Saturday evening, I arrived at the train station to see swarms of kids dressed up for Hallowe’en. The community had organized a Hallowe’en event and invited kids from around the neighborhood to come and enjoy games, live music and trick or treating at every shop in the shotengai. They had a stamp card and a map of the shotengai. When they arrived at each shop they’d get some candy and their maps stamped so they couldn’t keep coming and milk the shops dry. There was also a very cool Haunted House constructed underneath the train tracks. I would have gone in but I wasn’t in a costume. It was the first time for me to see any kind of Hallowe’en celebration in this country beside drunken gaijin in Roppongi.
It did seem to me this year that there’s more Halloween stuff than the previous years. It’s still probably a long way until kids will go trick-or-treat in the streets (probably won’t happen at all, well maybe it could work in inaka). Anyway I think it’s a fun event worth celebrating.
Hallaween is becoming huge here. I believe I heard that it’s second only to Christmas in what people spend on it. Part of the reason is that it has few people that it offends, nobody get depressed over it, and both kids and adults and have fun. I think people now decorate there homes more for Halloween then for Christmas. Of course here in Minnesota that might have something to do with it being warmer in October then November/December for putting those lights up.
Do gaijin still party on the Yamanote on Halloween night?
Err… sorry for the multi posts. Network problems.
already fixed :-)
What about the Yamonote Line today night? Any info would be great for me?
Feridun, don’t know about when the Yamanote thing is but FYI only real loser gaijin would take part in such an obnoxious event. How would you feel if a bunch of drunken foreigners did that in your country and disrupted everything?
I’m on the fence on weather the Halloween Yamanote party is obnoxious or just hijinx, but here is a good account of it.
http://japundit.com/archives/2005/11/10/1491/
Interesting article but I hate the way that writer keeps saying “A bunch of foreigners AND Japanese” as if having Japanese involved makes it OK.
Anyway, it started in the late ’80s not ’90s and I had the unfortunate experience of being on that train in 1990 by accident. I saw a bunch of people pissing on the seats and ripping up the advertising. It was pathetic.