Christmas time in Tokyo and Other Oddities
Christmas/ NYE Traditions in Tokyo
1. Christmas colors are mostly blue with a little red and green. It's strange to see a lot of blue lighted christmas trees. At least it's a electriic blue one of my favorite colors!
2. Christmas is made for boyfriends and girlfriends more than for family. You generally don't spend time with your family on Christmas unless you are a little kid...then you get presents. But it's more like Valentine's day for lovers. Generally if you are a man dating a Japanese women you spend about $250-300 on a gift, no one does creative or small presents if they are in a relationship. J-girls can be very snitty and superficial about this.
3. The most common christmas meal in Japan for families is Christmas Strawberry shortcake and Kentucky fried chicken. NO joke. When I told my students we did not do this tradition at all they were flabergasted. They also don't celebrate Thanksgiving obviously, but were very surprised when I told them our holiday's and meals.
4. New Year's is probably the equivelant of xmas and thanksgiving, with NYE and NYday as strictly family days where you do nothing but eat traditional home cooked meals at mom's house and watch bad concerts and NYE specials. On NY day it is common to visit shrines. There isn't any present exchanging but kids generally get a nice amount of money from their parents till they are around 20 or so.
5. On Thanksgiving this year, I was dying for turkey and decided to go buy one at the store. Well you have to order them from the deli, they cost $135 and you have to order them 5 days in advance. They have to cook it for you because most apartments don't have ovens here. However you can get a 5 course meal with pumpkin pie, turkey, tatoes and the works for $50. I unfortunately missed out this year on that deal!
Living in Tokyo really is like living on the moon. Let's rehash some general oddities......
35 Points of Weirdness
1. Drive on the left side of the road / Walk on the left side of the sidewalk
2. Read up and down and right to left
3. Kanji doesn't represent English in anyway shape or form... the alphabet is 80,000 characters long or something
4. You shouldn't talk on the train, let alone talk on your cell phone. There are cell phone designated areas in most places...
5. It's considered rude to show emotion. It is considered better to say less than more. It is neccesary to show copious amounts of apologetic gratitude as much as possible for every interaction.
6. You can usually smoke many places indoors, most restaurants don't have a smoking section inside you just smoke anywhere.. but it's illegal or frowned upon to smoke anywhere outside you have to be in a designated smoking areas.--- It is also not illegal to bring children to bars, so many times in Nagoya which is a city 4 hours away from tokyo you would see people drinking and smoking at bars with their children out till 4am.
7. Being white or anything other than Japanese is basis for discrimination, and people will look at you strange if you go to certain local hang outs. Some places have blatant signs that say "no foreigners." I have experienced people not wanting to sit next to me on the train, crossing the street, refusing to give me free kleenex because I am foreigner. I have had friends searched by the police for no reason. It really opens your eyes to what people of other nationalities go through in America. Sometimes the racism is so harsh and frustrating and hurtful that it can be very wearing.
8. There is a whole culture of men who have dolls that they treat like a girlfriend or life partner. They carry them around. I once saw an elderly gentlemen in his late sixties who had a doll and I thought it was for a child but as I looked at him and the doll and the dolls eyes opened and he looked delighted that I witnessed his doll waking up. Talk about fucking creepy.
9. Cute is considered sexy, sexy is considered inappropriate. Pedophilia is embraced here meaning there aren't really laws protecting children, whole floors of video shops are dedicated to children swimming in pools, at parks etc. Yet Japan is so safe that you see 6 and 7 year olds commuting on trains by themselves reading books and acting like little adults. Yet you constantly see men reading comic books on the train, or porn. There is no shame in sex here because there isn't a Christian foundation, so men look at porn in 7-11's openly on the train, on the street, everywhere. So children are reading books and men are reading comic books. It's the moon!
10. It is so important to be polite here and everyone treats you with this "fake" politeness wherever you interact in public. It is all a farce... sometimes its nice but most of the time people act like robots, with fake smiles and this over the top apologetic behavior. They also look like a deer caught in headlights if you talk to them. They get nervous... This is when the "I have no idea and I am not going to help you figure anything out" attitude comes into play... (which is very bad customer service) and then leaves the customer no better off than if they didn't ask to begin with. Yet for a culture that is hellbent on being polite, they shove and push to get on a train. They shove and push to get on and off an elevator. If you fell over, or onto the train tracks or were hurt, people wouldn't help. They would just sit there and look at you with a blank look of surprise.
11. Suicide is embraced here and they happen constantly. People love to jump in front of trains everyday. Its a terrible inconvenience, and it costs their family a lot of money since their family has to pay for every sale lost during the delay. So many choose to jump in front of less busy lines. It is considerable more honorable to kill yourself than to disgrace your family. 40,000 suicides a year, more than murders by gun in America.
12. College is considered time to fuck off, high school is everything and students go to school for 12 hours a day almost. Cause they always have cram school.
13. The Japanese school system is exactly the same in every school in japan so from 9:20-9:30 every day in high school, students have to read a book. Can't be a magazine or newspaper article. The teachers must do the same. Half the time they pretend to read and look at the same page for 10 minutes. This happens with every student in every elementary, jr. high and high school in japan at the same time. Why hasn't anyone put this in the Guiness book of records .... like 100 million people reading for the same exact amount of time the same time of day every day of the week.????
14. Men are first here for everything. They get served first, they will sit in a seat before they would let a woman sit down on a train or bus.
15. 95% of Japanese women lay like a dead fish during sex. If they do make noises they say oyyyyy oyyyy oyyyyy and they often cry and tell their partner that they are "too big" even if that isn't the case because it turns Japanese men on to see women cry about how "big" they are. They are also notorious for never taking any responsiblity in any part of a romantic relationship...ie. letting men cheat on them, beat them, and be 90 types of awful and never leave them!
16. There is no tipping for anything.
17. Eating out is very cheap, buying food at the grocery store is very expensive.
18. Buying alcohol is very cheap at the store, and fairly cheap out... the entrance fee to get into an unknown band who has never played a show before with absolutely no following is always at least a $25-45 minimum to see anything live.
19. All you can eat and all you can drink all inclusive meals here are very common. It makes breaking the bill up very easy. There are a million Izakya which are restaurants that are cheap places to drink with really delicious food (a huge variety of eveyrthing you can imagine) A lot of time you get little private rooms where you take off your shoes and have a private party with your friends for 2-3 hours for about $30 a person (all you can eat and drink)
20. Public drinking is completely legal and being completely wasted passed out drink is also totally acceptable. I have seen people puke at restaurants. I have seen people fall down stairs. I have seen people so messed up on alcohol that they are passed out sitting up. I personallly have passed out at restaurant and a bar...just fell asleep and no one bothered me. Wait staff and bartendeers don't generally care especially if it's before the first train has started again.
21. There are no garbage cans or napkins easily accessible ever. Yet the city is so clean you could eat off the sidewalk. Everyone frowns deeply upon anyone who liters. Seperating garbage from burnable to non burnable is a huge deal....and your neighbors will freak out of i you don't follow the rules.
22. If you leave your futon to dry in the sun (which is very common because of mold) and you forget to bring it in or it's out too long your neighbors think you are dead and sometimes will contact the police.
23. Black crows and rats and cockroaches are rampant and the most annoying scary pests around! Crows attack people. One of my students said one landed on her head while she was riding her bike. They attack people when they take out their garbage in the morning. You can hear them all morning cawing. and they are huge......prehistoric......fucking scary! Not to mention the Japanese hornet that can kill you with one sting it disinigrates your skin and is 6 times larger than an N. american hornet.
24. Living here as a foreigner it is very common to not only live in a very small space ( my room is 67 sq feet.) but also to live with people from all over the world... I live with a Russian, Aussie, 3 Koreans, and a French guy. The people you meet from all over the world on a regular basis makes living in Tokyo amazing. it's part of the reason why I came here.
25. Books are like gold here. They are twice as expensive as back home and it's difficult to find what you are looking for.
26. I have paid $6 for a pear on many occasions. Its easy to spend $100 a day here. I think back in portland I could live on $20-30 a day.... for everything entertainment, alcohol, food, transportation.
27. Japanese people are stuck in 1998. All the music at the clubs is circa 1998-2002. I miss good music so much it makes me feel sick!!!! All the movies on tv are in that era of ET-Titanic and Armageddeon. Needless to say, scrunchies are in..... i will never wear one again, and it makes me cringe to see my students wear those horrid hair holders that I happily forgot for years and was rudely reminded of when i got here. So are spaghetti strap dresses with t-shirts under them.
28. Many, many, many Japanese men here are completely homo-erotic and feminine! high pitched voices, feminine mannerisms, hair that is so teased and done that it looks like they stuck their head in a dryer and then took hair spray and gently laid each piece. Yet they are mostly straight (however I think many would fuck anything given the chance.) The gay Japanese boys generally don't act gay at all. Go figure. Something about Japanese women love feminine guys.... And some of the most beautiful women you see, the most put together, glamorous and strikingly beautiful women are actually transgender. I have met many and could not tell even slightly that they were men. Absolutely gorgeous. So gay men not feminine, straight men very feminine and cross dressers/ transgender so genuinely female that I can't even tell the difference!!!! weird.
29. YOu generally can't get hired as a Japanese person for any companies if you don't have a steady job before you are 30. If you are over 30 and looking for work with a degree it's nearly impossible.. Japanese companies hire for life generally and the laws are set in place that you are virtually un-fire-able... the company would have to prove that you weren't trainable, that there was no other department in the company that could hire you...
30. it is common for Japanese people to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, and not claim overtime. It is frowned upon if you work less than this if you work for most Japanese companies. Some people work so hard and so long that many life insurance policies will pay their families more if they die at their desk. And many do. Not only that but it's also common for their coworkers to not even notice that they are dead. There have been cases of people dead at their desk for a week before anyone noticed. Hmmm what's that smell?
31. The "birthday" song... is the same in Japan as in America... in English. This doesn't seem so strange but how would you feel if your whole life you were sung happy birthday in Japanese your whole life!?? The integration of Engrish in this culture constantly amazes me.
32. Japanese people love to stand in line... even when they don't know what they are standing in line for....sometimes I see lines that go to nowhere. And if a store is new and has just opened up, expect to wait in lines to get into the store for months, until the newness wears off.
33. Japanese people ask the same 5 questions when you meet them. 1. Where are you from? 2. How long have you been here? 3. when are you going home? they coudln't possbily fathom you might actually want to live here for longer than a couple of years....so you can imagine the confusion and look of concern that you get if you say you are never leaving.) 4. Can you use chopsticks? (I say back to them "can you use a fork?") 5. Can you eat rawfish (DO you know who you are talking to here? I moved here for sushi!!! It's like don't ask me stupid fucking questions! ( I say that sometimes just to freak them out.
34. They don't say "ummm" Little did I know that "ummm" is actually a word. They say "ETOOOO" or "ANOOO" that is their version of umm... who would have thunk umm was a word.
35. They are so obsessed with disney, cartoon characters, and manga. (Disney capitalized on this idea and actually made a Disneyland for adults. Called Disney Sea, and it is absolutely hands down the most beautiful amazing amusement park I have ever been to.) It is also incredibly common for BF/GF to go there and get engaged. If you go to disneyland with someone you are dating it's considered to be getting very serious. However there is a new omen that if you go to disneyland with a BF/GF that you might be doomed to break up. I have heard from my Japanese friends this is probably due to the fact so many japanese people relationship hop that they end up breaking up anyway so they correlate it to this. It is also very common if a Japanese boy is going to break up with a girl that he does it at a train station so he can put her on the train when she starts to cry.
Referring back to Disneyland and manga.... Many subcultures of "cosplay" which is a whole huge community of people who spend thousands of dollars to replicate their favorite video game and cartoon characters. Kind of amazing costumes actually, I highly recommend looking them up along with checking out Harajuku girls (which is where I live... Harajuku!)
Christmas/ NYE Traditions in Tokyo
1. Christmas colors are mostly blue with a little red and green. It's strange to see a lot of blue lighted christmas trees. At least it's a electriic blue one of my favorite colors!
2. Christmas is made for boyfriends and girlfriends more than for family. You generally don't spend time with your family on Christmas unless you are a little kid...then you get presents. But it's more like Valentine's day for lovers. Generally if you are a man dating a Japanese women you spend about $250-300 on a gift, no one does creative or small presents if they are in a relationship. J-girls can be very snitty and superficial about this.
3. The most common christmas meal in Japan for families is Christmas Strawberry shortcake and Kentucky fried chicken. NO joke. When I told my students we did not do this tradition at all they were flabergasted. They also don't celebrate Thanksgiving obviously, but were very surprised when I told them our holiday's and meals.
4. New Year's is probably the equivelant of xmas and thanksgiving, with NYE and NYday as strictly family days where you do nothing but eat traditional home cooked meals at mom's house and watch bad concerts and NYE specials. On NY day it is common to visit shrines. There isn't any present exchanging but kids generally get a nice amount of money from their parents till they are around 20 or so.
5. On Thanksgiving this year, I was dying for turkey and decided to go buy one at the store. Well you have to order them from the deli, they cost $135 and you have to order them 5 days in advance. They have to cook it for you because most apartments don't have ovens here. However you can get a 5 course meal with pumpkin pie, turkey, tatoes and the works for $50. I unfortunately missed out this year on that deal!
Living in Tokyo really is like living on the moon. Let's rehash some general oddities......
35 Points of Weirdness
1. Drive on the left side of the road / Walk on the left side of the sidewalk
2. Read up and down and right to left
3. Kanji doesn't represent English in anyway shape or form... the alphabet is 80,000 characters long or something
4. You shouldn't talk on the train, let alone talk on your cell phone. There are cell phone designated areas in most places...
5. It's considered rude to show emotion. It is considered better to say less than more. It is neccesary to show copious amounts of apologetic gratitude as much as possible for every interaction.
6. You can usually smoke many places indoors, most restaurants don't have a smoking section inside you just smoke anywhere.. but it's illegal or frowned upon to smoke anywhere outside you have to be in a designated smoking areas.--- It is also not illegal to bring children to bars, so many times in Nagoya which is a city 4 hours away from tokyo you would see people drinking and smoking at bars with their children out till 4am.
7. Being white or anything other than Japanese is basis for discrimination, and people will look at you strange if you go to certain local hang outs. Some places have blatant signs that say "no foreigners." I have experienced people not wanting to sit next to me on the train, crossing the street, refusing to give me free kleenex because I am foreigner. I have had friends searched by the police for no reason. It really opens your eyes to what people of other nationalities go through in America. Sometimes the racism is so harsh and frustrating and hurtful that it can be very wearing.
8. There is a whole culture of men who have dolls that they treat like a girlfriend or life partner. They carry them around. I once saw an elderly gentlemen in his late sixties who had a doll and I thought it was for a child but as I looked at him and the doll and the dolls eyes opened and he looked delighted that I witnessed his doll waking up. Talk about fucking creepy.
9. Cute is considered sexy, sexy is considered inappropriate. Pedophilia is embraced here meaning there aren't really laws protecting children, whole floors of video shops are dedicated to children swimming in pools, at parks etc. Yet Japan is so safe that you see 6 and 7 year olds commuting on trains by themselves reading books and acting like little adults. Yet you constantly see men reading comic books on the train, or porn. There is no shame in sex here because there isn't a Christian foundation, so men look at porn in 7-11's openly on the train, on the street, everywhere. So children are reading books and men are reading comic books. It's the moon!
10. It is so important to be polite here and everyone treats you with this "fake" politeness wherever you interact in public. It is all a farce... sometimes its nice but most of the time people act like robots, with fake smiles and this over the top apologetic behavior. They also look like a deer caught in headlights if you talk to them. They get nervous... This is when the "I have no idea and I am not going to help you figure anything out" attitude comes into play... (which is very bad customer service) and then leaves the customer no better off than if they didn't ask to begin with. Yet for a culture that is hellbent on being polite, they shove and push to get on a train. They shove and push to get on and off an elevator. If you fell over, or onto the train tracks or were hurt, people wouldn't help. They would just sit there and look at you with a blank look of surprise.
11. Suicide is embraced here and they happen constantly. People love to jump in front of trains everyday. Its a terrible inconvenience, and it costs their family a lot of money since their family has to pay for every sale lost during the delay. So many choose to jump in front of less busy lines. It is considerable more honorable to kill yourself than to disgrace your family. 40,000 suicides a year, more than murders by gun in America.
12. College is considered time to fuck off, high school is everything and students go to school for 12 hours a day almost. Cause they always have cram school.
13. The Japanese school system is exactly the same in every school in japan so from 9:20-9:30 every day in high school, students have to read a book. Can't be a magazine or newspaper article. The teachers must do the same. Half the time they pretend to read and look at the same page for 10 minutes. This happens with every student in every elementary, jr. high and high school in japan at the same time. Why hasn't anyone put this in the Guiness book of records .... like 100 million people reading for the same exact amount of time the same time of day every day of the week.????
14. Men are first here for everything. They get served first, they will sit in a seat before they would let a woman sit down on a train or bus.
15. 95% of Japanese women lay like a dead fish during sex. If they do make noises they say oyyyyy oyyyy oyyyyy and they often cry and tell their partner that they are "too big" even if that isn't the case because it turns Japanese men on to see women cry about how "big" they are. They are also notorious for never taking any responsiblity in any part of a romantic relationship...ie. letting men cheat on them, beat them, and be 90 types of awful and never leave them!
16. There is no tipping for anything.
17. Eating out is very cheap, buying food at the grocery store is very expensive.
18. Buying alcohol is very cheap at the store, and fairly cheap out... the entrance fee to get into an unknown band who has never played a show before with absolutely no following is always at least a $25-45 minimum to see anything live.
19. All you can eat and all you can drink all inclusive meals here are very common. It makes breaking the bill up very easy. There are a million Izakya which are restaurants that are cheap places to drink with really delicious food (a huge variety of eveyrthing you can imagine) A lot of time you get little private rooms where you take off your shoes and have a private party with your friends for 2-3 hours for about $30 a person (all you can eat and drink)
20. Public drinking is completely legal and being completely wasted passed out drink is also totally acceptable. I have seen people puke at restaurants. I have seen people fall down stairs. I have seen people so messed up on alcohol that they are passed out sitting up. I personallly have passed out at restaurant and a bar...just fell asleep and no one bothered me. Wait staff and bartendeers don't generally care especially if it's before the first train has started again.
21. There are no garbage cans or napkins easily accessible ever. Yet the city is so clean you could eat off the sidewalk. Everyone frowns deeply upon anyone who liters. Seperating garbage from burnable to non burnable is a huge deal....and your neighbors will freak out of i you don't follow the rules.
22. If you leave your futon to dry in the sun (which is very common because of mold) and you forget to bring it in or it's out too long your neighbors think you are dead and sometimes will contact the police.
23. Black crows and rats and cockroaches are rampant and the most annoying scary pests around! Crows attack people. One of my students said one landed on her head while she was riding her bike. They attack people when they take out their garbage in the morning. You can hear them all morning cawing. and they are huge......prehistoric......fucking scary! Not to mention the Japanese hornet that can kill you with one sting it disinigrates your skin and is 6 times larger than an N. american hornet.
24. Living here as a foreigner it is very common to not only live in a very small space ( my room is 67 sq feet.) but also to live with people from all over the world... I live with a Russian, Aussie, 3 Koreans, and a French guy. The people you meet from all over the world on a regular basis makes living in Tokyo amazing. it's part of the reason why I came here.
25. Books are like gold here. They are twice as expensive as back home and it's difficult to find what you are looking for.
26. I have paid $6 for a pear on many occasions. Its easy to spend $100 a day here. I think back in portland I could live on $20-30 a day.... for everything entertainment, alcohol, food, transportation.
27. Japanese people are stuck in 1998. All the music at the clubs is circa 1998-2002. I miss good music so much it makes me feel sick!!!! All the movies on tv are in that era of ET-Titanic and Armageddeon. Needless to say, scrunchies are in..... i will never wear one again, and it makes me cringe to see my students wear those horrid hair holders that I happily forgot for years and was rudely reminded of when i got here. So are spaghetti strap dresses with t-shirts under them.
28. Many, many, many Japanese men here are completely homo-erotic and feminine! high pitched voices, feminine mannerisms, hair that is so teased and done that it looks like they stuck their head in a dryer and then took hair spray and gently laid each piece. Yet they are mostly straight (however I think many would fuck anything given the chance.) The gay Japanese boys generally don't act gay at all. Go figure. Something about Japanese women love feminine guys.... And some of the most beautiful women you see, the most put together, glamorous and strikingly beautiful women are actually transgender. I have met many and could not tell even slightly that they were men. Absolutely gorgeous. So gay men not feminine, straight men very feminine and cross dressers/ transgender so genuinely female that I can't even tell the difference!!!! weird.
29. YOu generally can't get hired as a Japanese person for any companies if you don't have a steady job before you are 30. If you are over 30 and looking for work with a degree it's nearly impossible.. Japanese companies hire for life generally and the laws are set in place that you are virtually un-fire-able... the company would have to prove that you weren't trainable, that there was no other department in the company that could hire you...
30. it is common for Japanese people to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, and not claim overtime. It is frowned upon if you work less than this if you work for most Japanese companies. Some people work so hard and so long that many life insurance policies will pay their families more if they die at their desk. And many do. Not only that but it's also common for their coworkers to not even notice that they are dead. There have been cases of people dead at their desk for a week before anyone noticed. Hmmm what's that smell?
31. The "birthday" song... is the same in Japan as in America... in English. This doesn't seem so strange but how would you feel if your whole life you were sung happy birthday in Japanese your whole life!?? The integration of Engrish in this culture constantly amazes me.
32. Japanese people love to stand in line... even when they don't know what they are standing in line for....sometimes I see lines that go to nowhere. And if a store is new and has just opened up, expect to wait in lines to get into the store for months, until the newness wears off.
33. Japanese people ask the same 5 questions when you meet them. 1. Where are you from? 2. How long have you been here? 3. when are you going home? they coudln't possbily fathom you might actually want to live here for longer than a couple of years....so you can imagine the confusion and look of concern that you get if you say you are never leaving.) 4. Can you use chopsticks? (I say back to them "can you use a fork?") 5. Can you eat rawfish (DO you know who you are talking to here? I moved here for sushi!!! It's like don't ask me stupid fucking questions! ( I say that sometimes just to freak them out.
34. They don't say "ummm" Little did I know that "ummm" is actually a word. They say "ETOOOO" or "ANOOO" that is their version of umm... who would have thunk umm was a word.
35. They are so obsessed with disney, cartoon characters, and manga. (Disney capitalized on this idea and actually made a Disneyland for adults. Called Disney Sea, and it is absolutely hands down the most beautiful amazing amusement park I have ever been to.) It is also incredibly common for BF/GF to go there and get engaged. If you go to disneyland with someone you are dating it's considered to be getting very serious. However there is a new omen that if you go to disneyland with a BF/GF that you might be doomed to break up. I have heard from my Japanese friends this is probably due to the fact so many japanese people relationship hop that they end up breaking up anyway so they correlate it to this. It is also very common if a Japanese boy is going to break up with a girl that he does it at a train station so he can put her on the train when she starts to cry.
Referring back to Disneyland and manga.... Many subcultures of "cosplay" which is a whole huge community of people who spend thousands of dollars to replicate their favorite video game and cartoon characters. Kind of amazing costumes actually, I highly recommend looking them up along with checking out Harajuku girls (which is where I live... Harajuku!)
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
violet:
I have been here for 10 months. Loving it, but most likely moving back to Portland in April when my contract is up. I am teaching english at a university here.
plastelina:
Wow. Great post, thank you!