Halloween in Shibuya
Halloween in Tokyo felt like watching an entire city take something Western and turn it into something completely their own. The streets of Shibuya were full of people in actual costumes—not the sad store-bought vampire teeth and fake blood variety, but real work. Considered choices, genuine effort. Someone had dressed as a moving Starbucks logo, which shouldn’t have been that funny but absolutely was.
What got me wasn’t the exoticism of it, the ’oh look how quirky Japan is’ thing. It was how straightforward it all felt. People were here to dress up and look good, and they’d invested the time to do it right. Anime character wigs and makeup done well. Coordinated group outfits. The kind of commitment you see at conventions, not just happening out on a random night in the street.
In the West, Halloween’s either for kids or an excuse to get drunk in something you’ll regret by morning. It’s become an obligation or a joke instead of an opportunity. Tokyo didn’t ask permission. They just did it—dressed up, went out, looked good, moved on. No irony, no apologizing, just the thing itself.
What stuck with me was the straightforwardness of it all. Most places import things and then apologize for them, or treat them as exotic oddities. Shibuya just took Halloween and made it work on its own terms. There’s something about that kind of straightforward ownership—just absorbing something and making it real—that feels rare now.