WHEN CARNIVAL MEETS JAPAN

February in Switzerland is carnival season.

Which means that for a few glorious days each year, the Swiss are officially permitted to lose control.

This may not sound remarkable if you come from cultures where public enthusiasm is a daily occurrence. But Switzerland runs on restraint. On order. Emotional moderation calibrated to within acceptable tolerances.

Carnival is the exception.

This is when otherwise respectable bankers dress as medieval vegetables. Accountants unleash brass instruments tuned to frequencies normally associated with aircraft testing. Entire towns gather before dawn to parade through the streets producing sounds reminiscent of industrial machinery malfunctioning.

There are masks. Elaborate ones. Wooden, grotesque, occasionally unsettling. There are confetti battles, parades, 'Guggenmusik' (brass ensembles apparently tuned using industrial equipment), and heroic levels of food and alcohol consumption that would normally require supporting documentation.

It’s national chaos. Scheduled chaos. Permit-approved chaos.

Living in Japan, I sometimes try to explain this.

Japan also understands festivals – magnificently so. There are summer matsuri, portable shrines carried through packed streets, taiko drums, fireworks, and collective enthusiasm executed with breathtaking organisation and precision.

Swiss carnival, by comparison, looks like someone briefly unplugged civilisation.

And then I came across something that surprised even me.

In the canton of Schwyz – central Switzerland – there exists a carnival group called the Japanesen.

'The Japanese'.

They’ve been performing open-air carnival plays for around 170 years.

This is not a typo. It's history.

After the conservative canton of Schwyz lost the 'Sonderbund' War in 1847, the defeated canton was left paying part of the bill. Spirits were low. So carnival theatre was organised to lift morale – featuring exotic animals, theatrical absurdity, and enthusiastic satire.

At roughly the same time, Japan was emerging from two centuries of isolation. Switzerland, facing tariff barriers across Europe, saw opportunity and sent a delegation eastward with gifts intended to impress: watches, textiles, technology – diplomacy conducted with impressive luggage.

(Similarities to today are, by the way, purely coincidental.)

This was expensive, of course. Very expensive. About ten-percent-of-the-national-budget expensive.

Farmers in Schwyz were unimpressed.

So naturally, they wrote a carnival play mocking the whole enterprise.

The resulting play featured a Swiss delegation travelling to Japan to meet the taikun (emperor), only to be mistreated until their patriotic virtue wins him over – culminating in the ruler deciding he’d quite like to become Swiss.

It premiered in 1863.

It was successful.

Profitable, even.

And it became tradition.

Now – and this is important – the Japanesen never resembled actual Japanese people or culture. Their costumes were built from imagination rather than anthropology: flowing robes, dramatic beards, and broadly interpreted 'Far Eastern' aesthetics assembled from limited information and considerable enthusiasm.

Which makes sense.

This was the 1800s.

Reference materials were scarce.

Google Images had not yet been invented.

Today, locals openly acknowledge the portrayal isn’t authentic – and that authenticity was never the objective. Carnival is about transformation. Symbolism. Theatre. Becoming something distant rather than accurate.

At one point, a Japanese resident of Schwyz reportedly tried introducing real kimono to improve accuracy.

The organisers listened politely.

Thanked her warmly.

And changed absolutely nothing.

It took a decade to realise: accuracy had never been on the agenda.

The tradition has struggled in recent times – modern sensitivities, demographic shifts, declining volunteerism – but revival efforts using updated satire, music, and staging are gaining traction.

Which means that somewhere in central Switzerland today, people are still dressing as imaginary Japanese emperors to resolve fictional disputes rooted in a 19th-century civil war.

And perhaps that’s the point.

Cultural exchange doesn’t always happen through diplomacy or textbooks.

Sometimes it happens through theatre.

Through misunderstanding.

Through costumes assembled from guesswork and curiosity.

Or as the president of the society once put it:

Tradition is not the worship of ashes – it is the passing on of fire.

Creator: Pakeha / Licence