Winter clothes
In early November I was doing a part-time weekend job with some Japanese women. Sometimes I ask these ladies what they’re doing after work, because I’m interested in their lives. Going straight home? Going shopping? Eating lunch at a restaurant? Eating lunch with a friend? Going home and watching TV? Going to another job? On this particular day a woman told me that she was going to go home and so “koromo gae.” That means, she was going to go home and exchange her autumn clothes for winter clothes. That entails putting away all her autumn clothes in sealed boxes in her closet and taking down sealed boxes of her winter clothes. The smell of moth balls will fill the air. For me, it’s a little thing since all my closes are in my dresser. I just open a drawer and select different clothes. Maybe I’ll have to reach farther back in a drawer to find them, but … That’s not how Japanese do it, though. Japanese make a huge production out of it. Instead of putting away some of the autumn clothes and removing some of the winter wear incrementally, they have to do it all at once. Put away all the old clothes at once and get the new season’s wardrobe ready all at once. Don’t do it piecemeal like I would be inclined to do, but do it entirely in one go. It’s like they deliberately make work for themselves. It's a way of measuring the passage of time by literally closing the lid on one season and opening the lid of the next in a somewhat ceremonial manner.
I think they make too big of a drama out of it - this whole “Japan has four seasons!” thing, as if every other country did not. They do something similar with their New Year cleaning. Whereas Canadians will do their big house cleaning in the spring time - called “Spring Cleaning” - Japanese do the same at New Year’s. It’s part of a strategy to start the new year off fresh. But once again, instead of doing it incrementally and in comfortable steps, they often wait until December 31st and then ransack the entire house, upsetting everything, cleaning it, and then setting things in order again. It seems like the typical Japanese thing of substituting fevered activity as an avatar for actual accomplishment.
But I could be wrong.