奇妙な日本のクリスマス：日本式クリスマス誕生小史Weird Christmas.jp: A Brief History of How the Japanese Style of Christmas Was Born

Today, I would like to explore the remarkably strange background behind how Christmas came to be celebrated in Japan.

Japan has no connection to Christianity, yet every year at this time the streets are entirely given over to a Christmas mood. It is true that this is, in reality, the product marketing of an industrial society, but at its root lies a change in the calendar.

Japan first adopted a calendar about 1,400 years ago, when a Chinese calendar was brought by people who came across the sea. After that, Japan kept importing the Chinese calendar as it was updated, and built up its concept of time, and its history, with it. This went on for a very long time, but in the Edo period (1603–1868), as a reaction against dependence on China, a movement to look again at the country arose, and the mood grew for making a calendar of its own.

Out of this move away from dependence on China came the first calendar made in Japan, the Jokyo calendar (1685–1755).

In China, with its history of war, the calendar was tied directly to keeping a dynasty in power and was important for reading the disasters to come.

The domestic calendar, steadily updated, finally reached the highest accuracy: the Tenpo calendar (1844–1872). It is a curious tale of something that began as a copy of another country and, before anyone noticed, surpassed the original.

The shogunate demanded a highly accurate calendar so that it could foresee and avoid disasters that would shake its hold on power. In fact, refugees were increasing in many regions because of famine and natural disasters.

At that time, besides the closure of the country, countless borders had been set up inside it as well, and crossing a border without permission was punishable by death.

But people who had lost their homes had to cross into another domain, prepared for death, in order to survive. A great migration of refugees led straight to the overthrow of a government. That background, indispensable to keeping the regime in power, ended up helping to develop an extremely advanced calendar.

But soon after the Tenpo calendar came into use, in 1853 the arrival of the U.S. Navy warships under Matthew Perry set things in motion. In a time of mounting pressure from the powers to open markets, a military coup took place, and the shogunate, which had lasted 265 years, collapsed with astonishing ease.

After that, the officials of the new government kept learning the most advanced systems from the West and adopting them, but only the calendar stayed the same, still the Edo-period one, not the Gregorian calendar of the West. This was because the lunisolar Tenpo calendar was more accurate than the solar Gregorian calendar. Then why was a calendar that had no need to change changed?

The reason was a financial crisis.

Under the existing lunisolar calendar, 1873 would have had a leap month, the year's payments to officials would have run to thirteen months. And December 1872 would have lasted only two days, yet a full month’s pay would still have been owed. For a government in financial difficulty this was a matter of life and death. So, cleverly putting forward the modernity of Westernization, it forced the calendar to change.

So the state gave up the domestic calendar it had won over a long span of years and adopted the Gregorian calendar, fixed at twelve months and without leap months.

To put it plainly, the Meiji government’s pocketbook was the driving force that brought about the Westernization of the calendar. In that context, as industrial commodity society spread across the whole nation, something that had never happened before occurred in the twentieth century: Christmas was celebrated. Companies used this as a business chance.

By coincidence, Emperor Taisho (r. 1912–1926) died on December 25, 1926, and the day came to be felt as a special one. Personally, because December 25 left such a strong impression until after the war as the anniversary of the emperor's death, I think the day itself had a strong air of remembering the late emperor, and as a result produced today's situation in which Christmas Eve is the livelier of the two.

But in the period of high economic growth, one special day did not make money, so Christmas Eve and Christmas were both set, doubling the economic effect and seeking profit.

If the development of Christmas in the West began for the sake of spreading Christianity, then in Japan it was born of economic reasons. Japan's Christmas, unrelated to religion, is a strange pair of days that has been driven by economic circumstances.

At this time of year, if you walk the streets, you’ll see countless young couples strolling arm-in-arm, and virtually every shop remains open and bustling. To a tourist familiar with Christianity, it would seem a strange spectacle from another world, and a captivating one.

In this way, foreign cultures have been taken in flexibly on the archipelago and rebuilt in its own forms. Whether to see that as flexibility or as superficiality is left to the reader. Watching the streets loud with Christmas, I am once more struck by what a strange place this is.