My father moved our family to Tokyo in 1978. As a local, he had a great run sharing his observations of Japanese culture from a Western perspective in a collection of of essays collected in a now out-of-print book, Home Sweet Tokyo.

Here’s his take on the Japanese culture of gift-giving.

---

The Present Tyranny

By Rick Kennedy
Home Sweet Tokyo, 1988

It is curious that in a society as dedicated to sweetness and harmony as that of Japan, a tradition as potentially disruptive as the ritual giving of gifts has been allowed to flourish. People don’t talk much about the consequences of indiscriminate gift giving for fear of being seen as mean, but it is clear that in Japan gifts are launched as missiles, serving, if rightly chosen, to stun the recipient, or as least to nudge him or her off balance.

As gift giving proliferates, it tends to be taken for granted, and so to achieve its purpose of impressing the other fellow with the giver’s scarcely controllable generosity, the preferred gift has to be seen to be twice as magnificent as any sane person would deem reasonable.

In this way the ante escalates. If I give you a cheap souvenir teaspoon stamped “Shizuoka, counterpunch with a packet of fine tea. I fight back with an antique teapot; you ambush me with a round trip for two to a luxury hotel on the grounds of a Sri Lankan tea plantation. I, panicking, present you with a one-third interest in Twinings… and so on until we are both bankrupt.

In Tokyo this annual escalation of gifts given takes place between companies who do business together: one company one year giving its client company ten cases of beer, the next twenty, the next forty, until all corridors, closets, washrooms, and space at the back of the recipient company’s garage are filled with brightly wrapped packages from Mitsukoshi Department Store. At the end of the gift-giving season, the employees of both companies thus locked in gift-giving combat must hire trucks to cart away their share of the bounty, wanted or not, to their own homes and garages.

At a higher level, the presidents of the companies involved will exchange exquisite lacquer boxes, larger ones every year, each requiring the attention of a master craftsman for several months and costing millions of yen. It is said that the hills outside Kyoto are heavily populated with subtle geniuses whose sole occupation is the crafting of fine lacquer boxes destined to be presented by the heads of Japanese industry to each other during the annual gift-giving seasons of o-chugen in the summer and o-seibo in the winter.

Escape from the gift-giving plague is impossible. On every train platform, boxes of the local specialty-pickles, bean cakes, rice cakes, fish cakes, twirligigs – are dutifully purchased by travelers (although they may only have gone overnight to Osaka to visit an aged aunt) to be taken back and presented to fellow office workers and neighbors as a gesture of their enduring concern.

The constant flow of gifts keeps the Japanese economy purring and out in front of the unsupercharged economies of nations that don’t indulge in frenzied gift giving. A good 15 percent of the revenue of the average department store is generated by gifts: boxes of bars of soap, cans of soup, tins of salad oil and pressed seaweed, matched bottles of wine and whiskey and 100-percent orange juice, and hampers of exotic foreign delicacies – a truly prodigious prodigality, as if to make up for the shameful thriftiness of the rest of the year.

Perhaps, though, this gift-giving reflex could be put to good use.

One hears that the American public continues to be concerned that they are buying more Japanese goods than Japanese consumers are buying American goods. Some Americans are evidentily itchier than ever about the trade imbalance and have convinced themselves that behind it all there lurks some great brooding conspiracy.

Would not an appropriate gift serve to ease the tension? Why don’t the Japanese people simply present the American people with a massive present, perhaps a video game or a motor scooter for everyone, or a new national railroad system (staffed by supernumerary JR railroad men), or maybe, because after all it is the thought that counts, an enormous lacquer box?