Fun or awful: German carnival divides Japanese expats
When the excitement of Germany′s carnival reaches its annual climax, when the pubs are crammed with tipsy revellers in fancy dress, and when the cacophony of parades makes talk inaudible, some non-Germans think they are living in a madhouse.
Nowhere will be madder in Germany next week than the cities of Cologne, Dusseldorf, Bonn and Mainz along the Rhine valley.
For an estimated 11,000 Japanese nationals living in the region, there will be no escaping the merriment, which also includes day after day of variety shows where dancing girls and stand-up comedians perform for audiences who dress up as clowns and pirates.
While most of the rest of Germany ignores carnival, this belt of towns effectively ceases all business activity for almost a week, since significant numbers of staff stay up all night or are the worse for alcohol.
A tiny minority of Japanese wade into the thick of the beery amusements. The greater part follow the celebrations with interest but a certain distance. And a few admit they can′t stand all that "bad behaviour" and feel symptoms of "culture shock."
The celebrations are to climax with parades on Monday, February 15, a festival known as Rosenmontag.
"There is no question among Japanese shopkeepers and corporate employers against granting staff a day off on Rosenmontag," says a spokeswoman for the Japanese Chamber of Industry and Trade in Dusseldorf.
"Japanese people love the parades," says Wataru Okuma of the Japanese consulate-general in the city. Every year he takes his children to watch the parade and they join in the chanting and yelling.
"It′s a very colourful, absolutely unique festival," he said.
Groups of Japanese children in costume sometimes march in smaller suburban parades between the bands and floats, especially in Dusseldorf where an 8,000-strong Japanese community has dominated several streets for decades and has its own schools and kindergartens.
The Japanese like the organized parades but often feel uneasy with another side of carnival: the heavy drinking in packed bars, the skylarking and pranks by informal groups roaming the streets and the unnerving intimacy of many of the Germans.
"It′s as if they forget who they really are. Personally, I couldn′t be like that if I tried. It′s quite unpleasant," said Michiko Ariga. She has lived in Dusseldorf for many years, has seen many carnivals and knows the local customs without liking them.
Carnival is not a religious festival itself, but precedes a solemn, six-week season known as Lent when Catholic people reduce their food intake every seventh day or go without some pleasure such as smoking or eating chocolate.
"First they make themselves crazy with lashings of alcohol. Then they fast," said Ariga. "The routine never changes. How does that make them better people? For me as a Japanese, the religious significance of all this is utterly incomprehensible."
Her friend Kiyoko is equally critical.
"I experience culture shock when I see these completely drunken women wandering around kissing every man they meet. The fact that these people do it for an entire week is really a bit revolting," she said.
Emi Miyoshi, a dancer, tries to take a charitable view as she recalls a night out in Cologne among revellers who sang, ogled the girls, urinated against walls and dropped bottles.
"I suppose it was quite merry in its way," she said. "But it was terribly unrestrained, the mess they left on the ground was awful and there was a lot of bad behaviour since some were quite drunk."
Her husband, Marc, who is half German and half Japanese, says, "The fancy dress is colourful and very nice to see. But the cruising for sex and abandoning all inhibitions are things that would be totally inconceivable during a public festival in Japan."
Japanese people would also be wasting their time attending a carnival variety show, he added. "You wouldn′t understand the local dialect of German that′s used, you wouldn′t understand the jokes.
"It′s such a weird brand of humour that I don′t think any non-Germans would find it funny."
Toshiaki Yasuda, the new chief executive of Toyota Germany, is unfazed by such critics and has accepted an invitation to ride on a float with other VIPs in Cologne and throw sweets to cheering parade onlookers.
"I like the Rhineland mentality," he said. "I have only been here since early January, but I′m looking forward to the Rosenmontag parade." His predecessor, Yoichi Tomihara from Tokyo, not only loved to ride on the float every year but went to all the wild parties too.
"Carnival is the time when you see friendly, happy people relaxing, and that is the true nature of the Germans," he once said.
Japanese does have a word for carnival: "shanikusai." It is formed from characters meaning abstention, meat and festival, which is a reference to the now outdated religious practice of abstaining from meat for the whole six weeks of Lent.
Most Rhine people no longer fast, but they keep bingeing beforehand. A German folk etymology of the word carnival alleges that it comes from two Latin words, "carne vale" with the meaning "hooray for meat."