Celebrating Christmas in Japan?

Once Halloween has passed – no trick or treating in Japan, just cosplay at best – the Japanese stores at the stroke of a drum fill up with Christmas decorations. And so do the shopping malls, both inside and outside. Illuminations (which usually appear in November, and stay until February) light up the dark Tokyo nights, and amusement parks and horse racing courses compete with shopping centers and shopping streets in presenting a bright outside, full of LED reindeer and Santas.

 

 

You might be excused for mistakenly believing it, but Christmas is not a holiday in Japan. That does not mean it is not celebrated – and celebrated with gusto. But neither Christmas Eve nor Christmas Day are public holidays, even though many companies (especially those with international business) take Christmas Day off. Many office workers, especially those with small children, find it a reason for a few days of vacation.

 

 The big public holiday is New Year, which has inherited the Buddhist tradition of starting over and forgetting the old year. This is why Japanese new years parties, especially in companies, are called ”忘年会” or literally “forget the year party”. Usually, there is a New Year party during January with a celebration directed at building new relations, rather than forgetting those of the past year.

The Only Closing Time

 The New Years holiday starts on January 1, and is often preceeded by a few days of shops and companies being closed for inventory. Unusually in Japan, companies often close entirely between New Year and the Coming Of Age day, the first Monday in January.

 

New Years decorations appear suddenly on December 26, when companies and homes clean away the Christmas decorations. Japanese homes have no space for a Christmas tree, so you can buy stickers to put on the wall to make up your Christmas tree – a two-dimensional tree does not take up any space in the crowded Japanese homes.

Christmas in Japan is, more than anything, a family holiday.

Make it a Family Holiday

 One tip is to go to Japan over Christmas, especially when it does not fall on a holiday. The New Years holiday hotel prices still have not kicked in, and trains will not be crowded to capacity. Go home on December 31. New Year is a time for family and reflection, so you will not miss any events. Flight prices will still be reasonable.

 

Christmas in Tokyo is much more noticeable than in smaller towns – even if it is a rare place where the avenue leading up to the station will not have some illuminations.

The Christmas spirit is really noticeable in the big shopping centers and department stores, however. Even if Covid put a damper on the more excessive celebrations (flying in American handbell ensembles and Swiss flag juggling teams) the celebrations in shopping centers and commercial areas is filling up the store windows.

Still Believing in Santa

 Many Japanese children have not lost their faith in Santa, and hope for Christmas presents out of the ordinary. But so do dating couples. Giving birthday gifts is not as firmly established as giving Christmas presents, and stores do their best to populate their shelves with neckties, whisky, bracelets and earrings to enable also those who have passed the Santa stage to share the gift giving spirit.

 

To get into the Christmas spirit, Tokyo also has several Christmas markets, copying German Christmas markets but with a Japanese twist. These have also been hampered by Covid, when all such events were closed for a couple of years; they started coming back in 2023 and it is likely that the markets will draw even more people in 2024 – especially with the cheap yen making international travel prohibitively expensive to the Japanese.

Living Next Door to Alice – in German

 The German-style Christmas markets typically have at least one stand of Nuremberg wooden toys – and a beer hall. There are several German Oktoberfest style orchestras in Japan, so expect to be able to sing along to ”Living next door to Alice” with the typical German additions as you chug your stein.

But the most famous Japanese Christmas traditions are not the markets, but the Christmas food. Even though Christmas in Japan is not a public holiday, Christmas day is typically celebrated with a special family dinner – of chicken and cake.

That the Japanese eat chicken for Christmas is a combination of chicken being the only reasonably priced food after WWII, and Kentucky Fried Chicken cleverly tying their launch in Japan to Christmas feasts. For a long time, Christmas chicken was synonymous with a KFC bucket, but as the fast food offerings became more expensive and concern about eating fried food started to spread, alternative chicken offerings became popular.

Costco Takes Over Christmas Chicken

 The American warehouse club Costco has become very popular in Japan, often featured on TV for their offerings, both cheap and plentiful (and more often than not made in Japan, thanks to the cheap yen making imported goods prohibitively expensive). But Costco is also one of the few places you can buy rotisserie chicken in Japan. Usually they sell as fast as the store can make them (because they are cheap, too). Not, however, at Christmas.

On Christmas eve, and even more on Christmas Day, the line can run halfway around the store – and this is several hours before they open. The staff hands out tickets to the waiting members, and dispense the roast chicken in order to the waiting line.

While they do not offer rotisserie chicken, the convenience stores have become serious chicken competitors. All the three big convenience store chains are competing in the chicken race to Christmas. You can order your chicken already in September – together with your Christmas cake.

 

Some try to replace the traditional Christmas cakes with German style yule logs, but the strawberry shortcake dominates the Japanese Christmas season. So much that growers have adapted and are cultivating strawberries in vinyl hothouses, starting the harvest in early December (if you grow strawberries in the field it takes until May until you get the fruit). Christmas cakes are firmly entrenched in the Japanese psyche, although the joke about 25-year old ladies being like Christmas cakes has gone out of style, with weddings now happening at any age.

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