For the rest of October, Make Believe Bonus becomes…Make Boo-lieve Bonus, as we look at some Halloween related J-pop ahead of the spooooooookiest time of the year. Subscribe to catch up on the other posts!
It’s October 2009 and I need to teach a class full of slightly interested 13 year olds about American culture. This is a weekly challenge during my tenure as an Assistant-Language Teacher on the JET Programme. To some degree, this is the most important part of my job. The finer points of grammar and vocabulary fall on the main teacher (and accompanying textbook), with me mostly being a living soundboard to demonstrate how all of it actually sounds. What I can actually offer that nobody else in the building can is my American-ness.
Given the season, Halloween made the most sense for a topic. The fall happening only really popped up as pumpkin-shaped decorations at the city’s Jusco shopping center (and, unknown to me at the time, Disneyland shows). So my job was to explain how we approached Oct. 31 with good words worked in, such as “trick or treating” and “costume” and “Jack-O Lantern.” The concept was basically entirely new to everyone.
At the end of class, I attempted to demonstrate how trick-or-treating worked using real candy. The main teacher acted like I was giving the kids black-tar heroin. Now, I should have asked before (the dangers of asking 22 year olds to become an educator in a foreign country), yet the experience all around underlined how relatively unknown Halloween was.
Five years later, everyone in the country knew about and embraced Halloween. That wasn’t thanks to fake teachers like me…but rather people like Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, who helped define what this was all about and spread it to the social-media generation.
