Fukuoka, Japan: December 2006

WINTER HOLIDAYS

While living in Japan from July 2006-2007, I spent most of my time in rural Fukuoka. This gave me the opportunity to really experience the inaka ("country") culture. During the winter holidays, most of the foreign English teachers take the opportunity to travel to Thailand or Korea, but I chose to stay in Japan and participate in the various holiday traditions.

The first tradition I experienced was a mochitsuki ceremony (literally, "making mochi"). Mochi is a Japanese treat made from rice pounded into paste and then formed into balls. Many families and schools get together to make mochi as a way to celebrate the coming New Year. In December of 2006, I spent a day with a Japanese family in the countryside as they celebrated with this tradition.

The family cooked the rice over a fire before putting it in a large mortar called an usu. With heavy wooden mallets called kine, we took turns pounding the rice, quickly and repeatedly, until it no longer looked like rice at all. When we were finished with it, it was a big gooey ball of smooth white mush.

Once we had made several batches of the mush, we broke off pieces of it and rolled it into small balls. For several of the balls, we rolled some red bean paste into the middle for variety. In Japan this red bean paste is used in many desserts as it is considered to be quite sweet and tasty. I learned that there is quite an art to rolling these balls, as my new Japanese friends were quick to point out the imperfections in mine!

Later in the month, I was invited to Setaka Kindergarten School to participate in their version of the tradition. It began much the same, as the students watched the teachers take turns pounding the rice. A few students dared to take a turn, swinging the heavy kine as hard as they could.

While it seemed that everyone enjoyed this tradition, it was very time consuming and labor intensive. Surely it would take all day to make enough mochi for every student and teacher! When I asked how long it usually takes to make all the mochi, one of the teachers let me in on a secret... behind the scenes, they had a mochi-making machine!

I thought this was the perfect example of how old Japanese traditions seem to mix seamlessly with modern technology in rural Japan. This little kitchen appliance vibrates and spins to effortlessly pound the rice into the desired mushy consistency. The tradition was carried out for the children to learn about their past, while the machine quietly assisted in making the tradition more convenient and practical for a school environment.

Holiday traditions are observed a little differently in Japanese cities than in rural areas. Christmas has become very popular, but it not celebrated in the same ways as it is in Canada and the United States. I took a trip in late December to Fukuoka City, where I observed one of the most popular Christmas traditions: Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Apparently, KFC has convinced most of Japan that fried chicken is really the best meal to have for Christmas. I was told that many shopping malls in the country have their very own Colonel Sanders (just like how western malls have Santa), but patrons at the mall in Hakata, Fukuoka had to make do with a giant picture and a table piled high with chicken for sale.

For New Year's Eve, I followed several of my Japanese friends to a nearby temple just after midnight for hatsumode (the first visit of the new year). We waited patiently in a long line of people eager to ring the bell. Once we had each taken a turn, we entered the temple to light some incense, pray, and eat ozoni, the traditional mochi soup.

If you would like to teach your students or children about some of the Japanese holiday traditions, I would recommend Japanese Traditions: Rice Cakes, Cherry Blossoms, and Matsuri, by Setsu Broderick. The author wrote this book based on memories of her childhood in Japan, so the various holiday traditions are described from a child's point of view. However, readers should also keep in mind that her experiences are from many years ago so not all of the illustrations and descriptions are still current. Japanese Traditions would be a great addition to any classroom library to spark discussions about how other cultures celebrate year-round. The illustrations may seem to be geared towards a very young audience since the author/illustrator chose to depict people as cats, but they are so elaborate that even older readers will enjoy looking at them again and again to find all the interesting details.