Long expected update and Christmas in Japan.

Well folks its been a while and many many adventures to tell so let’s dive right in. I’ll start with my first Christmas in Japan.

Christmas in Japan is basically an amalgamation of all the things I hate about Christmas with none of the aspects about it that I like. For starters, it must be made perfectly clear that I despise Christmas music in all of its forms. This Grinchish behavior can largely be attributed to my stint as a grocery bagger where inevitably after every Thanksgiving I was subjected to Christmas music playing on a loop non-stop for about a month and a half and let’s just say one can only listen to so many renditions of “Silver Bells” before they go mad (to this day I still can’t listen to this song without developing a nervous tic and feeling a strong urge to annihilate whatever or whoever is playing it.) Thus, much to my utter dismay, Japan too follows the maddening ritual of playing Christmas music starting around late November. Indeed, by the time Christmas rolled around I dreaded going grocery shopping as I knew I would be tortured with another five versions of “Jingle Bells,” “Silver Bells” and whatever other shitty song about bells and winter that have been spawned by people trying to erode my last remaining bits of sanity. 

The part about Christmas that I do like, however, is spending time with friends and family in a relatively stress-free environment. This aspect of Christmas was unfortunately absent and it was definitely a time when homesickness hit me the hardest. In fact, for all the hulabaloo and ads Japan puts on about Christmas, the actual delivery is underwhelming. Evidently, the big tradition is to buy some fried chicken and “Christmas cake” and eat them…and that's pretty much it (I even had to go to work on Christmas day.)

Fortunately, I had a pretty good Christmas eve though. I started off the day by going to a local glass museum with Jillian and one of the office ladies at my school named Miwani-san. We saw some pretty neat glasswork and afterwards, Miwani-san treated Jillian and me to a nice western-style lunch with pasta and superb desserts. Afterwards, the three of us went to Jillian’s place to whip up some home-made pancakes and damn they were good! Although fruit is super expensive in Japan it sure does taste good and made the pancakes taste awesome. For dinner, Jillian and I joined two other JETs in the area, Zac and Amber for some Chinese food (reminds of A Christmas Story) and had some greasy delight.

Delicious Christmas dessert

Christmas Pancakes

Enjoying them.

While Christmas day was pretty lonely, I was nevertheless in pretty good spirits afterwards, as I would be bound for Tokyo in a few days to meet up with my dad and my brother.

Before I jumped into my Tokyo exploits, I did experience one more intersting part of the Japanese office life…the enkai’s estranged brother the Bonenkai, which is yet another excuse for coworkers and the bosses to get absurdly drunk together. The reasoning behind the Bonenkai is that it is a way to forget the bad parts about the previous year and to welcome in the hopefully better new year…and what better way to do that than by having an ancient Rome style hedonistic feast of food and drink.