I never encounter it in daily life any more, and a lot of younger Japanese have never even heard of it, but in the 1980’s, there used to be an expression called “Christmas Cake.” Back then, the expression was used to describe unmarried Japanese women over the age of 25. In Japan, cake is a ‘tradition’ at Christmastime (along with love hotels and boxes or cooking oil, see this post). If it doesn’t get sold by Christmas–the 25th–then nobody wants it, is the idea. A rather rude and sexist idea, but it was the 80’s and at the time I was living in rural Toyama, and so it came up. I remember one young lady, named Miki, who worked in the office of the school I worked at. She married some guy through o-miai, a matchmaking tradition often used until recently in Japan. A matchmaker would try to match the bride a groom; the couple would usually not meet too many times before making up their minds to get married. At the wedding, in fact, the matchmaker usually has a special place in the ceremony.

All of this came back to me recently when I stumbled across the topic in this news story, which reports–and I have observed personally–that women in Japan today don’t worry about their marriage age as much, and Japanese men are not quite so obsessed with age when choosing a spouse–significant reasons why the term “Christmas Cake” isn’t heard much anymore.