All over the country, rich fruity Christmas cakes have been sitting maturing in tins and being topped up with brandy since they were made a couple of months ago. But a Kurisumasu Kēki in Japan is very different…
Image reproduced with kind permission of Keiichirō Sugimoto http://home.att.net/~keiichiro/japan/photo/index.html
They’re usually sponge cakes lavishly covered with whipped cream or chocolate and topped with Father Christmas, other decorations, and – somewhat disconcertingly to British eyes – strawberries! and they’re eaten just before or on Christmas Day, no later. 24th is the peak demand day and the 25th is a bargain day because shops don’t want any left over on the 26th.
Living in Hiroshima in the early 1980s, I was keen to have a proper British Christmas cake and spent ages trailing round all the shops in the city that sold western ingredients approximating what I needed to make my own. Japanese kitchens don’t have big cookers, just a gas hob, but I was able to buy a tiny oven, about the size of a microwave. Amazingly, the cake turned out pretty well (far better than the one I made at school when the domestic science teacher insisted I left it in ‘just a bit longer’ until it would have been better suited to a builder’s hod than a cake stand). Sadly, although it was appreciated by my western friends, my Japanese colleagues at school were less enthusiastic, evidently preferring their cream-and-strawberries version.
Traditional Japanese cakes (wagashi), such as those eaten in the tea ceremony, are made from ingredients such as red azuki bean paste, rice flour, sweet chestnuts, sugar and seaweed agar agar. The Toraya company website shows what works of art these small delicacies are, while this saved search in Intute describes some good online resources with information about Japanese food in general.
The term Kurisumasu Kēki has also been used to refer to women in a very unflattering way. Young women were expected to be married by the age of 25; just as no one wants a Japanese Christmas cake after 25 December, a woman over 25 was seen as past her sell-by date. However, Japanese society has changed – the average age for women to get married was just over 28 in 2006, compared to just over 25 in 1980, and people are also aware that the phrase could be seen as sexual harassment, so it’s heard much less often these days. Kittredge Cherry’s book Womansword: What Japanese Words Say about Women (Kodansha 1987) is an entertaining and thorough examination of words and phrases like this, as reviewed by Janet S. Smith (available on JSTOR)
Tags: 2007 Advent calendar, Advent calendar, Other Lang Lit Historical and Cultural Studies
