Well, I'm about to sit down to open my presents from my mother, and I was struck by just how Anti-Christ(mas)y this day has been. Actually, that's a lie, it's been slamming me in the face at odd intervals all day long like poorly timed blows from some laboring Asian Paul Bunyan who keeps forgetting that he's supposed to be pretending to be Santa Claus. Give me presents, Saburo-san, not blows to the dome with your othersideoftheworldly hammer! Ok, that's all silly, but the words are flowing right now and I don't give a damn if they make sense. That whole Japanese Christmas as the Anti-Christ thing? Well, I was going to say that it's fully unrepresentative of how my day went, that I just liked the sound of the phrase, but now that I think about it...
Ok, let's get down to brass tacks before I get down to opening my stocking. Maybe today wasn't Anti-Christmas. It's not like I woke up, went over the the Satanmas tree (which is red and thorny and strung with laced together clumps of feces and dismembered puppy parts (nobody said worshiping the devil smelled nice), drew a few pentagrams, sang a few unholy dirges, and then spent the rest of the day lounging in the luxurious sins of roast fetus on the dinner table, naked goats in my bed, and fuck this is foul, I think those are ample luxurious sins to get my point across. No, it's not the fact that Christ wasn't a very big part of my day that made it weird. It's a very well documented fact, but, hey, Christ has been largely replaced by the Corporation in the American holiday, and X-mas is making a very good name for itself. Kick Christ out the door and replace his name with a screwy manifestation of the thing we strung him up on. Such is life.
But, no, it's not the secular nature of Japanese Christmas that threw me off. And that's because there wasn't even a secular nature to the damn thing. Christmas doesn't actually exist. Sure there are lights hanging from the eaves of the train station, and there's a big fucking electric tree in the plaza nearby, shedding softly incandescent holiday cheer on people commuting back and forth to work and school, but that shit aint Christmas. It's just window dressing, you know? It's kind of beautiful, in a way. It's Christmas as it could be in America once it's reached the terminus of the road of secularization and commodification it's currently traveling. Stripped of everything except the barest notion of lights, trees, and the obligation to buy your significant other or kid a present, Christmas here... well, what else can you expect, really? Of course families don't make a huge fuss about it, nobody gets work off for it, kids only get school off for it incidentally; it's just another in the host of countless things that has floated across the Pacific on the wind, an imprecise, barely recognizable shadow of it's American self once it reaches these Far Eastern shores. Japanese people take these indistinct shells of America and fill them with something that is distinctly their own, and that's one of the most fascinating things about this country. Just how good they are at bastardization. Or maybe I should say Japanification.
So yes, I went to work today. Sat around, did some studying, stared out the window and watched cars go by. I almost napped. It was nice. But was it Christmas? Nope. Christmas turned out to be just another thing that seems universal, but fails and dies once you cross the invisible cultural boundaries that keep it alive. Well, time to go open my stocking. Happy Christmas.
