How Japan Makes Foreign Traditions Its Own
Cultures don’t exist in bubbles, no matter how much we pretend they do. They drift, mix, borrow, and remix. And when it comes to cultural mashups, Japan is one of the most fascinating places to look. The country has a long history of adopting customs from abroad and turning them into something fresh, unexpected, and sometimes wonderfully quirky. The classic example, of course, is Japan’s famous love affair with KFC at Christmas, but that’s only the start of the story.
If you’ve never heard of it, yes, Japanese families really do pre-order buckets of fried chicken weeks in advance so they can celebrate Christmas “the Western way.” Except this “Western way” was actually invented by KFC’s marketing team in the 1970s. With no established Christmas tradition in Japan, the company stepped in and filled the gap with festive buckets, strawberry cake, and a smiling Colonel Sanders dressed as Santa. Fast forward a few decades and it’s now one of the busiest times of year for KFC. What began as an imported holiday became a uniquely Japanese ritual built around convenience, community, and clever advertising.
But the Christmas chicken craze sits within a bigger pattern of cultural borrowing. Take Valentine’s Day, which Japan imported from the West. Instead of exchanging gifts between partners, Japan created an entire social system around who receives chocolate from whom. Women give out everything from giri-choco (polite obligation chocolate for colleagues) to honmei-choco (the romantic kind). Then, as if that wasn’t elaborate enough, Japan added its own sequel: White Day. A month later, men return the favour with white-themed gifts, from sweets to jewellery. It’s Valentine’s Day, but with double the planning, double the pressure, and arguably double the charm.
Another tradition that Japan has enthusiastically adopted—and then re-engineered—is Halloween. Until the 1990s, it barely existed in Japan. But once theme parks started hosting Halloween events, the idea spread fast. Today, Halloween in Japan is less about children trick-or-treating and more about full-blown street festivals, cosplay, and one night a year when social rules loosen ever so slightly. Shibuya’s Halloween crowds got so huge that, recently, local authorities had to discourage visitors from coming at all. Yet even with that pushback, Japanese Halloween remains a huge, distinctly local celebration of creativity and chaos.
Japan’s love of Western-style weddings also tells a story of cultural remixing. Traditional Shinto weddings still exist, but the white dress + chapel aesthetic has become incredibly popular. Couples who don’t consider themselves Christian at all still opt for a Hollywood-style ceremony because of the atmosphere, the photos, and the sense of modern romance it carries. It’s a foreign ritual, yes, but it has been so thoroughly adapted that it now feels like its own category of Japanese celebration.
Even everyday food shows how cultural borrowing becomes cultural identity. Bread arrived in Japan centuries ago through European traders, but it didn’t stay European for long. Japanese bakeries took the concept and ran with it, creating soft, sweet buns like anpan, fluffy milk bread, and curry-filled pastries. These are now so embedded in daily life that they feel entirely Japanese; an example of how adaptation can blur the line between import and tradition.
What ties all these examples together is Japan’s distinctive way of adopting customs: not passive copying, but active transformation. Japan takes a global trend, strips it down, rebuilds it, and turns it into something that fits the rhythms and tastes of local life. Whether it’s fried chicken becoming a Christmas staple, chocolate turning into a complex gift economy, or Halloween evolving into a massive street-party cosplay event, each borrowed tradition becomes something new.
And ultimately, that’s the magic of cultural exchange. Traditions aren’t fixed; they travel, morph, and become new stories in new places. Japan just happens to be especially good at making those borrowed stories unforgettable.
Words by Megan Ingram-Jones
Photo by Seiya Maeda on Unsplash
