It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.....

I have to be honest, I was a little bit apprehensive at the thought of spending Christmas in Japan. The main question in my mind was, ‘Do they even celebrate Christmas at all?!’. Well happily the answer was yes, in a sense anyway. I guess Japan is a little like England in the ideas of Christmas. No, most of Japan society is not Christian, but then neither are a lot of families in the UK but we still celebrate Christmas (take my lovely family for example). The main difference in Japan is that Christmas isn’t really a time to be spent with family. Actually, Christmas over here is more like a second Valentine’s Day – young people should spend time with boyfriends/girlfriends/partners, or simply people spend time with friends. It is their New Years Eve and Day that should be spent with family, at shrines and temples and the like. However, there are many similarities between Christmas in Japan and England.

Number 1: Shops begin preparations for Christmas before Halloween is even over! That means presents start to be advertised and Christmas decorations start to go up.

Number 2: The constant playing of Christmas songs is highly encouraged in both shops and restaurants alike. If you can go into a shop and not come out humming some repetitive festive tune then it is indeed a Christmas miracle.

Number 3 (and the main thread of this post): Christmas lights start going up wherever you look.

And these lights my friends are not just the one strand of Christmas lanterns hanging above a door frame, nor a single Christmas tree glittering in a cosy window. No, this is tacky at its best. And I love it!!! 

awesome! It constantly changed colour as well!

Anyway, the highlight (no pun intended!) of these Christmas illuminations came in the form of the light display at a park in Kagawa (the prefecture above mine). Luckily, I have a very lovely friend who I knew from uni who lives in this prefecture, and this very lovely friend invited me for a day out in Kagawa ending with seeing these lights at the park. Needless to say, I had a brilliant day (treating myself lots whilst we were shopping) and the lights at the park were absolutely breathtaking. I have never seen anything like it, and probably never will. This is no small park, and the organisers seemed to have covered every square inch with lights of every colour! Anyway, my words won’t describe the scene very well at all, and to be perfectly honest the photos don’t do it justice at all. However, I will just upload the ones that I took and hopefully it will give you some impression of the scale of these lights. Simply awesome. Oh, and to top it off, I even saw a few flakes of snow while we were there! Perfect.