A Thousand Cute Zombies and One Ex-Sumo Wrestler

Halloween in Japan is a fascinating transplant. Decades of American cultural saturation, filtered through a sensibility that finds the grotesque inherently adorable, produces something genuinely different—not more or less authentic than the original, just its own thing entirely.

Tokyo’s zombie apocalypse rolled out last Halloween with roughly a thousand participants, led by a former sumo wrestler and a group of women who looked like they’d been training specifically for this. The kawaii zombie is a real and coherent aesthetic category: blood-spattered school uniforms, undead idol makeup, gore rendered in the same pastel register as a convenience store snack. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely works.

Zombie walks have mostly died out back home—ironic, given the genre. Watching the Tokyo footage, I remembered why they were fun in the first place. There’s something genuinely liberating about a city briefly agreeing to be theatrical together. No moral in that. Just a thousand people being ridiculous in coordinated fake blood, and a retired sumo wrestler at the front of the whole thing.