I’m pretty sure I posted about this video series a few years back when they were released, but they’re worth mentioning again: “The Japanese Tradition” is a series of videos made by a fairly well-known Japanese comedy group. They are made to point out the everyday absurdities in the Japanese way of life—kind of in the same way Seinfeld was famous for in the US.
The above video is a guide to the Japanese art of bowing, which is a very big part of everyday life here.
See also: Their equally hilarious video guides to sushi, chopsticks, origami, tea, and onigiri (rice balls)
(reblogged from thedailywhat)
Via The Daily What
How’s your GW?
We are, sadly, nearing the end of Japan’s largest national holiday event, Golden Week (often commonly referred as GW). GW is one week in Spring that contains 4 of Japan’s 14 legally-established national holidays. Add in Saturday and Sunday** and you get 6 out of 7 days off (and most people will take a paid vacation day to get all 7 days off). The timing of the holidays in the calendar (Spring: flowers are blooming, it’s finally getting warm) makes GW the busiest time of year for travel/tourism within Japan (and the most expensive, which is why I stayed in Kurobe). Side note: “Golden Week” is the official name for it; that’s not a translation from the Japanese name—they actually call it, in English, “Golden Week.” I don’t know why.
** This is assuming the timing works out right with the weekend (luckily, it does this year). There is, however, a provision of the law stating that if any national holiday falls on a Sunday, the next working day becomes a substitute holiday. You’re shit-outta-luck if it falls on a Saturday, though.
GW begins on April 29th with Showa Day. Well, it’s only been called Showa Day for a few years. April 29th was originally celebrated as the birthday of the Emperor Showa—whose reign began in December of 1926—until 1989, when his reign ended and April 29th became known as Greenery Day. Then in 2007, for some reason, Greenery Day was moved to May 4th, and April 29th became Showa Day: a day for remembering and reflecting on Japan’s Showa Period—during which Japan recovered from WWII to become one of the world’s most powerful economies. There aren’t really any traditions or festivals held for this holiday.
The next holiday of GW is Constitution Memorial Day, observed on May 3rd. There’s not much to say about this day. The Japanese Constitution was first enforced on May 3rd, 1947, so it became a national holiday. Again, there aren’t really any traditions or festivals for this day.
The following day is now, as mentioned above, Greenery Day (May 4th). This is a day to commune with nature and give thanks for all nature’s blessings. As far as I’m told, there is no tradition or guideline as to how you do that. Just, I dunno, go have a picnic or something. ”But Lawrence, you said Greenery Day was moved to this day in 2007, so was May 4th just a regular day up until then?” I’m glad you asked! It turns out there is a little law in Japan that was pretty much made specifically for May 4th, and it states that if there is a work day that falls between two national holidays, then that day also becomes a national holiday, referred to as a “Citizens’ Holiday.” So up until 2006, May 4th—which falls between 2 holidays (I’ll get to the other one in a moment)—was a Citizens’ Holiday, but now it is Greenery Day and that little law is completely useless.
Which brings us to May 5th, the last holiday of GW. May 5th is officially called Children’s Day, but because girls already get Hina Matsuri on March 3rd, “Children’s Day” is mainly for the boys. There aren’t really any festivities for this day, either, but there are a few traditions, mainly the eating of leaf-wrapped mochi, displaying warrior-dolls dressed in armor, and koi nobori (flying carp streamers). Families with boys will hang streamers with images of koi on them outside their houses. When blowing in the wind, the koi look like they are swimming upstream, to represent the strength and persistence of men. Families will hang one streamer for each man in the family (and one for the mother). The top one, representing the father, is the biggest and is generally black. Below that is a shorter, red one for the mother, and then a smaller blue one for the first son. If there are more sons after that, they are usually green and get gradually smaller in size.
And with that, GW draws to a close. I am certainly not excited about going back to work, but at least I only have two days of it before the weekend comes! Happy Golden Week, everybody! Cheers.
Tokyo-based architect Alastair Townsend is writing a series of posts on his blog entitled “A Few Things,” about Japanese housing design as compared to western design. Each focuses on a different aspect of housing design, and half are entitled ”A Few Things The West Could Learn From Japan About Housing” while the other half are “A Few Things Japan Could Learn From The West About Housing.” He’s a good and thoughtful writer—incorporating a lot of history and culture into each entry—and it’s interesting to learn these things from an architect’s point of view.
I found the first entry about Japanese baths (called “ofuro”) particularly interesting, especially because he mentions the new technologies that Japan has developed for their ofuro, such as the ability to fill and heat (or even re-heat) the bath to your desired temperature remotely—via cell phone—so your bath will be ready and waiting for you whenever you want it.
Japan Fun Facts pt. 13: Graduation
- The Japanese school year is year round—it begins in April and ends in March—so this month (this week in particular) I’m going to all my schools’ graduation ceremonies. I attended my junior high’s graduation on Tuesday, and yesterday I went to my elementary school’s.
- One thing that stood out to me right away was that they played music that I, as an American, would normally associate with weddings: Pachalbel’s Canon, etc. No Pomp and Circumstance or the like. They did, however, sing that Japanese version of Auld Lang Syne at my JHS’s ceremony.
- As one of my colleagues told me, “Graduation is the most important event of the year for schools, so we take it very seriously.” And she wasn’t exaggerating—the whole ceremony is incredibly serious. Lively is definitely not a word I would use to describe it; it’s very structured, ritualized, slow, and completely somber. Out of the 158 students graduating from my JHS, I saw only 2 show ANY kind of emotion at all: one smiled, and one cried (during the ceremony, that is—there was more crying afterwards). Everyone else was completely rigid and straight-faced through the entire ceremony.
- My ES’s graduation was only slightly more lighthearted—due to the facts, I assume, that 1) it’s an elementary school, so they get to have a bit more fun with it, and 2) my ES happens to be tiny (only 12 kids in the graduating class), so that also allows them a certain flexibility in the ceremony.
- There are no caps and gowns; the students wear their school uniforms. I don’t teach high school, so I’m not entirely sure if it’s the same, but I would bet that it is. I am told that at some college graduations the students wear kimonos.
- There are several speeches given: one from the principal, one from the head of the PTA, one from someone from city hall, one from the outgoing student body president, and one from the future student body president, and maybe even some others. Everyone’s speeches are written vertically, from right to left, on a scroll of paper that is folded like an accordian. They hold it with both hands as they read the speech and unfold it little by little as the speech progresses. That was one of my favorite things—as far as presentation goes, it looks way cooler than holding note cards. The speeches, though, are also very serious—no jokes are made—and the content of each is almost EXACTLY the same. There is honestly little to no difference between any of the speeches.
- You have to bow at least 50 times during a graduation ceremony. No exaggeration.
- The only lighthearted and sorta ‘fun’ part of graduation comes after the actual ceremony, when everyone gathers outside for the “miokuri,” or sending-off, in which all the students and teachers line up to make an aisle for the graduating students to walk through as they leave school for the last time. The graduating students also each carry a flower that they give to a teacher or an underclassman as a thank you for helping him/her thus far. I never actually taught the graduating class at my JHS, so I didn’t get any flowers there, but two of the twelve graduating from my ES gave me a flower, so that made me very happy.
Here’s a Japanese phenomenon I just learned about this weekend: Tsundere (ツンデレ)
Tsundere is a fairly new term in the Japanese language that has spawned from Japan’s manga culture. It’s a combination of two onomatopoeias: tsun-tsun (ツンツン), which means cold, cranky, and belittling, and dere-dere (デレデレ), which means warm, sweet, kind, and affectionate. The term is used to describe a female personality archetype that has apparently gained popularity over the past few years, in which a girl is very tsun-tsun with her boyfriend in public, but becomes incredibly dere-dere when they are by themselves. You can imagine the kind of drama that would ensue from being in a relationship with a girl like this, and I suppose that’s what makes it such great fodder for manga.
The tsundere type female has become such a hit within the Japanese otaku (nerd/geek) subculture that it has given rise to the tsundere cafe. I‘ve watched a few videos about this (including the above) and they all feature the same restaurant (in Tokyo’s Akihabara district), so this may in fact be the only tsundere cafe in the country. Like the classic Japanese maid cafe, the waitresses wear a cute maid-like costume, but at a maid cafe the hostess greets you by saying something along the lines of, “Welcome home, master. I’ve been waiting for you.” When you walk in the door of a tsundere cafe, the hostess greets you with a cold, “What the hell are you doing here?” or, “What took you so damn long?” and “Hurry up and sit down!” They then continue to berate you for the duration of your meal. The idea behind this particular cafe is that the waitresses treat you the way a bratty younger sister would treat her brother when he comes home after being away for a while. They’ll throw the menu at you and say, “Hurry up and order!” and after you’ve told them what you want they might respond with, “ugh, what a pain in the ass,” or “No, I’m not making that for you,” or if you take too long, they may just snatch the menu from you and bring you whatever they choose. When they bring your food they say, “now eat and get out!” If you call for the waitress, she will probably ignore you, or perhaps even yell “shut up!” from across the restaurant.
The missing ingredient in this, you might think, is the dere-dere—where is the sweet, affectionate personality promised in the tsundere name? That doesn’t come until after you’ve eaten and gotten up to leave, when suddenly (like an insane, bipolar girlfriend) the waitress(es) will become upset to see you go, and say things like, “I’m sorry, don’t leave because I was mean to you!” or “Please don’t go so quickly!” or “Don’t be gone long; I’ll miss you!” or some combination of those.
I kind of want to experience this place for myself, but it seems like a waste of money. If it’s anything like a normal maid cafe, then it’s probably overpriced, and if I’m gonna pay a good amount of money for food, I want to be treated well (and I want to get whatever I want to eat!).
February 3rd is a minor holiday in Japan, called Setsubun. Setsubun is the day before Risshun, or the start of Spring, but just like Christmas Eve, Japanese people tend to prefer the eve of an event to the actual event itself. It’s sort of related to the Lunar New Year (or rather, the eve of the Lunar New Year), so Setsubun is a sort of festival to cleanse away the evil of the previous year and start afresh for the next year.
For some reason, this is done by throwing around roasted soybeans—like those pictured above.
Mamemaki, or “bean-throwing,” is the main event of Setsubun. Roasted soybeans—called fukumame, which means “good fortune beans”—are seen as a cleansing element of some sort (maybe because of the effect beans can have on your bowels), and so on February 3rd every year people throw them out the front door of their house to rid their family of evil (basically misfortune, disease, and really bad sushi). If there is a man in the house whose zodiac sign is the same as whatever year it is (this year it’s the Tiger), then traditionally he gets to do the mamemaki-ing, otherwise it’s generally done by the head of household.
At some temples and shrines, or even at schools and in some households, one unlucky person (who most likely lost a game of Jan-ken*) will dress up as a demon (or oni) and prance around while everyone pelts him with fukumame.
And, of course, what Japanese holiday is complete without a signature chant to go with it? Well, you can’t let Setsubun go by without shouting this passage (preferably into your neighbors’ window, as my neighbors seem to enjoy doing): ”Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!” which means “Demons out! Good fortune in!” (the ‘out’ and ‘in’ being literally ‘outside’ and ‘inside’).
Finally, the last thing to do on Setsubun is to cleanse your body by eating your age in fukumame—assuming you didn’t throw them all out the door. This is especially taxing for grandmothers and grandfathers, who often lose count (or pretend to) before they even get halfway, and just end up faking it.
* Japanese kids use Rock, Paper, Scissors (or “Jan-ken” as it’s called here) to decide everything. Seriously, as a teacher, I end up playing Jan-ken at least 5 times a day with my students. I could go on and on about it, and I probably will some day soon, but for now just trust me when I say that if someone has to dress up like an oni and get beans thrown at him all day, it’s almost certain that he’s doing it because he lost at Jan-ken.
About Me
My name is Lawrence Denes.After spending 5 years studying Japanese language, culture, literature, and history in St. Louis and Kyoto, I now live in Japan, in a town that most Japanese people have never even heard of, lost amid the rice fields and vending machines.
Please feel free to ask me anything, or send me an email.
