Spending Easter Away

The first Easter I spent away from my family was during college, while on exchange in England. It was the first major holiday (of many to come) that I spent apart from my parents, brother, aunts, uncles and cousins, and although we tried to skype on the day to make up for my felt absence, the effect remained nowhere near the same. It seemed a bit of a waste, in a way, to even try.

England, as a country, is perhaps even more Easter-obsessed than America, so as a whole, my experience away was not lacking in Easter-related paraphernalia – Cadbury eggs and communion and bunny decorations – but in family. However, my first Easter in Japan, devoid of a fancy dinner with rosemary rolls as well as familial company, proved to be the most foreign-feeling version of a Western holiday away I have yet experienced.

Last year, as Easter morning dawned mere hours after the conclusion of a typical all-you-can-drink binge at a beloved local bar, it felt wrong not to go to church. Even in England, I had easily managed to find a service to attend, and not going seemed even more untraditional than my lack of chocolate rabbit and egg hunt did. With a small group of similarly-minded Westerners, whose cultural clock sounded “time for church” on Easter day, I headed off to find something resembling what we were used to, only in Japan. We had given up the idea of a service in English. We settled for an atmosphere that felt familiar.

We decided upon a small church in Yokote. Its membership came out to around eight, almost all sixty years old or older, with our one-time group of six ragtag foreigners in search of some Easter love nearly doubling the congregation’s size. The parishioners read their Bibles and prayed and sang hymns, sitting on hard wooden pews, just as we may have back home, except it was all conducted in Japanese. It felt surreal to witness the motions and sentiments that were so familiar sounding so foreign on their earnest tongues.

They invited us to stay after the service for tea and snacks, and we spent the next two hours attempting to communicate and to explain about Easter in the West to them, natives of a country that does not celebrate the holiday and whose only personal connection to it was purely religious. It had no commercialism for them; it was only a celebration of their faith, the roots of which the West has lost to the ubiquity of paper chicks and hollow candy eggs.

There is no Easter in Japan – cultural knowledge about it is limited at best, and it is not celebrated with family or as any special Sunday. I’ve asked my students what they know about Easter, and they never get further than a few whispers of the word “eggs.” Thus, the simplicity of the event for the church-goers we met that day was refreshing – as well as harrowing. What is something when it is returned to its roots by a country that did not birth it, but adopted it only in part and without the frivolity? They gave us hardboiled eggs wrapped in plastic sleeves of green Easter scenes as we left, images the most like what we were used to Easter being and given to us because they thought that’s what we would want.

That Japanese Easter wasn’t the family-centered event I was used to, but it wasn’t the most unlike Easter it could have been. No, I didn’t understand the words spoken during the service, and no, the snacks served to us by kindly old folks were not traditional Easter fare, but there was an innocence to their interpretation of the holiday that I’m not sure has existed for me within my lifetime. I think we, as the collective West, lost that vantage point on the holiday a long time ago – for me, the day has always had as much Chocolate about it as Cross. However, having stripped away the sales pitches, Japan has left Easter a cleaner and more earnest day of celebration, one of refreshing cultural obscurity and convicting simple belief.