Japan and gift giving お土産 omiyage

Japan is nothing short of obsessed with its tradition of お土産 (omiyage). Omiyage are gifts given to just about every person you know to say thank you, to say that you've been on holiday, to say 'please do something for me', to say hello, to say goodbye, and generally any message that needs to be (or doesn't really need to be) conveyed. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I actually get more gifts a day than I do conversations...today I have received two bisctuits, one chocolate, four satsumas and five small spinning tops (?)...not bad if you ask me! Writing this article, however, has just made me realise that I have left those four satsumas in my desk over the weekend to rot...DAMN!!

In all holiday destinations there are rows of shops exclusively aimed at selling gifts to take back to friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. Many service stations along the motorway have a variety of gifts from nearby towns, presumable for people who are on their way home and have forgotten to buy for somebody or for people who don't actually want to go to the place, they just want to go halfway, buy the gifts, and go back. Particularly popular are huge boxes of fairly generic cakes or biscuits, individually wrapped (perfect for splitting between many, particuarly for laying on the desks of colleagues) with the name of the place written on the wrapper. These must be bought in their millions in Japan! A bit (exactly) like this ....

Of course, me going back to England for the Christmas holiday was something that everybody I have ever met and his wife knew about...meaning that I had to buy a gift for everyone I have ever met and all of their wives, which need to fulfill many ruthless criteria :

1. Be the appropriate size and worth to match the person you are buying for and your relationship with them.

2. Be sufficiently typically English, and by that I don't mean something that is actually typically English, but something that a Japanese person considers to be typically English.

3. Be sufficiently cheap that I can afford to buy 40 million of them.

4. Be sufficiently small and light that they will all fit in one suitcase.

5. In the case of the teachers, be edible and individually wrapped so that I can go and neatly place one on every person's desk.

Hence a LOT of trapsing around Tescos with a list of names as long as my arm and this mental check list.....Not an easy task!!

After emptying my suitcase, you can see about half of them here...

I eventually settled for 4 boxes of Christmas crackers, 5 mini Christmas puddings, 2 packets of custard mix, 3 boxes of after dinner mints, 3 packets of mini Tesco rip-off Mars bars, 2 packets of sherbert sweets, one mixed bag of sweets, 2 bags of liquorice twists, one stick of fudge, 4 Kitkats with a Santa picture moulded into them, one Turkish Delight, two boxes of 12 mini mince pies, 2 boxes of Jaffa cakes, 5 CDs, one fake paisley tie (one pound New Look! Bargain!!), one diary, 3 jars of marmalade, one packet of biscuits, one packet of strawberry bonbons, one pen with London sights on it, 3 magazines, 2 boxes of nuts, one packet of Angel Delight, 3 boxes of teas, one mini box of After 8s, 3 mini bottles of scotch, 2 Union Jack mugs and one horrible keyring with an English footballer on it.

These will now have to be painstakingly and stressfully packaged up cutely and divided between....everybody in 7 staff rooms and everybody at the Board of Education of my town, one group of lunch ladies, one man at one nursery (the only staff room who didn't get a set of gifts for themselves cos I don't like them, so only he gets one), 17 teachers at various schools who I am either sort of obliged to give special presents to or who are just really nice to me so deserve one, my hairdresser, the other hairdresser staff, two volunteers who help with English at one of the schools, my taiko group, the lady who develops my photos for me, 3 ALT friends, my Japanese teacher and his wife, my boss and her husband and 7 other Japanese friends...and I've already realised that I've forgotten someone and have to try and conjur an extra gift up. It's a lovely tradition and for every gift I give, I'm sure I receive about 10 but it's a bloody stress and between you and me, given the choice of a CD/box of mince pies/Christmas cracker or 4 satsumas/5 spinning tops, I know which side I'd be on...I am a quality gift giver.

Two recent examples, however, or amazingly lovely and completely unnecessary gifts that I have received remind me why I shouldn't be complaining at all. Firstly, in the run up to Christmas, the Itakura International Association (who knows why they have one...it has about 100 Japanese members whose average age probably exceeds the membership figure, and one foreigner...me) were running some English conversation classes. I could (and might) write a massive article about the ridiculousness that those classes entailed, but for now, let's just say that I basically went to help out 4 times, for a total of 8 hours, did very little and STILL got paid (even though I begged them not to pay me as I'd done nothing and didn't need their money, but....). Anyway, one lovely old lady was at the last class (it was the first time I'd seen her at the classes though I had met her before at another International Association meeting thing, when we spoke only in Japanese) and it turns out that she can speak almost perfect English! She did a self introduction which lasted almost as long as the whole lesson should itself! Anyway at the end, I gave them all some German style lebkuchen that I'd made (nothing like the real thing but really nice...such an easy recipe from the Beeb, stuff you Nigella and your posh ingredients, you only need flour, butter, honey and spices!) and then we made Christmas crackers with toilet rolls some snaps my parents had sent me from England. Everyone had a great time, and the local TV were there again (that is my FIFTH appearance if you don't mind). Anyway, a few days later, one of the teachers from the course contacted me...the old lady had given them this handmade card and huge posh expensive box of chocolates and biscuits for me because she was 'touched' by my lesson (bear in my that I am being paid and that all I did was explain how to selotape a cracker snap to some tissue paper and roll it round a toilet roll).

The second amazing omiyage received actually defies belief. At the end of year enkai for one of my schools we were drinking sake. There is this old man who is sort of an upper-class receptionist...I have no idea what he does except that he used to be a teacher and now he is really ill and goes to hospital a lot, so I think they might have just given him this job where he doesn't have to do much so that he still has a job. Anyway, bottom line is, I never teach with him or work with him, just talk to him occasionally on the days when I'm at his school (which is only once a week on average)...anyway, he was so impressed that I like sake, and I mentioned that my parents like it too and that I had bought some to take back to England as a Christmas present for them. Everybody was very drunk by this point, but he was very very impressed that we all like sake (very) and asked for my address so that he could send my parents some...egged on by other colleagues (who thought my address was so cool because it was written in English ???) I drunkedly gave him my address and thought nothing more of it...I thought that in his state, it would be a miracle if the address even made it out of the restaurant, let alone if he could remember the next day what it was or why he had taken it....GUESS AGAIN MARK! Came home mid-holiday to find a HUGE parcel from Japan containing FOUR, that's FOUR litre bottles of sake sent to me by that lovely drunken man (he sent it a few days later, so I am assuming that he wasn't still drunk by the way). The cost of the goods and the postage was written on it...well over a hundred quid in total!! One hundred pounds! For somebody he barely knows...and what a hassle as well! Half of me was about to burst into tears of happiness and half of me was about to burst into tears of 'What the hell am I supposed to take back to match this??' I have asked my boss for advice and she doesn't know either...the saga continues. Anyway, what with the bottle my parents received when they came to Japan as a gift, the one they got from me for Christmas and these four, my parents now have enough sake to rival a Japanese off-lisence!! Cue drunken Skype sessions from now on!