Most of the emails that I had received from the US in the last two weeks have ended with the same line, “Hope you have a good thanksgiving! (You do have thanksgiving in Japan, right?)”

Well the answer is Yes and No. On November 23rd Japan celebrates a holiday of appreciation. It was previously the imperial harvest festival, but was changed in 1948 to be oriented toward the collective efforts of the Japanese workforce. As such, the best way to translate it would probably be Labor Appreciation Day, similar to Labor Day in the US. The fourth Thursday in November is just another day in Japan and most of the Christar workers did normal things like church activities and English classes.

That being said, the enterprising American is able to whip up a decent Thanksgiving feast, and most of us do. The hardest thing to find here is the Turkey. Japanese grocery stores don’t seem to sell anything whole (except fish) and so finding something to roast can be difficult. For people living in Yamaguchi prefecture, the best place is the Costco in a large city about two hours south. Our teammates had gone there for an event a few weeks ago and bought four turkeys to get them through all their holiday entertaining. There is also a fairly large Marine Corps air station about two hours north of us, and we recently found out that the KFC on the base also sells small rotisserie Turkeys.

Ready to dig in to our delicious dinner.

We actually ended up celebrating, not once, but twice. We had planned our own dinner with our teammates and some Japanese friends for this past Saturday, but were also invited to the home of some other Christar workers after we finished with our regular church activities on Thursday. It was nice to enjoy fellowship, some laughs about language learning, and, of course, the turkey with all the fixings.

We are thankful for all that God has done in our lives and how he has worked to bring us here and provide for us in many areas over the last nine months. We count you, our supporters and friends, amongst our many blessings!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Life in Cross-Cultural Ministry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.