Halloween revelry around Tokyo’s iconic Shibuya crossing has grown too scary for its own good, but can “saying ‘Don’t come here’” keep a lid on it?
Halloween revelry around Tokyo’s iconic Shibuya crossing has grown too scary for its own good, but can “saying ‘Don’t come here’” keep a lid on it?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“This year we’re making it clear to the world that Shibuya is not a venue for Halloween events,” Ken Hasebe, the mayor of one of the city’s most well-known and bustling wards, told reporters this month at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.
A former advertising executive who later started a street-cleaning nonprofit before winning office as an independent, Hasebe described how Shibuya’s once-spontaneous, al fresco celebration of elaborate homemade costumes had degenerated into something closer to a giant outdoor frat party.
Katsuhiro Nishinara, a Tokyo University expert on crowd surges who has been advising Shibuya ward, called preparations “perfect,” and said authorities would focus on routing pedestrians through one-way corridors on shopping streets and subway stair exits.
Visitors patiently line up just to snap pictures in front of the famous but otherwise unremarkable Hachiko dog statue and to stroll through what may be the world’s busiest pedestrian street crossing, the Shibuya Scramble.
The iconic junction’s intersecting crosswalks fill up with as many as 3,000 pairs of feet every time the light changes, and it’s even featured as a backdrop in Hollywood movies, including “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” and the horror film “Resident Evil: Afterlife.”
In fact, to many observers, Japan’s version of Halloween bears a closer resemblance to the original free-spirited, come-one-come-all, ancient community harvest festival it’s based on — albeit updated by urban youth.
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