Why Japan Celebrates Christmas with KFC (2016)
bbc.com
bbc.com
He did a great video on this topic which is worth checking out (as well is all his other content for those interested in Japanese culture!)
It only seems odd if you don’t think about it much. Americans don’t think Honey Baked Ham or Boston Market on a holiday is weird though both are franchises and Boston Market was formerly a McDonalds brand.
Try to book a table at Outback on Valentines (or even get seated at Applebee’s).
And while Americans have good cause to celebrate Benito Juarez saving their bacon by stopping the French while Americans were busy killing each other from fixed positions in the Civil War, Taco Bell chalupa combo boxes with a forty ounce no ice Mountain Dew doesn’t really align with Cinco de Mayo any better than extra crispy at xmas.
Every body is whacky.
Where I'm from everything is closed on Christmas, even Wal-Mart, except the local Chinese takeout, so if you don't want home cooking, that's your one option.
Now, living in a larger area, there are some other limited options but as a seventh generation European descended American I have never known a single family that celebrated Christmas by going to a franchise restaurant
The meme-able phenomenon the OP is talking about is very real and certainly not regional or niche e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/9z7zd6/honey_ba...
Not everyone has a large family after growing up and getting holiday meals from "strange" places isn't that strange. Getting a fully cooked holiday meal from the grocery store is a thing, lots of restaurants do this as well. Boston Market often has menu items of turkey/dressing/potatoes/etc that one might think of a traditional holiday meal, so this isn't a stretch for them.
You and GP might be talking past each other. GP is talking about "Honey Baked Ham" as a brand name. You might be talking about honey baked ham as a generic food.
I've also spent all my life in the US in vastly different regions, and I've never heard of a franchise called Honey Baked Ham, but I'm aware of honey baked ham as a food product.
Funny thing was, I had never heard of Honey Baked Ham until my first boss told me he used to be a manager at one. The irony there was that he was Jewish and didn't eat pork.
And if you're hitting up Taco Bell on Cinco de Mayo, you're doing it wrong. Home-make 7-layer dip and margaritas (if you're into that kinda thing) is how we rock it in Colorado.
Not OP, but I’m from the Midwest, and I find your “must be a California thing” hilarious given that we were eating a Honey Baked Ham at least once a year over 40 years ago. Imagine my surprise (and regret that I had since gone vegetarian) when I moved to the west coast and found a Honey Baked Ham store in Bellevue, WA. My wife still gets one once in a great while, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sneak a piece or two.
Anyway, back to the point, looking their website prompts me to ask where one would have to live in the U. S. and not be within an hour’s drive of a store.
Figure out where it takes a couple hours of driving to get to an international airport and you'll have an idea.
Anyway, I just assume anything people on this site assume everyone has seen is from California, especially if I've never heard of it.
Maybe I've just never been in the market for fast food ham? I still feel like this is a weird example of something Americans commonly do on Christmas.
From Seattle, same story. Thanksgiving and Christmas always included honey baked ham.
So no, standard families in the suburbs may be making their own meals, but there are certainly many people in the US that aren't in that situation. Young people away from home, singles and couples, non traditional families, families that don't have time to cook because of jobs or don't want to. There are many people who get holiday meals from these restaurants.
Growing up in a rural area with Chinese takeout as the only Christmas option is well protected from the pre-conditioned Honey Baked Ham holiday lifestyle.
Perhaps, but this isn't one of those stories. There's a genuinely interesting history to how KFC became a Japanese Christmas staple - well, I found it interesting, at least.
But when I finished I didn't have a better understanding of Japan's people, culture, or cuisine. Only a p-hack explained by multi-national marketing.
That's good enough piece
Every restaurant is packed for Valentines. It's a big date night. Going out on a date means going out to eat. There's nothing specific to Outback about going there on Valentines, that's just where some portion of people go. Same with Applebees.
And while Americans celebrating Cinco de Mayo is odd, it's not a uniquely Taco Bell thing. Any vaguely Mexican adjacent business will advertise around it.
This mashup of KFC and Christmas is a very brand specific thing unique to that country.
Problem is that TFA never called anyone wacky; they didn't try to pass judgment at all -- and the United States wasn't ever involved in either side until you injected them into it , unless you blame the country for KFC all together? I don't follow.
Surely there must be some behavior you find strange from Britain ; you know -- the originator of the article -- without trying to loop around the world to drag another country through the mud?
> “Those whacky Japanese” is a perennial category of bus-plunge journalism.
'bus-plunge journalism' isn't only about needlessly expanding nothing stories into pages, it also includes a level of exaggeration. I guess you could say the headline is exaggerated because it's not the entirety of Japan that celebrates with KFC? Feels like yak-shaving, most assume that headlines don't apply universally to entire countries full of people.
> Americans don’t think Honey Baked Ham or Boston Market on a holiday is weird
(as an American I do.. but who cares, let's look at the numbers)
The Honey Baked Ham Company says that it services about 2.5 million customers between Thanksgiving to New Years, meaning that the KFC phenomenon in Japan is significantly stronger, given that TFA states that 3.5 million families purchase KFC for Christmas in Japan.
Smaller time frames, smaller country, more sales; seemingly stronger trend.
Maybe we are all wacky, but clearly Americans are sensitive…
Even if a person isn't British -- but as noted that's the primary intended audience here. An audience where Kentucky and fried chicken and "Colonel" as an honorary vary between a bit culturally alien to quite so indeed.
The British press, BBC included, has a long history of portraying the otherness of anyone complected unlike a Windsor. I mean the BBC broke Lilibet-naming-gate.
Going to western Europe feels like the US. Going to Japan from the west still feels like traveling the world once did. Its unique culture is appreciated worldwide, even from closest neighbors.
They had smartphones almost a decade before we did. They had high speed rail before anyone else . Manga and anime are now worldwide, but they were born in Japan. Kawaii has spread to south Korea and to some extent the west, but it was born in Japan. Hanko instead of signatures is unique. Bowing. Onsen. Sumo. Vending machines. Much of the food... There's countless examples.
We're should be celebrating human uniqueness, Japan is a special place
Your screenshots folder will be filled within a few weeks. ;P
Similarly, Valentine's Day was pitched by chocolate companies as a time to buy chocolates for your sweetheart. There are actually two such days: on Valentine's Day women give chocolates to their sweethearts, while on White Day (March 14), said sweethearts return the favor.
Japanese people are starting to do things for Halloween. I am not sure what the marketing story is behind that.
Japan Celebrates Christmas with KFC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16002210 - Dec 2017 (9 comments)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_KFC#Heublein_and_st...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders#1930%E2%80%931...
"There, an assemblage of supporters yelled the players' names, and with every name, a fan resembling a member of the victorious team leaped from the bridge into the waiting canal. However, lacking a Caucasian person to imitate MVP Randy Bass, the rabid crowd seized a plastic statue of Colonel Sanders (like Bass, the Colonel had a beard and was not Japanese) from a nearby KFC and tossed it off the bridge as an effigy.
According to the urban legend, this impulsive maneuver cost the team greatly, beginning the Curse of the Colonel, which states that the Tigers will not win the championship again until the statue is recovered. Subsequently, numerous attempts had been made to recover the statue, often as part of a variety TV show."
There's good and bad, just like everywhere else -- excluding South Korea. Korean fried chicken is simply next level.
For the last 20 years or more, the KFC nearest to me has been known to the locals as a place to avoid at all costs. They've had 2 periods of revival, in the month after new owners took over, neither lasted more than a month or so. The default state is under cooked food, high prices, and shitty service. They have a policy of shorting orders and shorting change; it must be policy, random error would happen in the customers' favor sometimes.
I'd suspect they were a cover for some illegal activity, but if they are its happening at some higher level that I cannot perceive.
They also have some type of coffee shop/pastry joint inside, where you seat and the waiter brings the food.
- aggressive expansion of corporate-owned stores
- very clean and modern toilets with a “free to use” policy
- vertical integration: nearly every product became 7-11 branded.
- better quality of food in general, especially hot items
- fresh coffee, brewed to order
Of course, they fired that guy for a penny pincher and the quality took a dramatic nosedive to the point that shitty 7-11 products are a meme now. Things like bentos with a bottom that curves upwards to make it look like there is more product than there really is, sandwiches with filling only in side the visible from the shelf, shrinking onigiri, or “strawberry pulp” that is literally a picture of strawberry pulp printed onto the cup.
Nearly all of the other brands consolidated into Famima, and now Famima is competing on quality to take advantage of the situation. It was amazing how quickly they got their act together when they realized what was going on at 7.
They’ll probably get their act together sooner or later; McDonald’s in Japan had an extreme turnaround for the better after years of poor management and scandals.
It’s definitely not good for you, but it’s tasty.
Note that it's not that common to see roast chicken in grocery stores in Japan. So KFC isn't the worst option if you crave chicken for some reason.
It seems strange at first, but it makes sense when you consider only about 1.5% of Japanese people are Christians. Christmas as we know it in countries with a Christian majority doesn't mean much to them.
Why would it seem strange at first that a country that isn’t very Christian would not celebrate Christmas? Why would they?
To a lot of people (and I tentatively claim most people, probably) Christmas is either a mostly or entirely secular holiday, celebrating family and the coming of lighter days after the winter solstice, the southern hemisphere notwithstanding.
In the other half of the world it’s the start of summer.
Christianity was a hard sell back a couple thousand years ago, so it was often simpler to just coopt existing pagan holidays.
That’s a common myth. In most languages (English being an exception), Easter’s name is derived from Passover. Eggs and bunnies are a later development, but through medieval Christian traditions, not pagan fertility connections.
Much is made of the fact that in English, the name “Easter” comes from Ēostre, a pagan goddess. But that’s accepted to have happened because the holiday falls within the month Germanics named after her. Easter isn’t co‐opting Ēostre worship any more than Good Friday co‐opts worship of Frigg.
When I studied ancient Rome, my (secular) education was that Christianity had few adherents at the time, and since the doctrine was very much in flux (many of the books were not even written) and there were social or legal implications to declaring your faith, it was practical to follow the local custom outwardly, while maintaining your faith inwardly.
The most visible is the adoption of Saturnalia (winter solstice) as the time of Jesus' birth. It was the biggest Roman/pagan holiday, and the documentation of his true birthdate was incomplete, so ... Christmas?
The activities of celebration for Saturnalia and Christmas were wildly different (though to be fair, Christmas celebration didn't begin for a few centuries after 0CE, and they did get a bit rowdy in the middle ages!)
The crucifixion is better-documented. That it fell around the time of an existing fertility festival near the vernal equinox might be mere coincidence, I suppose. But rebirth/resurrection/fertility are variations on a theme, so either interpretation can be reasonable.
Additionally (I don't know if this is canon!), Easter is about 40 weeks preceding Christmas. Immaculate conception or not, gestation is still a thing, and the timing is interesting.
My country is supposedly overwhelmingly Christian, but most people including myself don't care much about Christmas in a traditional sense anymore. In fact I have celebrated Christmas with Asian food a few times. So you would expect a non Christian country to care even less.
Christmas here too was a marketing campaign gone wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas#Introduction_of_the_...