日本のクリスマス Christmas In Japan

Every year people all over the globe celebrate Christmas, the festival has long exceeded religious boundaries and the ideas of giving and showing love and emotion to people close to you, as well as to people in need has won the hearts of many...

It is also celebrated in Japan with more than 90% atheists in the country. You can see Christmas decorations in every shop and even cities don't save on money to let their streets shine with bright Christmas lights. City and big shopping centers will struggle for the biggest, most abstract and most expensive looking Christmas tree. Tree? Well take and form roughly shaped like a tree, e.g. a cylinder. Oh and the typical English Christmas songs can be heard from every shop, even konbini (Japanese convenience stores) play the jingles. The sings might seem a bit to fast and remixed for the ear used to the slow and relaxing songs known from home, but well Japan is after all a fast country without rest. As a bonus many people will sing Schiller's "Ode An Die Freude" to Beethoven's ninth symphony, the traditional Japanese Christmas song. In the stores you can also see yet another Japanese Christmas addition, the traditional Christmas cream cake, which is a must on those days.

So apart from temperatures you usually have in the middle of autumn, in fact you still can see autumn colors on natural trees next to the Christmas trees. It looks pretty much like at home. Looks... sounds... smells...
But it doesn't feel like it. People are still hasty, angry if they have to wait for 5 seconds, because they can't overtake your bicycle, they will not greet you or anyone a merry Christmas and appear and leave work as scheduled (25th and 26th of Christmas are no holidays in Japan).

So that's it? That's all there is to Christmas in Japan?
No of course the modern commercial soul has been very well copied to Japan, since it makes revenues skyrocket every year. So parents have to buy presents to their children, buy! self-made presents are an indication for a poor family after all. However if you grow older starting from being teenaged, you will not spend Christmas Eve with your family. Since if you do you will be a social outcast, a loser among your friends and classmates. So what do you do, hang out with your friends? No that's still a loser. The imported Christmas is said to be very romantic, ergo you have to have sex. So sometimes as far as an advent calender in advance you will search for a date. Anything is ok, as long as it leads to sex. And everybody knows that code, you just have to ask "Are you busy on the 24th?", which directly translates to "I want to have sex with you, let's not be social outcasts!". This pressure will drive teenagers as far as calling someone they met one single time 6 month ago in a bar. Everything is better than being the one not having sex on Christmas.
What when you grow older, maybe marry and have an husband or a wife? It doesn't change much. Instead of finding a date, as a husband now have to worry about finding a present for your wife. However this is not that difficult, since the actual things is much less important as the price it cost. So you just go to the next shopping mall and buy some designer anything and best even pass it with the designer bag it was given to you to your love. She will look at it, recognize the price and mimic the romantic expressions as seen on TV. Afterwards you will have an expensive dinner and then, of course, end up in a Love Hotels (special hotels with the sole purpose of having sex there, they are quite frequent in Japan).

But what about your friends, shouldn't you express that you love them?
No, you don't want to have sex with your friends, so no presents, no card, best is not even to call them, since they might thing you don't have a date on Christmas.

What about the poor?
Do you really need to ask?

It is sad, but to be honest I think you can't blame them too much. What is celebrated in Japan is of course not the traditional festival you find in Europe, North America and other parts of this planet, but an adaption of the modern commercialized version of it. After all if you look around in the traditional Christmas countries you will recognize that it becomes more and more a commercial festival every year. It is said to see to what extent one can actually commercialize love, how you can have Christmas without everything that is important on Christmas.

So what did I do, what did the other interns do?

Christopher a friend and Japanese classmate of mine, who is doing a foreign term at 宇都宮大学 (Utsunomiya University), invited me to a Christmas Party for December the 21st. It was much like every other party, but we introduced a nice Christmas tradition from kindergartens the "Weihnachts Wichteln", a kind of present exchange. Every guest will bring a little present in a moderate price range. Then at some point of the party, everyone will get one present by chance. That way you never know who will get your present, nor who brought the present you got it the end. It was quite nice, and the people from Utsunomiya I met at the party are all really nice and kind. :)
Also unlike in parties here, the majority of people was not able to speak English and everybody conversed in Japanese. Its the first time I would use Japanese to talk to other non Japanese people :). It was a quite cool experience. But of course there were also a big bunch of interesting Japanese people, like one boy who was very interested in the protection of the environment.

December 23rd we had a Christmas Common Room party. Alas when I came home on the 22nd, getting no sleep at all from 21st to 22nd, I was so sleepy that I could not attend and slept for 14 hours. Yet I can depict how it was. The other interns had the same idea as Christoph and made a present exchange. Furthermore they invited all the Japanese persons from our office, which we knew. Since we are foreigners and having a foreign Christmas party, it is ok for Japanese persons to come, everybody is equal and the same after all. And it is much better than staying at home alone :). So indeed a lot of Japanese coworkers and friends of us came to the party and the pictures I've seen and stories I've heard speak for a wonderful party!

December the 24th I was awake again and met with Lukas, a friend and Japanese classmate of mine doing a foreign term at the 学芸大学 (Gakugei Univeristy) in Tokyo. He is currently visited by his brother and very good friend Felix. Along with us came Moni, yet another friend and classmate from me, and Matthias, another German studying also at the 学芸大学. We met in 上野公園 (Ueno Park) and went to the robot exhibition and the natural science museum. It was really impressive. At the exhibition Toyota and Honda would make performances with their newest robots. Toyota's robot being able to play trumpet and violin, giving us a Christmas Song concert and Honda's Asimo showing us how he can actually run and climb stairs as well as do a lot of jobs his "family" asks him to do over the phone. Quite impressive. Apart from that you could see the history of robots in Japan, both in comics, novels, movies and in reality. There were a lot a highly precision handcraft "robots" displayed, like the iron samurai who was able to pull out an arrow, put it precisely on his bow, pull and shoot. All mechanical only by winding up a key. In the natural museum we almost run out of time before they were closing, so we run through it and saw skeletons of dinosaurs and other items from a prehistoric age.
Afterwards we would celebrate Christmas by going to an 居酒屋 (Izakaya, Japanese all you can eat/drink pub) and doing Karaoke, with two Japanese friends of Lukas, who apparently found no date and suddenly asked us to go out with them at the evening of the 23rd, when we already would have had other plans ;).

My impression of this Christmas is not wholly negative. I have seen and heard very well, that the Japanese people are in need for real love and friendship and accept them warmly and happily, as well as being able to show friendship and love to others. However a very strange form of Christmas has been introduced in Japan, by big shopping malls, the TV and Love Hotel owners, which dictate Japanese people what to do on Christmas. And since Japanese people are very law abiding, especially concerning social laws, they submit themselves to this perverted form of Christmas. But all hope is not lost! If you show them other ways and invite them with a little actual love (not the stupid sexual kind) and friendship, they will gladly accept it and cast themselves free of the chains of society. (And of course return an equal portion of actual love and friendship to you) :)

Changing the world can happen anywhere at anytime
Wish you all a merry Christmas and a wonderful 2008
mika

P.S. thanks to Christoph for this article about Christmas in Japan (in German)

大ロボット博 Great Robot Exhibition

Meeting with my friends Monika, Matthias and Lukas, who is again being visited by his brother and Felix the king in Ueno, we plan to go to the large Robot Exhibition in the museum in Ueno Park. The entrance fee would have been quite huge, but Felix found an ancient high school student's ID, in which he is 16 and where he scrapped the date. So they believed all of us to be roughly 10 years younger then we are...

The exhibition hosts a large variety of things and ideas connected with robots, beginning with movies like Metropolis and the first novels and comics dealing with the idea of robots. The term itself came up in a play in Czech were writer Karel Čapek raised both the idea of artificial humans, which he called robot (they were more closer to androids by today's concepts) and the idea of them being exploited by humans. An idea which follows us until today in recent works about robots, like the Mang/Anime universe of Ghost in the Shell.

The exhibition continues with toys and figures, which are featuring robots from the first appearance in Japan in the Manga Astro Boy by famous 治虫手塚 Osamu Tezuka, often considered the father of 漫画 Manga, to figures of the long running Gundam series.





After this introduction we enter the main hall of the exhibition, which hosts the actual robots and all kinds of that. They range from useful and a great aide to human life, like a robotic wheelchair for the handicapped or little helper robots for elderly people, to field and track robots being able to overcome a nasty landscape and finally robots simply displaying the technological state of their researchers. The highlight of this hall is without doubt Toyota's partner robots, who make a real stage performance all of their own greeting everyone, holding a speech and announcing a performance of Christmas songs played by trumpet. Because their most renowned highlight is to be able to play human instruments from trumpet up to violin.





robot for nasty landscapes (e.g. on Mars)



wheel chair robot





Here you can see a complete external exoskelet, which allows handicapped people to move legs and arms



next to violin and trumpet, we also have piano playing robots





Every car producer in Japan seems to have robots as a side project



aww

For me the second highlight however was an unexpected finding of Japanese "robots" from the mechanical age, that means no electricity all sparrow powered. The high skills of those artists found their peak in a "robot" of a 弓道 archer Samurai, who with the sparrow pulled tight, will consecutively take three times an arrow from his waist, put it into a real tiny bow, tighten it and shot at a distant target with a high precision! To achieve such precision with wheels and chains is really amazing!



one of the mechanical robots

Finally you could also stand amazed before a huge replica of dark Cyberpunk SciFi dreams modeled into dark and scary real life or watch an actual manufacturing robot spot the tiny holes in construction parts and grab them with a 100% precision in milliseconds of time. The speed and precision was so amazing, that it was actually scary to watch.







the fast and scary 100% precise find and place robots

Also notice the Robot Lords standing in a circle around the godess

After a merchandising shop we could take the stairs to the second floor, entirely dedicated to Honda's Asimo (Most probably named after Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest Science Fiction authors after Jules Verne). Asimo (IV), according to Honda, is already almost able to execute an amazing variety of difficult tasks and interact with a family. To illustrate that we could watch another real life performance of Asimo trying to follow the requests of his test family members.
The father forgot his keys, calls Asimo and asks him, whether he left them in the living room. Asimo searches for them and is able to find them and bring them to the father. Yatta!
The mother tells Asimo that she expects her friends to come over and asks him to prepare the table and their friends favorite drinks. He does as told, looks the favorite drinks up in his conversation database (a database filled with things he learned in real conversation) and prepares them. Yatta!
The daughter tells Asimo that she will have a date tonight, and that her date wants to dance with her. However she is not good in dancing and wants to practice with Asimo, thus she asks him to learn a certain dance, until she is back. This should probably illustrate the ability to download/extend Asimo's capabilities with new ones using the internet; In the performance however he watches a video of a dancing instructor and then mimics the movements (which is unrealistic without human intervention imo). Yatta!
Finally the son calls and tells him, that his friends called off the soccer playing, but he really wants to play. If he could play soccer with Asimo. Asimo agrees and shows to the audience (us) that he is not only able to kick the ball, bt also to run around the stage really quickly, a thing having been unable to two legged robots until very recently. Yatta!



Asimo learning how to dance



Asimo playing soccer



Yatta!

When we leave the exhibition, without noticing, we entered the Ueno National Museum and found ourself between dinosaur skeletons, ancient stones and a chronological evolution of human tools. Just as we started to become fascinated the 6 o'clock jingle told us to leave the museum. Outside a huge real sized blue whale said Good Bye to us and we left the world of marvels.

mika



Asimo II



Asimo III



another state of art robot technique are human facial expressions, which they can mimic to a scary extent