Halloween in Japan
Halloween is just around the corner and Japan has caught up with the spooky craze! Over the years, Halloween has become the second favorite foreign holiday after Christmas. The country is no stranger to playing dress-up, as it popularized cosplay, performance art, and wearing costumes and fashion accessories to look like a particular character. Japan is a natural at celebrating Halloween with plenty of pomp and pageantry.
Japan has its own fair share of local ghoulish monsters, creepy legends, and ghost stories throughout history, but mainstream Japan only began celebrating Halloween at the start of the 21st century. The golden age of Japan’s bubble economy, an unprecedented era of affluence and internationalism in the 1980s, popularized a few Western holidays such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and of course, Halloween.
Halloween didn’t take off as quickly as the other two holidays, because it was initially perceived to have a dark side to it. To add more controversy to the darkness of Halloween, there was an incident involving the teenage Japanese exchange student Yoshihiro Hattori, who in 1992 was killed on his way to a Halloween party. All throughout the 1990s until the early 2000s, Hattori’s death was the first thing that entered the minds of many Japanese when Halloween came around.
Over time, Hattori’s unfortunate death was not considered a direct result of Halloween. In 1999, Tokyo Disneyland played a major role in creating a different mindset about Halloween and at the same time testing the general reception of the occasion by holding a one-day Halloween event. It proved an instant success that eventually grew to become a two-month series of parades and shows held throughout September and October at the theme park. In line with the warm acceptance of Halloween in Japan, the city of Kawasaki in the Tokyo area held its first Halloween costume parade. The parade is a major event today and draws in a number of attendees garbed in elaborate costumes.
Kawasaki Halloween Parade. YouTube upload by Justin Henton
Halloween in Japan is probably one of the best ways to spend the much anticipated event via the Japanese kawaii culture and cosplay. Truly, it may just be one of the scariest and cutest Halloweens ever!
