Illumination (Lin Te Kuan)

During Christmas time, the whole Tokyo becomes very beautiful and has strong Christmas atmosphere. What is really special is illumination. Before Christmas to New Year around, a lot of places in Tokyo have illuminations. Japanese illumination is a very cool and extraordinary thing to me, because in Taiwan, people don’t
celebrate Christmas in that kind of big and serious way. But in Japan, people gather to
see beautiful illumination in Christmas. That’s very new to me.
When the first time I heard illumination, I thought it must be like other
illuminations I saw before, hanging a lot of light bulbs on trees, glistening all night

without any special tricks. Or shining some colored lights on the trees and changing
the colors is the best way they can do. So I really didn’t like to see people putting light
bulbs on trees or shine lights one the trees since I thought that was too gaudy and poor
taste.
But Japanese illumination totally blew my mind.
This year I went to 六本木 to see illumination. They plan the whole
illumination way to be a circle. The trees on the road were all hung with lots of
light bulbs, but not gaudy at all because the bulbs were well-designed. At the
main lawn, the whole grass land was all small light bulbs, but not just that.
They even set up different layers to make the lights looked more complicated
and beautiful. And the whole lawn looked like the galaxy, the blue galaxy. And
the illumination was like a picture of animation. It moved, shined, changed and
even exploded! The entire illumination was so extraordinary that people
around me were all shouting”beautiful! (きれい!)””Great! (すごい!)” I couldn’t
help but laugh because I had never seen Japanese be so excited and flushed that talked
in a really fast way! Though the weather was extremely cold, my friends and I were
all enjoyed illumination.
I think what stands Japanese illumination out is their technology and carefulness.
Japanese technology is generally acknowledged. Their great and amazing techniques
can always surprise people. And they apply this strength on the illumination too. So
many lights and bulbs were all in really small volume that makes the lights looked like
stars instead of electronic things at night. And walking on the streets and watching the
illumination really shows Japanese’s carefulness on the illumination. They really put a
lot of efforts to arrange such a big event. They planned the whole routes, putting a lot
of instruction and instruction people to avoid chaotic and made the entire illumination.
It was very touching and great experience for me.
I took pleasure in seeing illumination. It’s a big characteristic in Japanese
Christmas. That’s something I found really cool about Japan!