Christmas as it is used to be in Tokyo : totally non-Christian (Jeezus who ?...), colorful, shiny, German-spirited (did you know the Christmas sausage ? Me neither) and... romantic. This is the time for couple to go to Disneyland and joyfully mix the Christmas symbols with a kind of American-style naive romance. Look at this atmosphere at Roppongi Hills.

No Christmas without a tree...

... or two...


... or three.


Here it is : Drosselmeier's magic castle !


And... the Nutcracker ! Yesss !
(but ahem... could you please become Hans quickly ? thanx)


I shrinked for real... I could enter a snowball.


Oh ! A giant Barley Sugar over there !


"la neige ressemble à du glaçage à la vanille"


The Snow-man took the keys and stole the house. Damned.


Lights... lights... lights.

The countdown to Christmas is launched already

-Shinjuku -

(More pictures by Attila & Melinda in the ETP Japan photo album !)

Christmas means gift rapping, Chrismas means chorus songs, and Christmas means EATING.
This year, I had not only once but three different Christmas dinners in Tokyo. Which means, three diets at least to write on the the To-Do-List for 2010, but let's not talk about boring things.

Family first :

MY CHRISTMAS SURPRISE DINNER WITH SISTER

It began with this : the huge Xmas package, full of good French specialities, sent by our darling parents... Chocolates, tapenade, foie-gras, marrons glaces, caramels, calissons...
Look at these chocolates. Isn't it a piece of art ? French cooks, we love you !

And then, for the little "local" touch : we went to the izakaya at Ebisu, and had delicious fried spring rolls and roasted tuna with cheese ! Merry Christmas !

Then, friends :

MY CHRISTMAS PIC-NIC WITH THE ETP FRIENDS

Most of the ETPs went back to their countries to celebrate Christmas with their families, but a few of us were still there and ready to have a toast ! Thank you again to Attila and Melinda for hosting the party, and to Nataly for her fine organization of the Christmas lottery !
Our hosts cooked meat pancakes and we had the most delicious "buche" covered with nuts and almonds.

Let's jump to the boyfriend time :

MY CHRISMAS ROMANTIC RENDEZ-VOUS

At restaurant Temari (Shinjuku), you can sit into nice balls which are supposed to represent the toys the little Japanese girls play with, but from my French point of view it looks like Christmas tree balls... No ?

We had absolutely delicious sushi-balls, meat balls, deep-fried chicken, and other delicious and funny meals.

Boyfriend has a family too. On the 26th, I had the honor to join :

MY CHRISMAS FAMILY MEETING

Hitoshi's cousin is a volunteer for the association Support 21, which helps the refugees' kids to get a good education and the best chances to succeed in the Japanese society. I had the chance to join this meeting where some of these former kids, now high-level students, were presenting their researches and sharing their experiences (in Japanese of course). There were Chinese, Viet-namese, Peruvian, Brazilian students and also a very interesting young woman, born from an English man and a Korean woman, raised in Japan and totally Japanese - she had to struggle a lot to learn another language than Japanese - who made a speech about identity and the difficulty to exist as a human when you don't belong to the classic categories. An during all this time, we had sweets and drinks, whithout speaking of this amazing Christmas chorus where another cousin of Hitoshi was singing (the first on the left).

Chorale de Noel - Tokyo December 2009

 And after that... the first cousin invited us to have a Chrismas nabe (a kind of light fondue, soy-sauce-based, with boiled meat, vegetables and udon in this case). I had the chance to visit her huge appartment with a great view on Tokyo Tower, and to meet her Canadian husband. And she cooked chocolate truffes too !

Thank you gentlemen for cooking the nabe !

And they have a real Chrismas tree, with the authentic smell ! That is the smell of Christmas !

Thank you everyone for this wonderful Christmas. It was delicious, colourful, tasty and funny ! Your smiles made it even more beautiful !

It's almost Christmas and it's time for regression. So it's time to go and visit the Japanese version of the Disneyland Resort. We went to Disney Sea because it seemed to propose a few new things compared to our Disneyland Paris. The two parks (Land and Sea) are situated in the Easter surburb of Tokyo. You can acces the place easily with the JR line connected to Tokyo station or Shin-Kiba station, on the Yurakucho line.  It's a simple, easy, fast and cheap journey - first good surprise of the day.

Mysterious Island

Arabian Coast

Mermaid's Lagoon

Mediteranean Port

American Waterfront

TomorrowLand

I went several times to Disneyland Paris and I have to say that I definitely prefered Disney Sea Tokyo. Let me list the nicest points of Tokyo's park :

- It's quiet. The kids are patients, calms and nobody rushes to the attractions. No stress in the waiting lines. When you lost your friends because you were busy to take a picture, people kindly make some space in the line to let you join your group. As a result, the day was very relaxing - something that you can't expect from Disneyland Paris where kids are shouting at every corner and their parents insulting them in all the langages of the world...

- It's clean. Another difference from Disney Paris. Almost everyone is carrying a pop-corn bag but nothing falls on the flor and if it happens, a nice cleaning person immediatly appears to clean the place. So Disney Sea really looks like another planet where everything is pretty and easy-going.

- It's details-oriented. Inside the attractions, the level of attention to the details of the decoration and so on is really, really amazing. Nothing compared to the cheap Pinocchio/Peter Pan/etc. attrations I was used to. The journey to the Center of the Earth is properly a piece of Art, as well as the 20 000 Under the Sea and even Indiana Jones - the special effects are really high-standard and you don't regret the time that you spent waiting for it ! And I understand now why the Japanese are so crazy about Disney stuff - the park as a whole is really, really impressive. There are little rooms everywhere, full of stuff and decoration ; the music on the alleys is well-balanced with noises effects etc... How can you resist to the magic ?

Special mention to the Kingdom of Triton, it was so beautiful that I could have spent the hole day to watch the scenary... And there was the real Mermaid's cavern !!!

- It's not so full of tourists. We barely met something like ten gaijin groups or couples. All the staff workin at Disney Sea is bilingual but people seemed sincerely surprised and happy that I could question them politely in Japanese and two of them thanked me for my "kirei na nihongo". As a result, you don't have the feeling that the park is a "tourists thing"but a kind of part of the modern Japanese culture.

- The restaurants are not only fast-food spots, even the middle-range ones. You can have spicy food inside he Volcano, arabian pastries at the Arabian Coast and pasta at Little Venice. I didn't tried any restaurant but families have more choice to feed the kids than in Paris.

- The goodies are not so expensive. I didn't buy anything because there was no reason to but if you like to bring some stuff back to your friends, I suppose that you feel relieved about the range of prices.

- You can see Fuji-san from the water-front ! It's the fist time that I could see it so clearly !

A few strange things, anyway :

- In the Little Mermaid's show, after meeting the Witch, the mermaid finally decides to stay in the Ocean with her fishes-friends. Ok, they had to find a way to close the show, but personnally, I was shocked. The mermaid, in Disney's version, is curious about the world and wants to get out the protected familial area to make her own experiences. It's a metaphore of the way you become and adult, and make a step into a foreign world that you don't controle - the way you accept to take risks... It's really Japanese to prefer an ending where the mermaid stays with the people who look like her and rejects the dangers of the "outside world". Welcome to the Japanese society.

- You can GET MARRIED at Disneyland Tokyo... Oh my.

- For the strong sensations inside the attractions, prefer Disneyland Paris. I am not in this case but if you like adrenaline, you would be desappointed by the softness of the Japanese "fast-pace" experiences.
But I liked a lot the Tower of Terror... You are in a elevator suddenly falling from the highest floor. I really felt myself falling from high.

Tower of Terror

A really good day at Disney Sea !

Will I go to Hell if I eat strawberries in December ?

If the answer is yes, at least I am sure not to feel lonely and to have a lot of Japanese friends to play around with, because strawberry is the fruit of the month in this country.

Everything started at work. I helped my colleague Yasuko-san to do a reporting about the new products you can find this month at the combini stores. I was amazed by the number of strawberry-perfumed stuff that suddenly appeared in the shops. One of them was “a strawberry-flavor crepe with strawberry cream and strawberry sirup, and true pieces of strawberry”. I asked Yasuko about this raise of passion for the strawberry (a national campaign to develop the production area ?...) but my colleague just answered : “Well… because it’s Chrismas !”.

Oh. Of course. Still I do not remember that Gaspar, Melchior or Balthazar ever offered strawberries to the little Christ but anyway. Actually it sounds more like the first opus of Asterix to me, even if I doubt that the Japanese know about it…

Strawberries are red, small, sweet and cute, so they are “Chrismas-spirit”. And the Japanese cultivate them inside greenhouses to be able to provide it in December, which is not logic at all for a European like me who associate the idea of strawberry with May, spring, sun and flowers.

So let’s get back to the point : eating strawberries in December. At least these ones are from the very close prefecture of Shizuoka, which means local production, so it saves energy on transportation, and isn’t it good to support local production ?... But I suppose that a greenhouse is not especially eco-friendly, and it would be better to support local seasonal production… Ok, let’s say that I buy it just once, for the experience of eating strawberries in December, and get a before-taste of Hell.

Wow. Delicious.

現在、東京のコンビニでいろいろなイチゴの味がある商品が見つけられます。イチゴの季節ではないので、私は同僚に説明をお願いし、もらった答えは｢クリスマスですから｣のことでした。本当にびっくりしました。日本にはイチゴはクリスマスのイメージを表現するんですが、私は信じられませんでした。

According to a survey launched by JTB Corp (The Nikkei - Thursday, November 12, 2009), only 15% of the Japanese say that they plan to have a look at the Christmas lights. It’s a pity especially if you live in Tokyo, even if I heard that Kobe’s winter illuminations are the most impressive. In order to boost the figures, 100% of myself went to Ebisu and enjoyed the light show.

Outer lights

It started with sparkling trees covered with lights – I just wonder how the Japanese manage to take everything off without breaking the branches… mystery.

Then I met a giant classic Christmas tree…

A Baccarat stalactite…

And a magic garden.

Inner lights

Still according to the Nikkei, 23% of the Japanese plan to stay at home for Christmas and relax ; 20% will move somewhere like

hot springs

or so ; 12% will do a party at home and 11%... will answer the phone at the office…Not me. Merry Christmas.

日系新聞によって、日本人で15％だけイルミネーションをミ二行くつもりです。東京のライトはとてもきれいですから、少し残念だと思います。

恵比寿駅の近く、すばらしいイルミネーションが見られます。できれば行ってください。本当にきれいです。

... I quote my mother in the title, she will confirm this state of mind of her...

Chrismas - Noël in French - is important.

I have so deep memories of hapiness linked to this period of the year that I still feel strange to spend it far from Home, even if it's the second time... Noemi phones Home, like ET.
So I couldn't resist and I brought Chrismas inside my little place... I have a Xmas tree adapted to the size of the room (means, small), and I made Greeting Cards for the occasion (talking of that, thanks again to Davide for the painting stuff).
As Noel is written in our DNA now, I am pretty sure that Mogusa will soon publish her own Chrismas posts...

クリスマスは大切なものです。子供の時家事久都本当に楽しかったので、今でもクリスマスの特別な雰囲気が大好きです。それで東京にいても少しクリスマスの準備しました。

Two weeks to wait before whishing you a Merry Chrismas !