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Should You Celebrate Christmas?The Watchtower—1986 | December 15
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Dear David,
They are at it again. The merchants are leading the people like chief priests. Santa Claus is the master of ceremonies. Christmas trees serve as the symbol of the celebration. And offerings of Christmas cakes and toys are presented. The merchants are propagating the religion of Christmas in Japan. Their mission has been quite successful in the past three or four decades. An enormous number of Japanese are converted to this “religion”—at least for a couple of days a year!
This has intrigued me. I have often wondered why so many Japanese, who are mainly non-Christians, would be celebrating a “Christian” holiday. When did the Japanese begin to celebrate Christmas to such an extent? What is behind all of this?
Looking for the origin of the Japanese Christmas, I found this interesting story. Sōseki Natsume, a great writer of the Meiji era (1868-1912), sent a Christmas postcard from England to Shiki Masaoka, a famous poet, describing the fascinating Christmas scene in London at the end of the year 1900. Shiki even composed a haiku, the shortest form of Japanese poetry, about a small chapel on a Christmas Day. Apparently, Christmas was still a novelty at the turn of the century in Japan. So, exactly when did the Japanese celebrate their first Christmas?
You may be interested to know that some authorities claim that Christmas was celebrated in a girls’ school in Ginza as early as the eighth year of Meiji (1875). Yet “the custom of celebrating Christmas did not really begin to take hold in Japan until 1945,” observed The Christian Century. That was when the Japanese saw the families of American soldiers and missionaries celebrating Christmas. After being defeated in World War II and being left in a spiritual vacuum, the Japanese in general needed something to cheer them.
Christmas satisfied that need. As you can imagine, merchants did not waste any time in using Christmas decorations to promote their year-end sales. Christmas decorations “worked like magic in drawing customers,” says a newspaper columnist, Kimpei Shiba. “This,” he added, “was because these ornamentations were attractive and generated gaiety.”
But, David, since you live in England, you may not know that the Japanese had the custom of exchanging year-end gifts long before Christmas presents came along. December has always been a boon for retailers. People with thick wallets from their year-end bonus go out on a spending spree. “This atmosphere [of Christmas],” however, “put the people into a merry, spending mood and induced them to buy more osei-bo [year-end gifts] than they usually did, so the custom of using Christmas decorations has continued,” explains Mr. Shiba.
Today, department stores and retailers climb on the bandwagon to make the best of the “Christmas spirit” that seems to work so well. Toymakers and bakeries zero in on this atmosphere to take advantage of the season. In December, sales at Kiddy Land, the biggest toy-store chain in Japan, have been four times higher than other months. It is estimated that 5 to 10 percent of all the cakes produced in Japan each year are what could be termed “Christmas cakes.”
I found out that some people are annoyed because commercialism rules the Christmas scene in Japan. For instance, The Daily Yomiuri quotes an American who has lived a long time in Japan: “The Japanese have adopted nearly all of the Christmas gimmickry but somehow the spirit of the season is not here.” He was talking about the religious aspect of Christmas.
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Should You Celebrate Christmas?The Watchtower—1986 | December 15
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Then, why do so-called Christians in the West celebrate Christmas? One of the reasons is commercialism, just as it is in your country. I read about a Baptist minister over in the United States who lamented: “If the commercial aspect were removed entirely, most folks would feel that they had not experienced Christmas. But the religious focus could be removed entirely and a large number of people would not notice the difference.” These words apply in England as well.
Interestingly, the Bible reveals a close tie between commercialism and what it calls “Babylon the Great.” After depicting the fall of this “Babylon the Great,” the Bible (in Revelation 18:2, 11-19) says: “The traveling merchants of the earth are weeping and mourning over her, because there is no one to buy their full stock anymore . . . The traveling merchants of these things, who became rich from her, will stand at a distance because of their fear of her torment and will weep and mourn.”
Can you identify “Babylon the Great”? Well, who has given “the traveling merchants of the earth” here in England and in Japan enormous profits by spreading false teachings about Christmas? Is it not Christendom’s religions? Yes, I have learned from my studies that “Babylon the Great” stands for the worldwide empire of false religion, including Christendom.
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