When I recently met a Japanese acquaintance in Tokyo for a drink, the talk turned, as it often does, to Christmas traditions involving Kentucky Fried Chicken. At least the talk veers that way when having a drink with me, as I’m fascinated by the fascination with KFC on the other side of the Pacific. Yes, she said, her family always gets KFC for Christmas. She held both arms out to form a circle as if embracing a trash can. This was the size of the bucket they ordered.
Japan is among KFC’s largest international markets, with more than 1,200 outlets and plans to add another five hundred or so in the next five years. The KFC I visited in Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood was both familiar and not. It had the sizable self-service video screens for ordering as is expected these days, but also biscuits with holes—a bit like mini-bagels. The classics are available, but so are specials like, when I visited, the “Red Hot Chicken,” or pieces coated in a spicy dry rub. There was another set of specials that Google Translate informed me was “a greedy set that also includes the original chicken.”
But back to Christmas. “Kurisumasu ni wa Kentakkii” read ads across Japan starting in 1974. It translates to “Kentucky is Christmas,” and it was aimed at getting the Japanese to think of KFC when the western Yuletide season rolled around. The slogan’s origin traces back to Takeshi Okayama, the manager of Japan’s first KFC restaurant, which opened in Nagoya in 1970.
He’d overheard American customers reminiscing about turkey on the holidays. Turkey wasn’t common in Japan, but fried chicken was, so an ad campaign was born. The Japanese tend not to celebrate Christmas—the nation is only 1 percent Christian—but thanks to KFC’s persistence, it’s become a holiday tradition to bring home Christmas Party Barrels featuring traditional fried chicken, sides, and a cake.
Lines became so unmanageable that in 2021 KFC instituted online ordering. Early bird pre-order sales start the first week of November and usually close out by mid-December. Customers are provided days and times for pick-up at various KFC locations to help control the lines, with most picking up between December 24 and 26. One friend from Tokyo who worked at KFC in high school told me that when he was offered his job it came with one ironclad stipulation: He would have to work on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Wayne Curtis is the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails and has written frequently about cocktails, spirits, travel, and history for many publications, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, Imbibe, Punch, the Daily Beast, Sunset, the Wall Street Journal, and Garden & Gun. He lives on the Gulf Coast.
AloJapan.com