Flashback Friday

Next Friday Thanksgiving will be behind us, our interiors filled with food and fun and the warmth that comes from time spent with people we love--family in the blood sense and in the metaphoric sense. Last year I remembered my first Thanksgiving in Japan, a holiday (obviously) not celebrated there. It was not the first time I had lived in a foreign country during a major United States holiday, but in Ecuador a small gringo community gathered for a lovely turkey feast, which made that First Time much easier to bear.

感謝祭の日 Thanksgiving Day in Japan

感謝祭の日 Kanshasai no hi Thanksgiving Day was a very special day in Japan for me, my first being one of the first true demonstrations of how gracious and generous the Japanese can be, once you pierce their formal exterior.

I had an 英会話 eikaiwa English conversation class on Monday nights that I taught each of my three years in 中之条. As the autumn season of 1994 progressed, I was coming to realize that, for the first time in my life, I would not be experiencing Thanksgiving in a way that I had always known through tradition: gathering of family or friends, plethora of food, recounting stories already million times told but yearned for yet again so as to fulfill the requirement of tradition. Even in Guayaquil in 1992 I had a Thanksgiving dinner, along with my North American classmates, at the house of Bostonian ex-pat who had connections and could get a turkey. However in Japan, and much more so in rural 群馬県 Gunma-ken, it was extremely difficult to find a turkey, although the word for turkey, 七面鳥 shichimenchou, does exist in their vernacular.

My 英会話 class pooled together what must have been a great sum of money and imported a Thanksgiving turkey for me. They disclosed this gift two weeks before Thanksgiving, and I put together a list of other foods and recipes for those who would like to try preparing some other "traditions" that I was familiar with, such as sweet potatoes with marshmallows and cranberries and pumpkin pie. The next week we passed around a sign-up sheet and corresponding recipes for the next week's Thanksgiving Potluck Dinner...a first annual event for this 英会話 class.

This was a joyous occasion. We talked about the idea of thankfulness and how our different cultures celebrate and recognize this idea. We had an immense amount of food and the turkey was delicious. It was an enjoyable event, that we reproduced in other forms the other two years of my tenure.

At the end of the night, the group's leader presented the rest of the turkey and the leftovers to me and told me to have the rest on Thanksgiving night, and to invite my other friends who probably would not have any Thanksgiving turkey that year.

So, to my residence came my North American friends Mike, Chris, Laraine and Ted, and our Australian "bug-catcher" cohort John and together we reheated the turkey and spooned out all the side dishes and had a wonderful, memory-filled evening, giving thanks for all that we had and the fact that we had each other to lean on in the middle of our little individual pieces of rented Japanese heaven