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On Oct. 31, people all over the world celebrated Halloween. In Japan, there was a flood of Halloween cosplay everywhere. Chief among them was the Shibuya area which bustled with ghoulish excitement and created an even bigger buzz than usual.
The festivities of Halloween from the West have been permeating into Japan in recent years, coupled together with the cosplay culture of the otaku world. People dressed in cosplay flooded the streets of Nagoya and other urban downtown areas, and some areas even had Halloween parades. Because the market scale for Halloween including sales of costumes and the like has swelled to roughly 122 billion yen (researched by the Japan Anniversary Association), it has caught on in Japan due to its economic impact as well.
As early as Oct. 30, which fell this year on Friday, there were already young people in costume who took to the streets in Center Gai, Shibuya, naturally giving rise to “Halloween Eve.” On the day of, Oct. 31, 800 police officers, four times as many as last year, were dispatched, and from beginning to end they kept crowds under control.
Within Japan, there are differing opinions on how Halloween is celebrated. Japanese comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto touched on this during the Nov. 1 broadcast of the TV news show Wide na Show, expressing his support for cultivating Halloween culture that’s unique to Japan and requesting to see “costumes that have more originality.”
On the other hand, residents of Shibuya have also voiced concerns about the large amounts of trash left over the next day, calling it “bad behavior” and urging people to “have fun, but keep good manners.”
This Halloween in Shibuya brought more excitement than ever before and left behind plenty to remember. We can’t wait to see what Shibuya will look like next year for Halloween.
This is a Tokyo Otaku Mode original article written by Kohji Sakurai and translated by Jarrett Meuser. Photos by Soh Takemori and Kohji Sakurai.
