Anthropologist David W. Plath observed a growing tradition of celebrating Christmas in Japan in the 1960s. Originally introduced by missionaries in the sixteenth century, the holiday and its trappings only really gained traction in the nineteenth century.
“By the 1870s some famous Tokyo stores such as Maruzen and the Meiji-ya were displaying Christmas decorations and were importing Christmas cards and gifts,” Plath noted, and by the 1920s, “Christmas was percolating downward and outward into the lower classes and rural regions.”
The years of US occupation after World War II more directly inserted Christmas into Japanese popular culture, and Plath found that in the post-occupation era, “Christmas has not only been encouraged by the mass media and the retail merchants; it has further been encouraged by school English readers…with their chapters on an American family Christmas, or again by school teachers who sometimes praise the event as ‘democratic.’”
Christmas is traditionally a religious holiday, but the embrace of it across the archipelago indicated a secular significance as well. Plath noted that in a survey of people living in the Nagano Prefecture, around half of the respondents said they had a Christmas tree, even if they practiced another religion.
“Christmas usually is listed in calendars issued by Shinto and Buddhist organizations in Japan, which apparently do not interpret it as a religious threat,” Plath explained. He even found evidence of attempts to make December 25, the Anglo-American Christmas (as opposed to a December 6 St. Nicholas Day), a national holiday to be known as “International Goodwill Day.” The proposal prompted “several newspapers to wonder whether such a gesture would be regarded as international goodwill by people in Islamic and Buddhist nations.” (Read more.)
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Christmas along with Christianity were barred from Japan in the 17th Century during the Tokugawa Shogunate but were reinstated under Emperor Meiji in the 1800s.
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