Fried chicken, strawberry cream pies and couple dates characterize Christmas in Japan, where only 1.5% of the population is Christian and baked turkey, nougat or long after-dinner conversations until dinner lose all relevance.
The Japanese country celebrates these holidays without religious meaning, but in November its cities light up even more if possible and certain squares in large cities host European-inspired Christmas markets during December that bring with them the aroma of mulled wine.
Read also: Do you know the story of the Christmas tree?
The Christmas ‘marketing’ that led Santa Claus to stop wearing green also does not lose its place, and the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) was responsible for establishing, after a successful campaign, one of the most consolidated traditions of Japanese Christmas: eating fried chicken.
Instead of nougat and shortbread, cream pie with strawberries is the Japanese’s favorite sweet for these dates and must be reserved weeks, if not months, in advance at pastry shops if you want to enjoy it at Christmas.
The local confectionery and restaurant chain Fujiya was a pioneer in marketing this sweet at the beginning of the last century, whose white and red colors evoke the national flag.
Without knowing it, you might have seen this fluffy Japanese cake before, as the emoji keyboard pays tribute to it with the birthday cake and the slice of cake.
Christmas Eve, the Japanese Valentine’s Day
The height of romanticism in Japan does not come on February 14 – a date also marked on its calendar – but on Christmas Eve; Couples take the opportunity to go out to dinner and walk under the Christmas illuminations on the night of the 24th, a day even more celebrated than the 25th itself.
Although the origin of this tradition is unclear, some say that it is due to the Japanese musical hit ‘My Lover is Santa Claus’, leader of the charts when it was released in 1982.
This song would be to Japan what ‘Last Christmas’ or ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ are to the West.
The Japanese Christmas menu
Local conbinis (24-hour convenience stores), restaurants and burger joints serve special fried chicken menus at Christmas, and KFC estimates that some 3.6 million Japanese families sit down to a lavish feast of the food each December.
In fact, many establishments accept Christmas orders from the end of October to avoid long lines forming at their doors on Christmas Day.
The prelude to this custom is said to be the ‘Kentucky for Christmas’ advertising campaign that KFC launched in 1974, inspired by a foreign customer who went to the chain’s first location in Japan -Nagoya, 1970- to buy fried chicken after an intense but fruitless search for turkey to cook for Christmas.
They also say that the dish became the quintessential Japanese Christmas food after the first director of KFC in the country falsely presented it as the typical American Christmas food in order to increase its sales, at a time when Japan was still It lacked traditions for these dates.
Whatever the beginning of this consolidated custom, the truth is that fried chicken is not very far from original Japanese cuisine, which includes a very similar dish, ‘karaage’, the culinary technique with which the Japanese coat it with panko. pieces of meat, often chicken, or fish and then fry them.
Figures published by KFC raise the chain’s collection in Japan between December 20 and 25, 2018 to 6.9 billion yen (about 43.6 million euros), ten times more than what was billed on an average day.
A centenary cake instead of nougat
The supreme Christmas dessert for the Japanese is the strawberry cream pie, which was introduced in 1910 by the Fujiya chain, but was discontinued after the Second World War due to food shortages that turned sugary sweets into unattainable luxuries for the majority.
As the Japanese economy recovered, the ingredients needed for this cake became available again and the cake re-emerged to become a symbol of Japan’s recovery.
Now, strawberry cream pies on the Christmas tables of Japanese families represent good fortune and, along with fried chicken and couple dates that replace baked turkey and Western after-dinner meals, they are customs that generation after generation long to maintain. generation.
