1st and 2nd Christmases in Japan
My first Christmas in Japan was cold and rainy, thick in the heart of Tokyo. I was alone in my small apartment with no plans, no tree, no decorations, no cards, no presents, no church services, no phone calls, and my Christmas dinner was a Big Mac, fries and a shake. At the time I thought, this is crazy! I’m in the biggest city in the world, and there must be something to do on Christmas Eve. So, I went down to the world-famous Ginza shopping district after my Big Mac. But when I got there, it was as dead as a doornail. Although it’s a big city, Tokyo goes to sleep after work. It’s not a 24-hour non-stop hive of activity like New York City.
Today, although, some foreign festivals like Halloween and Christmas have gained some traction here in the intervening years, Christmas is not a holiday. When it falls on a weekday it is a regular work day and school day for children. In hindsight, I think I probably ought to have gone home to Canada for that first Christmas. I certainly had the time and the money to do it. But I decided against it because of a general unfamiliarity with the ways and means of travel, and because as it was my first time away from home, my first time working and living alone. I thought I ought to stick it out to see how it went.
My second Christmas in Japan was a little better. Just. I was in a bigger, better apartment, but I was farther away from the centre of Tokyo. I had a few holiday cards and decorations deployed. I had more physical comforts around me. Plus, I had a present from my mother. She sent me a large white teddy bear in the postal mail. Well, it seemed large to me at the time. It is still on my bed today, among my other teddy bears (about 80 of them). But my Christmas dinner was sandwiches and chocolates. I went nowhere and did nothing. I saw no one. In both instances, I had television sets to keep me company, but I can’t remember how I acquired them. (Probably hand-me-downs, left behind by previous tenants.)
E-mail lets us ignore each other with less guilt than physical postal mail allows.
Those were the days before the internet, before cell phones and digital cameras. To occupy myself and connect with family and friends back home I churned out hundreds of postal letters each year, recording, documenting and reporting my life in some detail. At first, my correspondence was all hand-written. Soon, I bought an electric typewriter (which you could still do in those days). Then, I began using a computer and printer at work, but continued to hand-write letters at home. It wasn’t until the millennium that I got a computer at home - first, a used desktop, and later a second-hand laptop - and I didn’t start using e-mail until 2004, 2005 or 2006. I was disappointed to discover that all the people who enthusiastically recommended e-mail to me uniformly failed to live up to their own advice by actually using it. Instead of facilitating a great communication renaissance, it seems that electronic communication is just a more convenient way for ghosting people. I mean, it lets us ignore each other with less guilt than physical postal mail allows. Oh, well.