Is birthday so important?

Every year on my birthday I feel so grateful to receive kind birthday wishes from my friends around the world, even if I forget theirs! (sorry!) In their messages, they usually ask me, "So, what did you do for your birthday?" or "How do you celebrate your birthday in Japan?"

To be honest, I feel uncomfortable answering these questions because my family doesn't really care about my birthday and we don't really celebrate it. Even when I'm in Sweden, my family in Japan don't call me just because it's my birthday or send me birthday presents.

As soon as my friends heard this, they looked so sad and very sorry for me, as if I was not loved by my family, even though I was perfectly fine. After many years of living in such an environment, I was somewhat influenced to feel sorry for myself by seeing the expressions of others.

Astrologically, a birthday is surely a special day for an individual to reflect on the past year and start a new one. However, for many years I didn't know why my family didn't care about birthdays and I was fine with that, and why my friends made such a big deal out of birthdays! (sorry!)

What is birthday for 'traditional' Japanese?

When I was a kid, my parents would buy me a strawberry cake and a birthday present for my birthday, but what was important to my parents and me was not the birthday, but the cake and the present.

One day I asked my mother, "Our family forgets birthdays. How did you celebrate them when you were a child?" She replied, "We didn't have birthdays because we all grew older together at the beginning of the year.

It was an 'aha' moment. My mother didn't have a birthday when she was growing up! In pre-war Japan, there was no custom of celebrating birthdays. It was a system called "counting age", in which all family members grew older on the 1st of January. It is a collectivist practice that puts the group before the individual.

The emphasis on individual birthdays is individualistic and makes sense for a Western cultural practice. After the last war, it seems that birthdays began to be highlighted in Japan as a new celebration, like Christmas for commercial strategies to sell cakes and toys.

In our family, we've never had any problems with birthdays, but we did have some family conflicts over New Year's. My father, a super traditional Japanese man, was furious when I didn't return to Japan for the New Year. Having been born after the war and brought up in a mixture of Japanese tradition and newly imported Western celebrations, I was rather confused about cultural priorities. For a long time I didn't understand my father's feelings about New Year. I thought he was just indifferent to birthdays because he was not a family man.

Having experienced both Japan and the West to the full, I have come to understand the cultural differences in Japan before and after the war. My father, who was born towards the end of the war, was a person who was completely from the "traditional system" where all family members grew older on the first of January. For him, New Year's Day is not just the first day of a new year, but an extremely important day for the whole family to grow a year older together in good health. In other words, for him, it was the day when all family birthdays come on one day!

Since I became an adult, I have rarely been with my parents on my birthday. This year I spent my birthday with my parents. In the morning I helped my mum with the shopping and in the afternoon I helped my dad with the roof garden. For lunch we had normal food together. It was a very good birthday!

Image of a birthday card arrived from my friend!