Title: Eating with Chopsticks

General Information about Item:

• Genre and Sub Genre
  • Customary Folklore: Superstitions, Traditions

• Language: English

• Country where Item is from: Japan

Informant Data:

Lauren is a freshman (’21) at Dartmouth College. Her father is American and her mother is Japanese. She has family in both New York and Tokyo and resides in the latter. She is fluent in Japanese and was born and raised in Japan.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context: Lauren learned these superstitions from her elders in Japan growing up.

• Cultural Context: These “bad luck” superstitions center around thematic ideas about death and are largely derived from symbolism.

Item:

• Bad Luck: With regards to chopsticks, it is bad luck to stick your pair of chopsticks directly upright into your food, particularly if it is rice.
• Bad luck: It is also improper to pass food between people from chopstick to chopstick.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

Informer: “First they are all related to chopsticks and the usage of chopsticks in Japan. Basically, if you’re eating, you’re not allowed to stick your chopsticks directly into your food, usually it’s rice. But it’s not allowed to stand upright because it’s reminiscent of the incense we use to honor the dead. So if you do that, it’s like you’re going to go to hell or something like that. And the second one, you’re not allowed to pass food from chopsticks to chopsticks because at funerals, you pass around the bones of the deceased from chopsticks to chopsticks. So it’s all related to death.”

 

Informant’s Comments:

• Lauren says that both these practices deal a great amount with symbolism and similarity. These practices emulate actual traditional rituals and practice that deal with death.

Collector’s Comments:

• I noticed that these superstitions were not only based on symbolism, but also exhibited Japanese belief in homeopathic magic, as defined by James Frazer.

Collector’s Name: Natt Chan

Tags/Keywords:

• Superstition/Bad Luck/Japan/Chopsticks