Celebrate Christmas the Japanese Way, With Cake and Sex

One of the earlier memories I have of Japan took place during an “orientation” seminar I attended as a part of the first exchange program I participated in, which was designed to brief us on general rules of behavior and the like so as to avoid at least the most obvious embarrassments. Scattered amongst the customary warnings about proper chopstick usage and the wisdom of bringing your own supply of tissue to public toilets came the puzzling warning, “Don’t ask someone what he or she is doing for Christmas. You’ll be misunderstood to be making a romantic proposition.”

And indeed, it’s true. Christmas was first celebrated in Japan when Jesuit missionaries first landed there, but the persecution of Christians by the Shogunal government stopped the spread of the practice. No, it was a force much greater than God that finally brought Christmas to the Japanese masses in a lasting way: capitalism! During the roaring 20s, children’s media began to decorate their pages with Santa, but what really took off was the café, department store, and glitzy hotel restaurant culture along the go-go Ginza (the early-30s Santa on the right is holding the glamorous Tokyo Imperial Hotel). With an enticingly cosmopolitan new excuse to illuminate their windows with lights and create tree-shaped new spectacles, they attracted the emerging upper middle class who were preoccupied with the brand-new and deliciously subversive pursuit of romantic (as opposed to family-arranged) love [??]. This emphasis on couples has remained consistent ever since, turning Christmas in Japan into a kind mix of (American) New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day.

The Japanese, after all, already have their own version of New Year as a religious, family-centered winter holiday that involves special foods and gifts (well, usually money) to children. So Christmas rushed into the breach where the drunken revelry of New Year’s Eve is missing in the Japanese winter, and now it has become a focal point for romance and conspicuous consumption that eclipses even Valentine’s Day. After all, Japanese Valentine’s Day involves such intricate layers of ritualized chocolate giving that its major feature these days is the emergence of “obligation chocolate [giri choco]” on the shelves to buy for all your loathsome colleagues at work. Television dramas are routinely scheduled so that their romantic climaxes coincide with Christmas, not Valentine’s Day, their tearful confessions of love taking place against a backdrop of frigid temperatures and twinkling lights while regularly attracting much higher ratings than romantic dramas run any other time of year.

Christmas is so glitzy and ritzy – you and your honey plan the most extravagant date possible, and the hotels and restaurants of Japan are there to help! (here is a sample itinerary suggested by a date-planning website) Special dining rooms, special menus, special floor shows, even special Santa-themed love hotels (see picture) for afterward, the choice is yours. But notwithstanding this vast array, there is one element no Christmas date can afford to be without, the one thing that ensures its success perhaps even more than the trueness of your love or the dazzle of your surroundings. Yes, ladies, that’s right. I’m talking about cake.

Christmas cakes are by far the most potent signifier of the anxieties and pleasures a Christmas romance promises. Large, luscious, expensive, and frequently covered in strawberries, Christmas cakes loom in both figurative and literal ways over the Japanese Christmastime landscape. Their importance has given rise to sexist sayings like “An unmarried woman is like a Christmas cake – past 25 and they start to go bad,” but the Christmas cake also serves as Japanese Christmas’s saving grace – if you can’t afford the rest of the trappings, just pull together a great cake, or even just a sincerely fabricated mediocre one, and all will be forgiven. How sweet is that?

And if there’s no one special, or you just don’t feel like sharing, well, isn’t that just more cake for you? ????????, and I’ll see you all next year. Yes, it’s the Year of the Bull. So I guess by then we’ll all be horny. Can’t wait!