Why is KFC a Christmas tradition in Japan?

the veggie assortment delights you with a carefree country taste… cooks up to a classic gastronomic treat yet with exotic flavor

jeez, Pizzahut Taiwan, laying it on a little thick, aren’t ya?

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Who doesn’t love an assortment of shrimp, crab, squid, clams and green peas on their pizza?

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or, “pizza,” as it were. i mean, it’s pizzahut to start with, but those pictures look like canned veggies on plastic dough.

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You quickly learn the photos of food are purposely nothing like the reality. There seems to be a preference for explicitly showing the ingredients over showing something delicious looking - at least on fliers like that one.

EDIT

A lot of shops even have plastic food outside showing the dishes.

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Fake food is huge business inside Japan. It’s an entire art form of it’s own.

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Here in the Midwest we say, “I feel soda!” It’s Coke in the South.

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I feel ya.

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did you say that in 1985 though? i was on a trip with college students from all over the US and it did not make sense to any of us at the time.

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Fast food tastes like shit in the USA because the managers and workers take no pride in what they do. Japanese workers, on the other hand, take every job (no matter how menial) very seriously and strive to do a perfect job and create the best version of their product possible. Which is why KFC in Japan (McD’s too, by the way) tastes a helluva lot better than it does in the US.

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Rigors indeed:

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That actually goes back to the beginning of last century. As Japan industrialized and people moved from villages to big cities, food stalls and restaurants quickly discovered that newcomers often couldn’t read and didn’t necessarily use the same word for this or that dish. Because such restaurants were usually small and actually specialized in this or that type of dish (fried food / noodles / sushi / okonomiyaki / etc.), it was doable for them to represent most of the menu in model form (initially in wax, iirc). That became wildly popular, and it’s used to this day. There are entire businesses selling nothing but model food for restaurants.

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It doesn’t hurt that Japanese fast food franchises often locally source their ingredients. A lot of American fast food is simply a crime committed against perfectly good recipes. Work ethic need hardly enter into it.

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Oh, but it does. However you’d make a good manager at the McDonald’s down the road from me. No work ethic there … none at all.

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The actual reason is that a rumor was spread that Americans traditionally order KFC on Christmas…

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Yes and no. Don’t forget that the “ni”, when it is being used locationally, modifies the preceding noun, so it would have to be “Kentucky ni ha Christmas” for it to be “Christmas is in Kentucky”.

In this usage, which is fairly common in advertising, the “niha” functions like “nara” or has an implied “no tame” preceding it and doesn’t imply physical location (Christmas is an abstract noun) so it’s more like “for [all things] Christmas, Kentucky.”

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Christmas is not an official holiday in China, but it’s promoted all over the place. In major cities, it’s easy to find Christmas decorations, trees, even Christmas music. My nearby KFC does decorate for Christmas, although I’m not aware of any special meal for Christmas being available.

ETA: Christmas at KFC in China:

http://www.kfc.com.cn/kfccda/minisite/sdlh20161128/index.html

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Obtaining deep fryers or pressure cookers here isn’t trivial.

Myth. [quote=“noahdjango, post:6, topic:91497”]
Why did the Japanese people decide, en masse, that they wanted to start celebrating Christmas in the 70s?
[/quote]

Basically because American things are/we’re seen as cool[quote=“RichardKaufman, post:30, topic:91497”]
Which is why KFC in Japan (McD’s too, by the way) tastes a helluva lot better than it does in the US.
[/quote]

KFC here has no spices nor is the skin crispy

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Oh people celebrate Christmas and Halloween and a few others, but there is a very distinct avoidance of the name and you don’t see a lot of advertisements featuring the iconography. Shenzhen was obviously much more lax on the rules than Binhai/Tianjin, but it’s nowhere near Hong Kong or Taiwan. I was told there are specific rules for allowable Western holiday decorations, and they were not enforced heavily but places tend to not push it.

I see the words “Merry Christmas,” Christmas trees, and Santa Claus, many many places. The KFC page I linked quite prominently mentions Christmas (in Chinese “圣诞”). Secular references to Christmas seem to be quite generally accepted around here.

I’ve never seen any religious references to Christmas in China. (Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if a hymn or two doesn’t occasionally get mixed in with the Christmas music.)

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