In Japan, Gift Giving Climbs to Lofty Heights

It’s December, and Motoko Kaneko is expecting the usual: a couple of dozen hams. She won’t be able to eat them or unload them before they go bad, but she’ll have to write thank-you letters anyway--and next year she’ll have to reciprocate.

“It’s always a headache season when December rolls around,” Kaneko said as she stood in front of the gift-meat counter ($70 for about a pound and a half of thinly sliced beef in a nice box) in the Matsuzakaya department store. “I hate it.”

Americans may have fruitcakes and obligatory neckties, but when it comes to the calculations and complications of gift giving, no one out-figures the Japanese. According to Nikkei Gifts magazine, Japanese will spend more than $90 billion on gifts this year--a sum considerably larger than the U.S.-Japan trade deficit.

Japan celebrates Christmas these days--in a purely secular, gift-giving way, of course. But before Christmas comes oseibo, or end-of-the-year gift season. And if you haven’t done your oseibo shopping by Dec. 15--if you haven’t bought your gift-pack salad oil, gift-pack laundry soap or gift-pack cans of self-warming sake with blowfish fin flavoring--you’re way behind the curve.

Fortunately, Matsuzakaya has introduced the latest computer and telefax technology to gift giving this year, taking some of the pressure off dawdlers. But before telling the computer your desired price range and type of gift (“ordinary” or “unique”), a word of explanation is in order.

Japan is a nation where personal relations count. The president of NTT, Japan’s giant phone company, had to greet and thank about 10,000 employees, customers and suppliers personally after his installment in the job last summer before he could get down to serious work, he said. It took him about three months.

Gift giving is a key component of personal relations here. Japanese give presents on almost every imaginable occasion and have invented a few simply so they can give more.

“We think their gift giving is fantastic,” Ruth Benedict, the Dr. Spock of Japanology, wrote 45 years ago.

If you go to a wedding, naturally you must bring a present, but if it’s your wedding you have to give presents to all the guests, too. Funeral guests bring gifts, usually money; the bereaved family offers gifts in return, a box of sugar, perhaps.

If you go away, even for a day, you must bring back presents, usually edible, for your office mates. Tokyo Station is crowded with stands selling typical products of every region of Japan, so if you forget to buy your red-bean pastries steamed in hot-spring water before boarding the train in Atami, you have a second chance when you disembark.

These days, even chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, the standard gift from Japan’s most popular international destination, Hawaii, are on sale.

The Japanese and their always watchful retailers have embraced enthusiastically any Western holiday that could conceivably provide an excuse for giving presents: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween.

But centuries ago, they invented two holidays, ochugen (in July) and oseibo, whose only purpose and sole means of celebration is the exchange of gifts to cement relationships.

A number of politicians and businessmen are on trial for allegedly carrying the gift-giving tradition a bit too far in the so-called Recruit scandal.

In trial testimony recently, the former chairman of Japan’s largest company, NTT, said his acceptance of cut-rate stock from the Recruit Co. was not a bribe but part of a normal exchange of favors.

“Rejecting such an offer is considered rude in Japan,” Hisashi Shinto testified.

The difference between Christmas presents and oseibo gifts is subtle but, to a Japanese, perfectly clear. Christmas gifts are for friends and loved ones, to make a personal statement; oseibo gifts repay an obligation incurred in the past. Thus, Kaneko said she would give oseibo presents to her children’s teachers and the matchmaker who arranged her daughter’s wedding; her hams will come from the tenants of a building she owns.

At Matsuzakaya, the Christmas shopping takes place under wreaths, accompanied by carols. But the oseibo floor is all business, looking more like registration day in the high school gym. Shoppers grimly match lists with coded tags and then proceed to long desks to arrange for shipment.

This year, shoppers can watch a video screen for the latest specials at a fish market in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, and then have their orders faxed to the market, from which fresh oysters ($42 for 20) or fish paste ($21 a pound) will be sent to the designated recipients. They can touch a video screen and get gift suggestions with picture printouts in any price range, from $21 (a 15-bar pack of Lux soap or a 13-can pack of Asahi Dry Beer) to $70 (an assortment of cookies, tea and coffee from Tour d’Argent in Paris).

“Price and prestige, not product, count most when decisions are made,” the Japan Economic Journal recently said, noting that wrapping from a prestigious department store is essential. The newspaper reported that when Suntory marked down its Royal Whisky from an even 5,000 yen ($35) to 3,750 yen, “gift sales plummeted.”

A sizable subsidiary industry has grown up of merchants who buy unused oseibo gifts at a discount from recipients who can’t face another package of socks, processed cheese or bath scent. A popular cartoonist here recently bemoaned the loss of feeling in oseibo, recalling the days when gifts were lovingly wrapped and carried to the door by the giver, not by delivery boys.

But the cartoonist, Ryohei Saigan, concluded, “Even though we may think it’s a formality and would like to stop, when the time comes, we can’t.”

Indeed, a big seller at Tokyu Department Stores this year is a $35 golf insurance policy that protects the recipient from, among other things, shooting a hole-in-one.

Why is such protection needed? Because anyone unlucky enough to ace a hole is expected to celebrate by--what else?--giving presents to the rest of the foursome, most of the golf club and everyone back in the office, too.

Which can set you back quite a few hams.