Omiyage (souvenirs from travel) area really big part of Japanese culture. People were always bringing food from their trips to the office when I worked at the board of education/junior high schools. I think it's the same in offices, where at tea/coffee time these snack would be distributed. It has always seemed that this idea of of bringing back mementos for family, friends, and colleagues is more important than in the west. Sawa Kurotani in her column, Behind The Screen talks about this custom this week in her column. Here she talks about the history of omiyage:
As transportation routes developed throughout the 17th century, more and more groups of pilgrims would travel to well-known temples and shrines. These pilgrims, who visited sacred sites as representatives of their social groups (family, household, clan) and communities (hamlet, village) were expected to bring home charms or other objects of religious significance and the noted products of the region they had visited.
The sacred experience and protection granted to the pilgrims were supposed to "rub off" on those who received those objects. Miyage is, thus, a representation of the powerful and sacred "other" that one brings home after a journey to a distant and mythical place. The practice of gift exchange at a trip's commencement (a parting gift from the community to the pilgrims) and conclusion (miyage from the pilgrims to the rest of the community) thus marks a movement between the familiar home and the distant and strange places away from home.
Uchi (the inside, the home, "the self") is an important cultural concept that signifies a situation or relationship of belonging and familiarity. The opposing domain of soto (the outside, a strange place, or "the other") is deemed dangerous and undesirable, yet often considered powerful and even sacred at the same time. Traveling is an ambivalent experience, because it removes some members of a community and exposes them to the "other" outside their familiar uchi territory.
Travelers, away from their homes, are betwixt and between. In anthropological jargon they are in a "liminal" state. On one hand, the experience of liminality itself threatens to breach the boundary between uchi and soto; on the other, the communally shared experience of liminality can also be beneficial to group solidarity. Medieval pilgrims, who shared their travel experiences with their community through miyage, have something in common, then, with contemporary Japanese who take part in company recreational trips and school excursions.
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