halloween in japan

It’s Halloween in Japan! Hooray! Excellent! Let’s have a party, everyone! Wait, what is Halloween and how do we celebrate it? Quick, to the foreigners!

This, apparently, was the thought process of The Nakama Crew, that super-funtime club I wrote of earlier. Beginning last week, every foreign student here at Obirin began to notice that all of our conversations and exchanges with the Japanese students started to become peppered with inquiries as to the nature and execution of Halloween. Nakama, it seemed, sensed or had heard that the holiday was a great deal of fun and was something that we all looked forward to, but they seemed to have little to no idea of what in the world Halloween actually was or what people did for it.

Some thought it was distinctly a Christian holiday for which we should attend church services (this delighted some as Obirin is technically a Christian university – one of the school’s sports teams, lacrosse, I think, is named the “triple thorn crowns”, a reference to the crown placed atop Jesus’ noggin during the crucifixion. Yikes!), while others quizzed me as to exactly how a pumpkin should be seasoned and cooked for the festivities. There was no doubt in their mind that the prevalence of pumpkins and pumpkin-related items around late October was a clear indicator that on Halloween night, everyone gathered around a table and consumed the orange gourd. Honestly, considering the ubiquity of cartoon turkeys and the like around late November, I can understand their confusion and I give them points for connecting the dots in such a creative way. And you know what? I would like a pumpkin pie for Halloween! Make it happen, Japan!

Anyway, we did our best to explain what Halloween was and that the big ritual, trick or treating, would be kind of hard to do unless we literally involved the whole of Machida in on our festivities. Certainly a party could be had, though, and we described how everyone should wear costumes, bob for apples, do that thing where you put a bunch of donuts on a string and bite them off, etc. The troops rallied admirably, and we had quite the excellent Halloween party, complete with absolutely ridiculous costumes, apple-bobbing (or ‘ringo-bobbu’), and a bingo game in which I won a stack of CD-Rs. I really find it quite endearing and sweet how eager the Japanese students were to absorb and dive head-long into some of our traditions, and I do my best to try to have their same enthusiasm when viewing their culture. I think I’ve been doing well but this has certainly given me a new outlook on how one can completely enmesh themselves, even if only temporarily, in a culture not one’s own.