Shibuya Does It Right

Shibuya is where Japanese youth culture goes to metabolize itself—to take every global trend and run it through some internal process that spits it back out stranger and more committed. Halloween is no exception. While Germany treats October 31st as a half-hearted import, a few plastic pumpkins and maybe a costume party if you’re lucky, Shibuya takes the whole grotesque carnival seriously, which is to say: it goes completely feral.

The street photography from Tokyo Fashion captures something staged costume galleries never do: the cumulative visual noise of hundreds of people who all went too far at once. There’s a running Starbucks logo in there—a person dressed as the actual mermaid siren—so precisely executed it almost loops back around into corporate art. The craftsmanship across the board is embarrassing compared to what passes for a Halloween costume anywhere in Europe. Someone put real hours into this. Multiple someones, across an entire district, on a Wednesday night. I find that genuinely moving in a way I can’t fully explain.