A Japanese Thanksgiving

A little oxymoronic, I know (oxymoronic. Is that even a word? Damn, my English is starting to go...)
Anyway, since they don't celebrate Thanksgiving as such in Japan, a bunch of the IUC students decided to do a big Thanksgiving potluck. It was held over in the house that Bridget, Travis, Connor, and Ben R. are sharing--because that's the only place big enough to hold all of us--and was a phenomenal success. I'd say 30-some people showed, which is crazy, especially considering the whole program's only like 45 or so students.
We had a huge array of food, too. I'd been wracking my brain for something I could bring that was sufficiently Thanksgiving-y, but also something I could make in my (pathetic excuse for a) kitchen. Originally I'd been thinking black bean salad, but I had to give that up upon discovering that finding black beans in Japan is like...well, I can't really think of a good analogy, but it's *hard.* At last I hit upon the brilliant idea of deviled eggs, for which all the ingredients are readily available (the Japanese L-O-V-E mayonnaise, they put it on everything--even pizza, ick). They took a while to make, cause I have one small pot and can therefore only boil about 5 eggs at a time. But eventually I got it all done, so that was good.
Amy M--bless her!--brought mashed potatoes, and there was also cranberry sauce (the good homemade kind), green bean casserole, rolls, salad... It was a success.
We had all the Thanksgiving essentials except...a turkey. We heard about a place where one could buy frozen turkeys, but the problem was that nobody has an oven, or one large enough to cook a whole turkey. So the next thought was to grab some kind of roast duck from Chinatown (fowl is fowl), but when Felicia and Aaron showed up at the house, it was with the disheartening message that roast ducks in Chinatown are quite expensive, so they brought several cartons of shumai and dumplings instead. Lol. The closest we got to a bird all day was when Marshall showed up with an 8-piece bucket from KFC.
But it was still a pretty darn good Thanksgiving. People hung around at the house for several hours, and afterwards came over to Odori Koen by my apartment--Jason having enlightened them on the joys of drinking cheap beer out in the park with all the homeless おじいさん. So there were literally about 15 gaijin drinking out in the park until about 11pm, being sufficiently rowdy and getting many stares from some very confused Japanese people.