerly opened up our fortunes to see what is in store for us for the coming year. Mine was 83 luck (I'm not sure what this means), but it's supposed to be pretty lucky, as long as I don't build a house in the coming year?!? So if you pick a good fortune, you are supposed to take it home with you. One of my friends got a fortune that he didn't really care for, so he tied it to a tree on the temple grounds, which is the Japanese custom. So I have to admit this has been the most enjoyable New Year's that I've spent in a long time and now I'm looking forward to enjoying the rest of the holidays. I haven't quite decided what I ‘m going to do yet, it's either going to be cross-country skiing up north or meditation in Kyoto.
So I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year's and I'll send another update soon!!!
Cheers,
Willow
Happy New Year!!! Akemashite Omedeto Gozaimasu!! All the leaves have dropped off the trees and the fields have all been burnt which means that it is officially winter here in Japan and time for a brief respite from the work and school for winter holidays. This is the second time that I have spent the Christmas holidays in a foreign country and it's always interesting to see how a Western holiday like Christmas is interpreted and celebrated in a place like Asia. On the outside, it looks a lot like Christmas in Canada, albeit a little tackier. While most people don't decorate their houses with lights like we do, there are a few people who do and there is a large public Christmas tree that is lit up every night. The stores are decorated with the tackiest possible Christmas decorations including life-size dancing Santas (or Santa-san as they call him here) and there are lots of Christmas-y commercials on TV. Here is where the similarity ends. If you ask a Japanese person what kind of holiday Christmas is they will inevitably say that it is a romantic holiday. Yep, that's right! Christmas was made for romance. Japanese people like to go out on dates or stay home with their beloved and eat traditional Japanese Christmas food: Christmas cake and fried chicken, preferably from KFC. We even got to eat chicken and cake for a special school lunch on the 24th. (By the way, I still had to work on Christmas). Perhaps the fried chicken is meant to be a substitution for the North American Christmas turkey which is quite a rare bird in this part of the world. As for the reason why the Japanese celebrate Christmas, well, I couldn't tell you, but I suspect that it may have something to do with the Japanese obsession with anything Western. However, I found it interesting that most of the students in my classes seem to know very little about how Christmas is celebrated in Western countries and were rather shocked and amazed when I told them that Santa has a mailing address in Canada and that my family eats reindeer for Christmas dinner. I think that like with many things that Japan has adopted from foreign countries, the Japanese have truly made Christmas into a uniquely Japanese holiday.
However, I did get to celebrate Christmas in a more traditional fashion; Hoff and I threw a Christmas party for which I made several of my family's favourite Christmas dishes. They were a big hit and the next day, a few of us got together to exchange presents and eat some real turkey which one of our well-connected friends was able to find for us. We all ate at least three helpings. On the 26th, my school had its closing ceremony marking the official beginning of the Christmas holidays. Hoff headed off to Korea and well, I headed to bed for some much needed rest before the ‘Goenkai' later that evening. A ‘Goenkai' is a "forget the year" party. The party was being held for all of the teachers of my school, meaning that I was going to be the only gaijin there. So we all got onto a bus and headed out to Tanigumi. The enkai was set up in a traditional manner with superb food as usual (I got to try ‘koi' or carp for the first time; apparently it is very expensive, but delicious!), and the "forgetting" part of the enkai started when the liquor began to flow. The Japanese become entirely different people during enkais; the usual seriousness and decorum of the teacher's room is abandoned and people are free to say things and behave in a way in which they ordinarily wouldn't be allowed. In an effort to be sociable, practice my Japanese and avoid getting drunk myself, I grabbed a bottle of beer and started circulating around the room, pouring drinks for the other teachers. I began with my principal and vice-principal who don't speak any English really and rely on the English teachers to translate for them. My principal was very insistent on finding out how many times per day a man says "I love you" to his wife in Canada. He wasn't very pleased when I said that I didn't know and actually asked me about how it is in my parents' case!! I think that he is a very intelligent, but very conservative man who for some reason is very interested in the relationships between men and women in Western countries. From there I moved on to one of the music teachers, a very loud and boisterous middled-aged woman with a wacky sense of humour. She was very willing to speak to me in Japanese, but in her excitement to tell me all about the students' graduation ceremony this coming March, she became frustrated and called over one of the English teachers to translate line by line the song which the graduating students will be singing. Then I moved on to speak with some of the other Gr. 2 teachers, one of whom was a quite "forgetful" PE teacher who speaks a little bit of English. In a very loud voice he proceeded to ask me which one of the male teachers present I liked the best. I told him, "You, of course!" and he starting whooping with the other teachers. He then offered me his sake which I polished off in one gulp much to their delight and I taught them the English expression, "chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug". Then in his excitement, he asked me the same question again and then almost fell over on me. Fortunately, I was saved by another teacher who was very excited to tell me about how he had been skiing in Canada twice. When I told him that I didn't like downhill skiing, he jokingly asked me, "Are you Canadian?" I found this quite humourous as we gaijin often ask Japanese people who don't like Japanese things (ie. fish), "Are you Japanese?". Then I moved on to a couple of the Japanese teachers. They admitted that they couldn't speak any English, but that was fine. The older woman asked me about if I had a boyfriend in Canada and when I said that I didn't, she asked me about what I thought of Japanese men. The Japanese are always very interested in knowing about your marital status and one sometimes gets the feeling that they might be interested in getting you set up with someone. Anyhow, the conversation then turned to food and I was explaining that we have ‘matcha' or green tea flavoured ice cream in Canada. The other teacher started laughing because he thought that ‘matcha' sounds a lot like macho. Macho, of course is an English word, but the Japanese have adopted it and it seems to have a similar meaning. This particular teacher is a very buff and handsome man that many of the students have a crush on. So I asked him, ‘Macho desu ka?', "Are you macho?" to which he replied by flexing his pecs for me. I was just about rolling on the floor laughing and then me and the other teacher teased him about how the young female students always come up to him, hoping to cop a feel of his muscular arms. Unfortunately, this was to be the last of my interesting encounters with the teachers. The enkai ended abruptly at 9pm which was kind of disappointing for me as I was hoping to enjoy some karaoke with the teachers. It's not so much that I wanted to subject the teachers to my horrible warbling, but I was hoping to see some of the teachers do some singing. Earlier in December, I went out to karaoke with a few of the English teachers and got to watch the two younger ones sing Japanese punk rock music and mosh together on the small karaoke stage. Something I will never forget!!
So well, this was the beginning of my holidays... A couple of days later, I taught a special class at another junior high school where I taught them some stuff about Canada and we made Christmas cookies. It was a lot of fun and then I went to visit an English teacher from a nearby junior high school who had invited me to her house to watch her family make their home made mochi for New Year's. Mochi is a delicious, soft, sticky rice cake that is traditionally eaten at New Year's and also presented to the gods as an offering. Now while Christmas is considered a romantic holiday in Japan, New's Year's is just the opposite. It's all about family. Being in their home reminded me of Christmastime with my family when we would do our lefse making and everyone in the family would hang out together and help out. Here, the father pounds the boiled mochi rice (they use a special type of rice for making mochi) in the large stone basin with a big wooden hammer, while the wife intermittently kneads the rice as it becomes more doughy. Then when it is finished, she starts pulling off clumps of it and throws it onto a small square platform layed out on the kitchen floor and covered with rice flour. The other family members sit around the platform and roll the mochi into round shapes, covering it with the flour or with a tasty powder made from soybeans. They invited me to help out with this part which was kind of messy, but throughly enjoyable. When the work was finished, we all sat and had a simple lunch of rice and nabe, which is a delicious winter stew cooked in a special pot over a portable burner with lots of green vegetables, kimchee (Korean hot pickled cabbage), and white miso (fermented soybean paste). Then we spent the rest of the afternoon chatting about religion, etc. and I discovered that her teenage daughter had been to Canada and spoke pretty good English as well. I also discovered something else that is quite interesting. Japanese people are always interested about what foreigners think about Japan and for some reason often think that most foreigners really don't care for Japan too much. The English teacher started talking about previous ALT's who had lived and worked in the area and mentioned about how many of them didn't like living in the countryside and didn't like Japanese food, etc. From her conversation, I realized something that I hadn't really noticed before; when a foreigner doesn't like Japan or Japanese things, Japanese people seem to take it quite personally. Maybe it's insensitivity on our part and I'm sure that I've been guilty of it too, but even the most objective criticism seems to weigh heavily on the Japanese heart. For the most part, I have found most Japanese to be extraordinarily soft-hearted and to be highly subjective in their thinking. It's interesting to note that the Japanese use the same word for heart and mind; this is also true of Tibetan and Sanskrit, while in English we have two separate words for these concepts. Maybe this says something about the nature of Asian thinking and makes me wonder why we as Westerners have chosen to separate the two. (By the way, the English language comes from Sanskrit, so I wonder historically when the split occurred). Anyhow, it makes me want to be more careful about how I choose to express my opinions to Japanese people.
After a nice relaxing weekend, I went to Kyoto for a day with some Japanese friends. They're both teachers with pretty good English. The wife, especially is really smart and has taught me a lot about Japanese culture and history. So what did we go to Kyoto for? Well to visit temples of course!! In Japanese there is even a special verb just for describing the act of visiting temples and shrines. There is so much to see in Kyoto, so we just confined ourselves to an area on the western edge of the city, nestled in the mountains. Unfortunately all of the leaves have fallen off of the trees, so we couldn't enjoy the fall colours, but it was beautiful just the same. Each one that we visited had some different wonderful attraction: beautiful scenery, a picturesque graveyard, wonderful statues and even sublime poetry. I'll save you the boring nit-picky details, but it was quite an enjoyable day and I even got to see my first Japanese monkey. Believe it or not, many Japanese don't realize that we don't have monkeys in North America and always wonder why we get so excited about seeing them.
Now the real topper for the holidays is Oshogatsu. Oshogatsu is Japanese New Year's. My Japanese teacher invited me to got to her home to eat traditional Japanese New Year's food with her and her husband. Her husband cooked some delicious soba noodles and tempura for us and since he doesn't speak English, I got in some good Japanese practice. Then we went to a mutual friends' place where we hung out for a while and played cards and I got to show them why one shouldn't play cards with a Keeling. Then at about 11:30, we went to our friends' father's place to ring the bell for New Year's. Her father is a Buddhist priest and it is the Japanese custom to ring the temple bells 108 times before midnight. The belief is that there are 108 worldly desires that people should rid themselves of and that by ringing the bell 108 times, these desires should be dispelled. When we got to her father's temple, we stood around a nice fire outside, drinking cloudy sake heavily spiced with ginger. We each got a turn to ring the bell and place a marble in the box to keep count of the number of tolls. Japanese temple bells do not have a ringer inside the bell, but rather are struck on the outside by a small log suspended by chains beside the bell. I got to strike the bell twice. Then we headed off to Kegon-ji in Tanigumi, the largest temple in the immediate area, to get our New Year's fortune. Now in Japan, this is truly the thing to do at New Year's. It is almost like a festival with the approach to the temple lined with food stalls selling delicious food and people from every Japanese social group come out to pay their respects at the temple. There were a lot of people, but it wasn't as bad as some places where apparently you have to wait for several hours to get up to the temple. So we went up, deposited our coins and picked a piece of folded paper from the box next to the coin tray. Then we eagerly opened up our fortunes to see what is in store for us for the coming year. Mine was 83 luck (I'm not sure what this means), but it's supposed to be pretty lucky, as long as I don't build a house in the coming year?!? So if you pick a good fortune, you are supposed to take it home with you. One of my friends got a fortune that he didn't really care for, so he tied it to a tree on the temple grounds, which is the Japanese custom. So I have to admit this has been the most enjoyable New Year's that I've spent in a long time and now I'm looking forward to enjoying the rest of the holidays. I haven't quite decided what I ‘m going to do yet, it's either going to be cross-country skiing up north or meditation in Kyoto.
So I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year's and I'll send another update soon!!!
Cheers,
Willow
posted by Willow at
11:05 AM
