Ask John: Why is Halloween an Infrequently Seen Holiday in Anime?
Question:
I have seen many anime shows where characters are celebrating many different occasions including Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s Day, Obon festival, and Golden Week. I noticed that many anime shows do not have the characters celebrate Halloween. The only anime that comes to mind is “Blood: The Last Vampire” movie, but the Halloween celebration occurred on an American army base. Do the Japanese celebrate Halloween? If so, why is it not predominant in anime as Christmas or Valentine’s Day?
Answer:
Considering that Halloween is only weeks away, this seems like a very timely question. Contemporary Japan does celebrate the Halloween holiday, and, in fact, according to many reports the popularity of the Halloween holiday is steadily growing in Japan. However, Halloween is still a relatively new and foreign celebration for most Japanese citizens.
Halloween, like the more popular Japanese Valentine’s Day holiday, was introduced to Japan by the Kobe Morozoff confectionery company in 1936, then popularized by the Morinaga confectionery company in 1960. Christmas is American culture’s most significant annual holiday, and because of its pageantry and its connection to the Christian religion, which has some presence in Japan, Christmas has been widely adopted by modern Japanese society. Valentine’s Day was popularized in Japan by Japanese confectionery companies that recognized the holiday as a valuable means of selling more chocolate. However, Halloween is a European holiday rooted in ancient pagan beliefs. So the origins and meaning of the Halloween holiday are not especially familiar to even many Americans. Halloween hasn’t been as passionately adopted by Japanese society because the holiday has no resonance with Japanese culture, tradition, or religion, nor has the holiday been artificially popularized by designed Japanese effort. Many present day Japanese citizens that do celebrate Halloween still don’t know the meaning behind the holiday (not that the meaning of Halloween is especially relevant these days, anyway). But Halloween is beginning to catch on in Japan, increasingly in recent years, because of the playful and visually appealing costuming aspect of the celebration.
Halloween celebrations aren’t especially commonplace in anime, but there are a few examples, including Dirty Pair OVA 2, Ouran High School Host Club episode 21, Wagaya no Oinarisama episode 19, Super Doll Licca-chan episode 4, and the Cowboy Bebop movie.
Article revised October 3, 2008
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John, according to the Japanese Wikipedia, Japan’s first Christmas celebration was held in Suo (Yamaguchi Prefecture in today), 1552. Western missionaries allegedly planned to hold it and welcome their Japanese Catholics. (In that era, Japan was regularly frequented by Catholic missionaries from Spain and Portugal) However, it is in 1900, when the Japanese retailer called Meidi-Ya opened the store in Ginza Street in Tokyo and promoted Christmas. The Christian celebration became popular enough that a Japanese newspaper reported in 1925, “Now Christmas is a Japanese annual celebration, as well as many Japanese children love Santa Clause.†BTW I love the scene where an illiterate Japanese sergeant released a British officer from the death bar in honor of Fazeru Kurisumasu, in OSHIMA Nagisa’s WWII POW film _Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence_.
I must add that most Japanese did not know of Halloween until the Japanese release of _E.T._(’82), when the festa would look bizzare to me.
The sentence “Halloween, like the more popular Japanese Valentine’s Day holiday, was introduced to Japan by the American occupation following WWII” was corrected to its present form thanks to an enlightening suggestion from a Japanese reader.
>popularized by the Meiji confectionery company in 1960
It was by Morinaga.
Revised again.