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merii kurisumasu pt. II

By Matthew Ward | Saturday, Dec 2, 2006

It used to be that Santa didn't just spend his time in Japan welcoming young romantics to love hotels for hot sex, he also spent a lot of time getting crucified, too. Yep, poor Santa apparently used to get nailed up on crosses in various Mammon temples around the country.

Now, I can't really blame the Japanese for this mix-up: after all, the American Christmas that they base theirs on is pretty darn confused too. We have a bunch of distorted pagan solstice traditions mixed with the birth of Christ, who almost certainly wasn't born in late December, anyway. I mean, you have some elf from the North Pole named Santa Claus, who is merged with a saint from Turkey called Saint Nick, and Christ, and somehow they are related—the North Pole and Palestine and Turkey and jingle bells and Jesus and Mary and Saint Nick and Rudolph and Prancer and Prancer and Frosty the Snowman and Mrs. Santa Claus—even WE can't possibly explain how these things are connected, so it's no mystery why the Japanese managed to get mixed up about it.

Anyway, they do know that ONE of these Christmas characters got himself crucified, and it just seems that they used to get confused as to which one it was. Some people say that the story about a Japanese department store having a big crucified Santa Claus on display is an urban myth, but I've met various long-term expats here who insist on seeing crucified Santas in various places, so I'm pretty sure that it used to be a regular Japanese Christmas tradition, kind of like fried chicken and Christmas cake.

Oh yeah, the Japanese have special food for Christmas too. First, there are Christmas cakes. When I first heard the word “kurisumasa keeki” (“Christmas cake”), I thought that they were talking about fruitbread or something. No, a Christmas cake is a regular sugary birthday-style cake, albeit with little Santas and trees and reindeer on top. As for fried chicken, Kentucky Fried Chicken is said to do very good business on Christmas here. I think that they heard that Americans ate some kind of bird for Christmas, but turkey is pretty hard to find here, so they just substituted it with fried chicken. And now, most Japanese people are amazed when they find out that I, as an American, have never eaten Christmas cake or fried chicken for Christmas back home. I remember, on my first Christmas in Japan, my mother-in-law said “Oh, I should go get some fried chicken.” My wife said “Actually, they don't eat chicken for Christmas—that's just something we do.” And my mother-in-law was like “Oh REALLY???” It's kind of like how we North Americans eat fortune cookies after a Chinese meal, having no idea that fortune cookies don't even exist in China.