Halloween in Japan

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The Japanese are famous for absorbing imported ideas and concepts yet still remaining fundamentally Japanese. Halloween is no exception. In recent years it has become quite a major event.

The original impetus was no doubt retail sales but the Japanese love a festival and a party and they have adopted Halloween as a sort of dress up Christmas.

In our local town we attended a great street party and I played keyboards in the band.

Spiderman's mum bought him an icecream but you can see from his look that he's pretty unimpressed as he has no apparent way of eating it.

It was surprisingly well attended and all the children were having an absolute ball. All very harmlesss and good natured.

The band played 5 songs. We were on after the Hawaiian Band, the High School dance troupe and the Primary School rappers. All hard acts to follow.

After the street party we retired to the band leader's pub for our own party which also happened to be Tomono's and the guitarist's wife's birthday.


So the band played on..and on.... and on with everyone having a go and vast amounts of food and drink consumed well into the night.

Great fun doesn't adequately describe it.