Globalisation in Japan

This week's topic is "Globalisation", and since my everyday adventures in Japan this week included a (free) trip to Universal Studios Japan, in thinking about this topic I was really struck by how popular Halloween is here in Japan. There are few people in "the West" (for example, America, Canada, Europe, or Australia) who have not heard of Halloween as the institutionalised festival it has become or indeed otherwise; however, I had no idea that it was so "big" in Japan!

This week at Kansai Gaidai there has been a large-scale celebration for Halloween including all kinds of parades and parties and a costume contest. It strikes me as a little odd that this Pagan festival from Britain, commercialised by America has shipped to Japan as a kind of Western oddity of a festival with such strange traditions as carving pumpkins and bobbing for apples. Not only that, but that it receives a better turn-out than the celebration of the laying of the foundation stone of the university - an event celebrated by no-one coming to university that day.



Here we have Rilakkuma (a popular Japanese media character) saying 「はろうぃんですね」 - "it's Halloween!". So, similar to the US and Britain, Halloween is being imported as a generally commercial "holiday".

When I went to Universal Studios Japan, the whole place was covered in Halloween-style decorations, with pumpkins and skeletons everywhere. For some reason it gave me a funny kind of feeling, which reminded me of jet-lag, only it felt a bit more like culture-lag.



There's no real reason I should have felt this way, anyway. I am well-aware that the Japanese love to dress up - simply look at the variety of fashions on show at any given time, or Cosplay for an extreme example. Not to mention that last year back in Leeds, at the Japanese Society Halloween party, they really went all-out!

According to this blog, however, whose owner has been living in Japan for 10 years, he's watched Halloween permeate public consciousness from nearly nothing to now being a phenomenon. Just goes to show that with the advent of the internet and with more, well, American media being imported, what kind of effect it has on Japanese culture.