An Urban's Rural View

"There are no new stories, only new reporters to tell them."

I didn't understand that old adage when I first heard it as a cub reporter. Then I wrote a front-page feature for The Wall Street Journal about a bass fisherman who was turning pro -- and was startled to see a similar story about an angler going-pro on the front page a decade later. When still another Journal reporter held forth on the same theme yet another decade after that, the meaning of the maxim was clear.

Which brings to mind another story that gets trotted out again and again -- the Japanese custom of celebrating Christmas with Kentucky Fried Chicken. This being the Christmas season, and the story having an American food angle, let me tell you about it.

The custom dates to a 1974 KFC ad that's been repeated and refined over the years: "Kurisamasu ni wa, kentakkii" (at Christmas, Kentucky). Somehow, the eat-chicken-at-Christmas message caught on; to be sure they get their Yuletide fried fowl, many Japanese now place orders months in advance.

The story caught on, too. I first became aware of the custom in 1991, when I edited Yumiko Ono's telling of it in the Journal. Yumiko wasn't first with the story, though, and she certainly wasn't last. Google "KFC Christmas Japan" and you'll find countless new reporters have nibbled on this old chestnut in the last few years alone.

Why? Because it's a curious yarn, tickling readers with two obvious questions. First, what's a nation whose religions are Shintoism and Buddhism doing celebrating Christmas? And why fried chicken?

In response, the reporter gets to explain Japan's predilection for taking Western customs and Japanizing them -- and the lack of ovens in Japanese kitchens, which rules out roasting a turkey or baking a ham. Colonel Sanders sort of looks like Santa, and the similarity is especially strong when KFC's marketing dresses him up in red.

Why do reporters keep writing the story if it's been written so many times before that surely everyone has already read it? Back when I was a cub reporter, I heard another adage that attempts to answer that question.

I'd just told a grizzled veteran I wasn't going to write something because I'd written it before. Nonsense, he snapped back; 90% of the people who read your story won't have read the previous one, and the 10% who did read it won't remember it. His advice: "If you've got a good story, write it every once in awhile."

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com