Not Just Ninjas

If you live in Japan and are employed in any capacity or belong to any social groups, you will most likely spend your entire December floating from one bounenkai to another. These “forget the year” parties mostly consist of sitting in a big tatami room, flitting from table to table and filling up people’s glasses with alcohol. I was thrilled when my adult English conversation class deviated from this time-honored standard and set up a night of karaoke instead.

Of course, December karaoke equals Christmas Songs galore. I usually kind of abhor carols, but something about being in Japan far away from home made them kind of nostalgic and appealing somehow.

To my surprise, the karaoke machine had a decent selection of Christmas music to choose from, including some Japanese holiday classics I’d never heard before. Over the course of the evening, I learned the following things:

• When asked to explain the whole Christmas story thing, I was informed that “manger” in the local dialect means “kitchen”… oddly enough, this misunderstanding didn’t detract from my description the whole nativity scene too much.
• You can make a grown Japanese woman cry actual tears by serenading her with “O Holy Night”
• We held a kind of informal gift exchange. I gave away some kitschy candles I brought from America which were baseball themed, shaped like bats and balls and gloves. Which is when I discovered that my students had never seen a candle shaped like anything other than a candle. It took me 4 tries to explain that they weren’t edible and that you’re supposed to light them on fire. (And this was with pictures of the things actually burning on the front of the package.)
• The karaoke machine does in fact have Handel’s Messiah, which makes for a rousing finale. Karaoke Handel has never been belted out with heartfelt operatic panache. Although I think we’ve now been banned from the karaoke bar.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 10:52 am and is filed under Festivals and Events, Seasonal. 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.