天下制覇

I’ll settle for the treat, thanks all the same.

You know, you’d think that the Japanese Otaku community would flock to Halloween. A chance to dress up and go beg others for free food? It seems like the kind of thing that they do as a matter of course. On the other hand, Japan’s squash and pumpkin industry really isn’t prospering all that much, so there goes the jack-o-lantern market, and with the population crush, I can imagine that trick or treating is about as popular in Japan as it is in central Manhatten.

So much of the imagery normally associated with Halloween is completely foreign to normal Japanese culture. With holidays like Christmas or Valentine’s Day, the central themes are abstract and vague enough for the spirit to get across without a particularly accurate reflection of the practice. Christmas is a day for lovers, not for Christ’s birth, for example. What is Halloween without skeletons and pumpkins though?

Japan at least has a relatively decent grasp on witches, but given their Shinto background and the wide array of ‘magic’ that they accept, the ‘witch’ basically just means a western magician. The entire imagery of MacBeth or the Witch Hunts that formulated western perception is totally absent for them. The witch is not so much the crone with warts cackling over a bubbling cauldron, but instead basically just a a title for somebody with a really big and floppy hat.

The Shinto roots of Japan vs the Judeo-Christian roots of the western world do make for some interesting comparisons between the ‘monsters.’ The western middle ages had one munificient god protecting them while lots of goblins and minor spirits ran around and caused merry havoc, cavorting with druids and such. The east has a more balanced range of spirits; those that protect and those that also cause mischief.

The aforementioned lack of skeletons is also probably interesting and probably relates closely to the inherant difference between the east and west’s versions of the undead. For the west, necromancers or some other unnatural form to bring the dead back is a matter of course. For the more Shinto bent, the undead more often tend to result from the soul being unable to peacefully ascend. Aside from the ghosts, this does limit the lapse of time between death and undeath, and thus, you won’t see all that many skeletons wandering about. Althought, and this is a huge caveat, the Mexican Day of the Dead influences do have a huge impact and keeping skeletons in the western consciousness.

They did take to western vampires pretty well, but then again, there’s probably something deep rooted in human nature that makes you fear the walking dead out to suck the soul of the living. It also helps that they had a similar idea already in their culture; the kyonshi (or jiang shi for the Chinese out there). There is a difference though, as western vampires are explicitly referred to as ‘blood suckers,’ and not your run of the mill kyonshi. It’s hard to make kyonshi interesting anyway… something about the paralyzed arms and hopping makes them more comical than frightening.

Anyway, I’m sure you’re tired of my meandering rambling. Have some delicious candy and try not to leer at your female friends in their exposing costumes too much.