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Mood: Cool ]
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Currently: Working between classes ]
Well, it was actually about a month ago, but since Jeff (see the post below this) did his GW thang, I thought I should do mine.
Golden Week is an end-of-April/start-of-May event when we have a whole bunch of holidays in a row, and pretty much get a whole week off. Let’s see…consulting the holy Wikipedia…OK, 4/29 is Showa Day. Oh yeah, that’s right–they changed it. Until this year, it was Greenery Day, kind of like Arbor Day in the US, but you get the day off. "Showa" means Emperor Hirohito. That’s right, the guy who was in charge in WW2. Actually, it has been a national holiday for a loooong time, because it was Hirohito’s birthday, and Emperor’s Birthday is always a national holiday anyway–and Hirohito ruled for a looong time. Since hardly anyone would’ve wanted to change something that had been a holiday for 63 years back to a regular day, they kept it as a day off, but renamed it Greenery Day. But from this year, it became Showa Day–just evidence of how the "Japan never did anything wrong/the Emperor is a God" neofascists are coming out of the woodwork now that the generation that remembers the War is dying off and the youngsters aren’t being taught history.
Oooookay, so not a very auspicious beginning. Right, so after that we have May 3rd which is Constitutional Memorial Day, which celebrates the adoption of Japan’s current, endangered Constitution (see this post), which gave us the peaceful democracy we have today. If they do move forward with making a new constitution, I wonder if they’ll adopt it on the same day. And I wonder if they’ll declare the Emperor to be a God again.
May 4 is Greenery Day. What? OK, until this year, it was Citizen’s Day, but when April 29 changed, I guess they decided green things were more important than citizens, so 5/4 became Greenery Day.
And Cinco de Mayo is Children’s Day in Japan. It used to be Boys’ Day, but since Girls’ Day (March 3rd) was not a national holiday, it was changed to Children’s Day to try to get rid of the sexism. Which didn’t work very well, since a lot of people still call it Boys’ Day.
So anyway, every single holiday in Golden Week used to be something else, and was changed for political reasons. No wonder even Japanese people can’t remember which day is which holiday, and celebrate them all the same way: by sleeping late and going to sales, or just taking a trip during Golden Week.
Since many companies (like Kyushu University) give employees the middle non-holiday days off, it’s a popular time for travel, which is why I always stay home. Ticket prices go through the roof, and the highways and trains are packed.
And I hate to complain about having a whole week off, but it’s only 3 weeks after the semester begins, and then there’s not a single holiday after that until Ocean Day in mid-July, during final exams. It means the spring semester really drags, while the fall semester has a day off every 3-4 weeks, which breaks things up nicely. I often wish Golden Week came about a month later.