Super Fun Happy Pumpkin Day

***YES, I know how late this is. YES, I've been putting it off. YES, I've been lazy. YES I've been busy. Have we established that I'm a putz now? Yes? We can move on? Great! Please enjoy.***Right-o. Japanese Halloween. Guess this day was coming. It's more or less the same as Halloween anywhere else.

Except no one - adult or child alike - dresses up in costume. And there's no trick-or-treating. And no one decorated their house. And no one gives out candy. And no one carved Jack O'Lanterns (Because there are no orange pumpkins in Japan). And no one has Halloween parties (sorta). But yes sir, in all other ways, it's just like being back home.

One thing that is lacking here is the costumes during the day. No one goes to work or more importantly school dressed up. I can recall - oh, so long ago it seems - going to high school and the flock of teachers would be dressed up as I don't know what. But here, it's all about the professionalism. I even had the bright idea for a costume as dressing up in the kids' uniform; I think they'd have gotten a kick out of it. But sadly, the dream is gone. And as for the kids? Inconceivable. They effectively sleep in their uniforms. If they're going to school at all, even if it's to get something from their desk on a Sunday afternoon (School's are open 7 days a week here for activities on the weekend), they have to be in uniform. So it's just not in the cards for them to be dressed down for something as trivial as Halloween.

But this is not to say that the Halloween spirit was absent from school that day. After the first class, a few kids came to my desk chiming, "Trick-or-treat!"

Sidebar: On Monday, I did a presentation about Halloween to a few classes detailing the highlights of our wonderfully nonsense holiday. Throughout the entire thing, I had perhaps two of thirty sets of eyes upon me while the rest were doing just about everything they could not to listen. By the end, I'd thought that perhaps one or two kids heard my explanation of Trick-or-treat. How wrong I was.
/Sidebar

I had bought some candy the night before because I'd expected a few kids to know about Trick-or-treating, but imagine my surprise when dozens of kids made their way to my desk throughout the day with their hands outstretched and a slightly-incorrect-but-nonetheless-adorable version of "Trick-or-treat". That was but one side of the coin. The cool part of "Trick-or-treat" @ school was the teachers who participated too. Here and there, one would ask what I was doing, and I'd poorly explain in Japanese. When finished, I'd tell them to say it, and reward them with a piece of candy accompanied by this little twinkle of five year-old gleamed in the corner of their eye.

The day tears on. For all my classes I did a powerpoint on Halloween. For the most part, they seemed only mildly interested in our weird traditions, and only slightly more so when I showed them pictures of costumes. The highlight came when a picture of a guy dressed as a bottle of lotion and an innocently indicative arrow came on the screen. Most of my classes didn't give it a second thought, but one student raised his hand and asked me about it. I played it off as, "Oh, I don't know. People sometimes wear weird costomes," and it was then that my teacher chimed in with an oh-so naive, "Oh, it appears that it says hand lotion on his costume. He must be a bottle of lotion." It was all the willpower I possessed to keep myself for bursting at the seams. I then devoted the only mental channeling that I had spare - which was very little save I explode with chuckles - to pray to God not to have either her or the student follow up. Someone was awake @ the switch that day, because they both dropped it, and I was but too happy to quickly continue on.

After school that day, we had English club and today we were making Jack O'Lanterns. This is a huge deal because there are no pumpkins in Japan. Well, that's not entirely correct. It would be more apt to say that there are none of the huge orange pumpkins that we see in abundance that time of year back home in Japan. The pumpkins here for the most part are green or beige, and fit in the palm of your hand. Thus, it was with a stroke of luck that I just happened to be placed at an agricultural school, where one teacher just happened to be growing huge pumpkins for a competition, which also just happened to be judged the day before. Therefore, he had no futher use for the two 20+ pound pumpkins that he grew, and they were ours to destroy.

The thing I liked about it all was that there was as many teachers as there were students. Because A) Halloween isn't celebrated here as it is in the West, and B) There aren't any Jack O'Lantern-esque pumpkins to be found, most people in Japan have never carved a pumpkin before. So for these 30, 40 year-old teachers, this was a first for them. I almost felt like a proud pappa teaching his son to fish and then watching him reel in a bass on the first cast. 'Cause an hour later and we had two of the biggest Jack O'Lanterns that I've ever done, and they did it all themselves. I was incredibly proud and happy for them 'cause everyone was having a great time - teacher and student alike. Even the principal popped in to take a few pics of himself with the smiling orange faces.

So even though I didn't get to dress up as I usually do by day and party the night away later on, I would definately mark this Halloween up there as one to remember.