Why the Japanese Calendar Is Full of Unofficial Food Holidays

Over the last few years, an increasing number of unofficial food holidays have popped up all over the Japanese calendar. Banana Day, Strawberry Day, Curry Day; the list goes on. Each is celebrated with a flurry of online attention and clever marketing tie-ins from restaurants, trade groups, and food companies.

But how does a random date become Strawberry Day, for instance? Part of a larger trend known as dajare no hi, or (bad) pun days, most of these celebrations depend on wordplay, to which the Japanese language is particularly well-suited.

Take Banana no hi (Banana Day) for example. Broken down, the Japanese pronunciation—ba-na-na—corresponds to the Japanese for eight (ba) and seven (nana). The seventh day of the eighth month, August 7, thus becomes “Banana Day.”

Similarly, the Japanese for strawberry—ichigo—corresponds to the number one (ichi) and five (go). Depending on one’s location, Strawberry Day, or ichigo no hi, is marked on either January 15, or even the 15th day of each month.

In a 1999 paper for the Japanese Society for Language and Humor Studies, the linguist Heiyo Nagashima explained how puns have existed in Japanese since the time of the Manyoshu, a collection of poetry published in the later Nara Period (710-794). Japanese is naturally suited to puns, since the language has relatively few phonemes, the distinct sounds that make up words. In Japanese, wrote Nagashima, only 111 phonemes “give rise to at least 450,000 words.” Numerous similar-sounding words result in more homonyms, and accordingly, more opportunities for wordplay.

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