Posted on 11/29/2010 10:23:38 PM PST by CIS
I've seen plenty of examples confirming this, but a prime example I just found was with KFC, the fast food restaurant. They are of course an American company, but they have operations around the world, including Japan. Both KFC USA and KFC Japan have "Christmas" promotions in place on their websites (and probably in-store).
The difference is, for KFC in America, the culturally Christian nation, the word "Christmas" is avoided and the word "holiday" is used as a euphemism. For KFC in Japan, the culturally non-Christian nation that has adopted the Western/Christian culture, the word "Christmas" is used unabashedly and without any apparent concern over whether someone "doesn't celebrate it" or might be "offended" (which is often the excuse given in America for avoiding the term itself).
KFC USA (http://www.kfc.com/) -- "Holiday" ad loads with instrumental of Joy to the World. Christmas scene of a Christmas tree, fireplace, candles, etc. Announcer avoids the word Christmas. Slogan at the end is "have a so good holiday".
KFC Japan (http://www.kfc.co.jp/xmas/top.html) -- The word Christmas is seen everywhere on the site. "Kentucky Christmas" is used and said in English on the on-site commercial.
Can I get some speculation from people with experience in cultures as to why this is occurring? Why is Christmas controversial in a country where 95% of its people celebrate it, while it's advertised without concern in Japan where almost no one is Christian?
i lived in dubai for about 4 years. This is an islamic nation, yet they still put up merry christmas signs everywhere, christmas trees and decorations everywhere. Im just confused at where the pressure is coming from here that happy holidays is the norm.
Here's the list....
Here’s the Anti-Christmas companies...
Companies against “Christmas”
Banana Republic (NEW!)
Barnes & Noble
CVS Pharmacy
Gap Stores (NEW!)
Hancock Fabrics
NASCAR
Office Depot
Office Max
Radio Shack
Staples
SUPERVALU
Victoria’s Secret
KFC’s massive advertising campaigns have embedded “KFC = Christmas” into the minds of many Japanese. Christmas in Japan is purely commerical with no religious strings attached. So, just about everything the Japanese know about Christmas has been fed to them through television , radio , and myriad magazines, including commercials for chicken.
BTW - I live in Japan .
I hate to see Hancock Fabrics
on that list. My mom retired from there after 25 years of service. Thinks have gone down hill fast.
Cultural Marxists need to destroy Christianity and the Natural Family. Particularly the Catholics—one of the few Christian religions that has not caved to become CINO. Christianity is not a force in Japan so not a threat. They divorce religious philosophy and the Bible from the term.
So far the Catholics have not caved in to homosexuals, abortion, and contraception and other behaviors that will basically destroy the Bible, as written, and change the Christian paradigm into something meaningless—without the force that created the greatest culture in the history of the world.
The independence and individualism created by Christianity (and the confidence when one is filled with God’s grace) makes people fight slavery (communism) and want freedom who take responsibility for their lives and kick government out of their business....esp. out of brainwashing their children into the Atheistic secular humanism that destroys all moral character and, thus, destroys all relationships and leaves little children dead or neglected or in institutions cared by strangers who could give a sh*t about their future. Societies implode when there is no morality. The children can not survive. There is no future.
There still are traces of real Christianity in America...it always was the most Christian of all nations. Non Christian nations have all been hell-holes. One world government can only succeed if Christianity is killed.
I saw a Safe Auto billboard today in downtown Columbus, OH that said “Merry Christmas”. It had a crucifix on one side and a manger scene on the other. It was nice.
“The independence and individualism created by Christianity (and the confidence when one is filled with God’s grace) makes people fight slavery (communism) and want freedom who take responsibility for their lives and kick government out of their business.”
Well put. Christianity emphasizes free will, which is one reason why it was able to modernize and abandon medieval practices like witch burning. Islam is fatalistic by nature, and so it can’t seem to get out of the 12th century. Remember: Christian groups played a large part in the civil rights movement. The communists didn’t do anything to free blacks. Instead, they just told them to hate Whitey and riot in the streets.
Christmas is singled out in America because the religious aspects of it are still practiced here.
You are right about the Free Will. It was St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century that basically aligned Catholic Theology to Natural Law Theory. He argued that reason, logic and truth was always inline with Christian thought. Because of that connection between logic and reason to find Truth, the Church created the greatest thinkers in history such as Copernicus, Galileo, Milton, Newton and Mendel. Science and Art flourished because of the thinking that we were made in God’s image, therefore, we had intellect, had Free Will, and were encouraged to glorify God as creators ourselves.
The only reason Western Civilization flourished to the greatest heights above all other cultures is because of the underlying Christian faith. Tocqueville commented on this saying that the people filled the Churches on Sunday and they all had a Bible in their home. The women were fiercely independent and picked the mate. They were a great country because the people were good.
Obambi is jealous of the white Christian race. He hates them both. He wants Christianity destroyed and by promoting homosexuality he will put the last stake in the coffin, because the bible will become hate literature...He is redesigning Natural Law to be twisted and perverted like his Liberation Theology (Marxist) chuch was. He and Soros and the communists have been trying to destroy this nation since Gramsci invented the Political Correctness necessary to take this nation down.
KFC also known as YUM. Their fired chicken is horrible, salty, fatty, and inedible. I say YUK.
“You are right about the Free Will. It was St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century that basically aligned Catholic Theology to Natural Law Theory. He argued that reason, logic and truth was always inline with Christian thought. Because of that connection between logic and reason to find Truth, the Church created the greatest thinkers in history such as Copernicus, Galileo, Milton, Newton and Mendel. Science and Art flourished because of the thinking that we were made in God’s image, therefore, we had intellect, had Free Will, and were encouraged to glorify God as creators ourselves.”
You have to remember that modern science was born in the Christian world. There was no Islamic equivalent of the above-mentioned individuals. Islam had a brief burst of intellectual energy in the 9th and 10th centuries which soon faded and never came back.
Now, we all know the Church persecuted Galileo, but the reason they did it was incredibly silly. His astronomical findings were not incompatible with the Bible or Christian doctrine (and certainly carried far fewer theological implications than the theory of evolution later would) but the Church was relying on the inaccurate science of ancient Greeks such as Ptolemy. They didn’t want to admit they’d been wrong about the Earth revolving around the Sun and things of that nature, so they sentenced Galileo to house arrest.
Not too many years before Galileo, the Church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for proposing that the Earth was just one of many planets with life on them. The authorities maintained that if he was correct, there must be thousands or millions of Popes and Churches in the universe and that Jesus would have to have been born and crucified on every one of those worlds. Since the idea of that was way more than they could handle, they simply put Bruno to death.
The point being that, persecutions aside, the Christian world could produce men like Galileo and Bruno while the Islamic world couldn’t.
Christmas is not a religious holiday in Japan. It’s a secular holiday that they’ve adopted as a way to give gifts to each other.
So when a Japanese person wishes you a ‘Merry Christmas’... they are not asking you to be happy at the birth of Jesus, but wishing you well in the efforts to buy gifts and give them to friends and family.
Thus eliminating any questions of whether one is ‘pushing’ religion onto someone that may not have the same faith.
It’d be on par with American’s wishing each other a “Happy Bruce Lee’s Birthday!”.
I thought KFC got started in the Christmas biz because so many Japanese started asking for the bird they saw served in all the Christmas movies that came from America... as they thought it a giant chicken (being that turkey doesn’t exist in Asia, unless imported).
So KFC, noting that Asian kitchens don’t have ovens, sensed that this would be a good business move and started to offer whole-chicken take-home dinners for Christmas. So they now heavily advertise it every year.
BTW, they do the same in Korea as well.
Yep, seen the same in Itaewon. Though, the Korean Colonel Sanders wasn’t quite as plump. (not a joke)
Why is Christmas controversial in a country where 95% of its people celebrate it, while it's advertised without concern in Japan where almost no one is Christian?
My brother lived in Japan for 15 years. He thinks the numbers of Christians are way underreported.
Thinking the "Krissmuss" festival has anything to do with Christ, anymore? Baaah, humbug! Ayn Rand, even, liked Christmas.
I was stationed near Camp Zama 65-69. We were in downtown Tokyo around Christmas one December. There was a sidewalk Santa Claus - a really skinny Japanese with a Salvation Army type kettle. I wish I new how to post pix here. It was very amusing.
Walked down 5th Ave in new York City to see the “Christmas” lights and window displays.
Cartier was the only business that mentioned the word Christmas. They had banners saying “Merry Christmas” in many languages.
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