I had no idea kawaii was now an English word: Kimono-clad princesses offer apologies for roadside construction in Kyoto

Kimono-clad princesses offer apologies for roadside construction in Kyoto

I came by that info from this article.  I'm fine with kawaii joining the vast numbers of words English has borrowed from other languages.  Most of them are food words, but there are enough that aren't.  And we use various foreign language phrases at times, too, because they have a certain je ne sais quoi.  That sounds smarter than saying we use them because they have this thing and I don't know what to call it.  It's probably charisma.  Kawaii means cute, but used for a particular form of cuteness as exemplified by Hello Kitty and various manga and anime characters (to use two more borrowed words), it has charisma.

For example, your grandchild is cute.  Your grandchild's Sailor Moon blanket is kawaii.

And yes, to make a general observation, there is a lot of emphasis on kawaii in Japan.  Every prefecture, many cities and practically every company you can do business of some kind with has as a mascot some cutie-pie cartoon character.  And some of these involve sending emissaries in fluffy costumes to do personal appearances.  Even the grotesque and hilarious Funasshi, a parody of these "wild characters," is ultimately kawaii unto itself.  Himself?  Herself?  Our local cute character is Ieyasu-kun, a kawaii-ified version of the guy who beat all comers to unify Japan and set up the Tokugawa Shogunate that then ruled the country as an all-powerful dictatorship for about 200 years. 

It's fun to have your photo taken giving the peace sign and smiling broadly next to a fluffy, round-headed caricature of an iron-willed man responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in battle, plus who knows how many political murders in order to consolidate his rule.  I feel the same way about Ieyasu-kun I do when I see the presidents race at a Washington Nationals game.

C'est la vie!

Christmas Eve has arrived in Japan!

Incredibly, just one year after the last Christmas Eve, we have another.  It's a clear, cold day here in Shizuoka prefecture.  This morning a couple of huge crows shouting at each other greeted me as I left our apartment for work.  Christmas crows, I suppose.  I don't like to stand underneath a crow because I feel they're smart enough and wicked enough to poop on someone's head deliberately.  These two went from wire to wire, aggravating each other.

There are a lot of crows and pigeons here.  Sometimes they interact, such as the time a friend and I watched from our table at an Indian restaurant as across the street a crow murdered a pigeon by repeatedly pecking it in the abdomen.  What does this morbid memory have to do with Christmas Eve morning?  Ask the crows.

Over the weekend we watched quite a bit of Japanese television, and most of the shows we watched featured Christmas decorations.  Christmas trees, hosts and guests in Santa hats.  Even omnipresent Funasshi, that weird pear thing "yuru-kyara" ("wild character") from Funabashi, Chiba, wore a Santa hat yesterday while a sushi chef sliced a large sushi roll of some kind with kana characters inside and then a couple of pictures of Funasshi itself.

Which Funasshi ate after one of the hosts inserted it into the back of its jiggly green head.

It's hard not to be in the Christmas spirit (or some strange variation thereof) when you watch things like that.  For me, anyway.  I find the weirdness very appealing.

Anyway, I'm at the office now even though I have nothing to do.  Working on Christmas Eve is no big deal for me.  One year I worked on Christmas Day, which was odd.  Here in Japan, even though the holiday has grown in popularity, it's not an official one.  It's just fun and romantic for young couples, a time for cute costumes and pretty decorations and even seasonal music in the stores.  Next week is the big event.