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Christmas prevails as the most widely popularized American holiday among modern Japanese festivals. It is not simply transplanted from America to Japan, for the Japanese since World War II have adapted the holiday to their cultural context and added distinctive features not found elsewhere in Christmas customs. A noticeable material difference, for example, is the use of a round white cake decorated with red strawberries. As a festival food it expresses symbols that communicate cultural values, social relations, and the distinctive identity of modern Japan. Christmas celebrations in Japan create an environment for Japanese to detach from the routines of everyday life and experience an American milieu. Dramatized by showy commercial advertisements and promotional campaigns, Christmas is a major public event in urban industrialized Japanese society.
My observation ranges from the dawn of modernization in the Meiji Restoration (1868) through the period of Japan's high economic growth during the 1960s and 1970s. Pertaining to the emergence of the cake, I emphasize American influences in the years after World War II, including democratic reforms of the American Occupation (1945-51). Drastic social changes occurred during that time, and a modern outlook began to replace many traditional views of society. Urbanization and industrialization during the Meiji had already removed the borders between rural villages and thus traditional institutions and customs within them eroded. In addition, American leaders of the occupation equated the legal and educational reforms they were instituting with individual as well as social advancement. To promote economic recovery, they encouraged fulfillment of individual needs that would stimulate consumer demand and consequently, industrial production (Fujiwara). Corresponding with absorption of American ideas and ways of lives, a new form of ceremonial food appeared as the cake. Arguably the cake takes its meaning from its ingredients, shape, colors, and surface decorations.
In this essay I offer interpretations of the Christmas cake as a symbol of the incorporation of American values. The discussion begins with describing the social background of the assimilation of the modern American Christmas into Japanese lives. The following analysis, in relation to the postwar economic prosperity of Japanese society, investigates what new values were instilled in Japan and how they were illustrated in the cake. Interpreting Japanese continuity of traditions, I argue the acceptability of the...