Christeph in Japan

Amazingly enough, no one asked me to prepare a lesson about Halloween this year. Some of my JET colleagues have had to teach class after class about this holiday, and often people who don’t particularly celebrate Halloween are asked to teach these lessons. For me, this day manifested itself through two parties, and my English club at school.

The Big Plans were to carve a pumpkin and drink spiced cider with my English club girls. Little did I know that extensive plans laid many moons ago were necessary to obtain a pumpkin for carving, even the smallish green variety that is the most common here. I foolishly went out with a song in my heart looking for said pumpkin to purchase the day before Halloween and there were none to be found. My co-teacher said she’d hit the streets on a squash-finding mission, but she too returned empty handed. Which means I had to come up with a quick plan B to save the party. What did we end up doing? Why Halloween origami, of course! There really is no entertainment related problem that origami can’t fix. So, possibly for the first time ever, Japan witnessed the creation of paper bats, pumpkins and ghosts.

The cider created more controversy than I had expected. I mean, how freaky can hot apple juice be, right?… but everyone flipped out. “You actually drink that stuff?” Indeed. Those crazy Americans. Heating their juice and putting spices in it. Has the world gone mad? I know I thought it had when I saw the spigots for the hot lemonade in one of the local restaurants. That’s crazy. Everyone knows lemonade is supposed to be one temperature, and that’s cold. I guess juice warmth or lack thereof is just a very personal issue. But the most objectionable quality to the juice seemed to be that I put cloves in it… not a very familiar taste to the Japanese tongue. If success is measured in intrigue, then hooray for me. If instead you measure success in volume of juice consumed… then I am afraid that I come out on the losing end of that one.

But I liked it, dammit.

As for dressing up, I’ll admit, I’ve never really been one to go all out for a costume. I’m a pretty lazy Halloweener. So I dug around in my closet, and came up with the idea for a Japanese schoolgirl, complete with plaid skirt and knee stockings. Almost independently, Chris decided to go as a Japanese school boy, which shows just how well matched our temperaments are. Yay for multi-person costumes! I have to say that the concept was more cerebral than visual, and almost everyone asked what we were dressed up as. If anyone knew me AT ALL, the skirt and makeup would have tipped them off that, yes, I was wearing a costume. We ended up just pointing to Chris’ hair barrette, at which point the costumes immediately became clear.

Thank you, boys of Japan, for giving us such a snappy visual cue to pounce upon.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Festivals and Events, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.