Not Another KFC Christmas

When living in Tokyo almost a decade ago, I was lucky enough to stay in a share house managed by a company called Borderless House Japan. Staggeringly, our home could fit a maximum of 29 people across two floors, where the second story split into two wings. One of our property managers had explained that the building used to be a large, old-school restaurant that was then refurnished.

There was a fair bit of notoriety associated with gaijin sharehouses in Japan if you did the research. I’d heard more than a few horror stories about festering living conditions, frat-party-mosh-pit-esque socializing and younger, rowdy tenants who were mostly backpackers. I was passionately trying to avoid returning to the wilderness of college dorm life and was beyond relieved when I stumbled upon an alternative.

Becoming the Omori crew

I lived in Omori house for a little over a year. A cleaner came in once a week to maintain the common areas like the corridors, toilets, showers, laundry rooms, our big living room and kitchen. At the time I lived there, our sharehouse was crucially different from many of its competitors in another way too: the tenants were divided evenly into locals and foreigners, many of whom were working in Tokyo.

This meant foreigners who were interested enough to stick around and get to know the real city beneath the famed Mario Cart street tours, Maid cafes and comic bookshelves laden with manga—lived with Tokyo-ites who were genuinely engaged in meeting new people and learning more about cultures other than their own.

We formed endearing friendships almost instantly. Our local friends showed us around when they could, and we met each other’s friends and families too. We often caught up for meals or a quick beer during the week and on weekends we usually went dancing at seedy Roppongi—which was packed with tourists and foreigners, but also allowed us ladies free entry and at least 2 complimentary drinks at the majority of the clubs in the area—our favorite being Feria.

We had “our” places too, local spots that we frequented as “the Omori crew”. There was “the wine bar”, which didn’t really serve great wine, but the venue was made almost entirely of glass and right between the house and the station, so why not? “Reggae Bar” was another favorite (again, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the actual name of the bar). The DJ was also the bar owner, a consistently drunk and high self-proclaimed rasta. He was a bubbly elderly man who was at least 60 or 70, wearing dreadlocks, glasses with a thin metal frame, and the same “rastacap” each time we hung out for drinks. The bar always stayed open till dawn, and the drunker we all got, the worse the DJing became. We loved that place. 

Having lived there for a year, I have a million stories I could tell you. One of my favorites is the first December I spent at Omori house.

Kicking the colonel to the curb

My housemate Amy and I became friends quickly after I moved to Omori Borderless House. She is a TCK from New Zealand, Bahrain and the UK, and I had grown up in Dubai, before moving to Melbourne and then Tokyo. Culturally we had a lot in common. We both worked at different branches of the Berlitz School of Languages, often catching up during lunch breaks to explore the city or share food. 

As December neared, we were (now I can see we were being a tad unfair and judgemental) mortified to learn that a true Tokyo Christmas meant cozying up with your significant other over a bucket of KFC and one of their strawberry shortcake desserts (or a specially ordered strawberry shortcake from a local bakery). Somehow, years ago, the colonel’s marketing team had convinced locals that fried chicken was the meat of the season—not the home-made, golden-brown turkey and chicken roasts Amy and I had grown up with at home.

Their meals were perfectly choreographed too: locals placed their orders around November and were given a precise pick-up time slot to collect their holiday feast on the 24th of December. This very considerate planning eliminated all inefficiencies, so no one would miss out on their Christmas Eve dinner.

Was it fair for us to decide that our flatmates needed to experience a ‘real’ Christmas that year? Racially, probably not, but we didn’t know better back then and we honestly had the best intentions at heart. Even though Amy and I would be going back to our respective ‘home’ cities for the festive season, what we really wanted was to share our own experiences of Christmas with our friends before we flew away for the holidays. This kind of cultural exchange really was the baseline of most of our interactions and friendships in that house and something we did almost daily. Many of us were single and didn’t have future plans to KFC with a loved one anyway. 

Boiled birds

Our kitchen was well-equipped—we had three fridges, three sinks, and enough storage for all the food we were hoping to cook up—but we did not have any ovens. Ovens and dishwashers really weren’t common kitchen fixtures back then anyway and there were plenty of other ways to cook perfectly delicious food (one of our housemates used to make an amazing rice-cooker butter cake).

Still, trying to fit a western meal into a Japanese kitchen was a challenge. The closest I could get to a roast (and by ‘close’, I mean, ‘the furthest thing from a roast’) was boiling several whole chickens in large pots of water with herbs, salt and pepper, and then crisping them up in the microwave before we served them (wisdom from our cooking genius, Paul Kennedy, who was also working with us at Berlitz at the time, and who I must have panickedly turned to in the staff room for food prep advice before the big dinner). 

Our beige-ish and boiled chickens did not have the crispy, browned skin and Christmas glow I had fantasized about, but at that point, I was just happy I was able to cook each bird properly and that they reached the table in time for dinner. Amy’s decadent butter, vegemite, and chicken stock gravy was what really made the meal, along with her ‘roasted’ veggies. 

It’s a dinner that I’m still really proud of. We pulled it off, we didn’t give anyone food-poisoning and we really did cook from the bottom of our hearts. I remember Amy shooing away a plate of store-bought maki rolls to the meal that a housemate was valiantly trying to contribute, while another blinked at the naked chickens in front of them, bemused. “I’ve never seen a whole chicken before,” he admitted thoughtfully, before tucking in with the rest of us.