Whose Halloween Is It?
A story about costumes, crowds, and a holiday that each person can decide to enjoy or not — at least to a point.
As of this writing, on Halloween evening, the Hachiko statue at Shibuya Station is boarded up behind a temporary fence. Roads around the Scramble Crossing are closed. About one hundred and eighty-five security guards are walking the streets, and sixty-two shops near a now-annual no-drinking zone have been asked not to sell alcohol from six in the evening until five the next morning. The ward’s slogan, printed in English, is “Goodbye, Bad Halloween.” It is also the first time in six years that October 31st has fallen on a Saturday.
That is a lot of effort to spend on a holiday Japan never really had. So whose holiday was it in the first place? I’d argue the honest answer is: everyone’s, in turn, and nobody’s for long.
A Sales Idea, Not a Tradition
Start with what Japan did have. Obon, in August, is the season when the spirits of the dead come home, which is a solemn, family affair. There’s no trick-or-treating tradition here, no history of pumpkins and bonfires. Halloween arrived the way many foreign holidays arrive in Japan: as a sales idea. The Harajuku toy store Kiddy Land was stocking Halloween goods in the 1970s, and in October 1983 it staged a costume parade down Omotesando. About a hundred people took part, many of them foreigners. Tokyo Disneyland held its first Halloween event in 1997, a full parade in 2000, and Universal Studios Japan joined in 2002. Estimates vary, but Halloween now ranks among the biggest commercial occasions of the year, in the same league as Valentine’s Day. Along the way, the Japanese version took shape: less candy, more costume.
The Party on the Yamanote Line
Costumed Halloween parties are largely though not exclusively a North American tradition, and wherever anglophiles hung out, Halloween was a favorite event that encouraged costumed partying. I personally remember good times at Dubliner’s Irish pub in Shinjuku and other expat-friendly bars in Roppongi and elsewhere. At the time, sometime in the 1990s, a second version of Halloween partying was being invented on a train, with foreign residents boarding the Yamanote Line in costume on October 31st. The Yamanote is the loop that circles central Tokyo, and the plan was simple enough: meet up in costume at the Shinjuku station platform at about 9 p.m., get in the last car, and ride the full circuit, about an hour. The early years are poorly documented but I can tell you I was in the area at the time and I know people who took part.
It didn’t last. By 2008, when a coworker of mine heard about the tradition, police were standing on the platform, ready to repel any Halloween partiers. The two of us had to walk past them in cognito before boarding, only then putting on our masks. In 2009, the party was advertised once again on an online forum for foreign residents, with a boarding time of 9:06 p.m. at Shinjuku. A group of protesters showed up with signs telling foreigners to get out and declaring that Japanese people don’t need Halloween. By one account, no more than fifteen costumed foreigners actually got on the train. The train parties faded. The party itself did not. It moved to the streets, and by one common account, that move is how Shibuya became the center of Halloween.
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From Pub Party to Street Spectacle
By the 2010s, the crossing on Halloween night had become an international image: thousands of people in costume, photographed from above and shared around the world. Japanese twenty-somethings, cosplay fans, and tourists all joined in. My coworker took part pretty much every year and every few years I took part myself. By then it wasn’t an out-of-sight expat pub party anymore. It was a spectacle, and spectacles tend to attract an audience…as well as participants.
What struck me over the years was how potentially dangerous the scene was becoming. Despite Japan’s generally orderly manner, the crowds got bigger every year and it seemed to me irresponsibly so. Shibuya’s Halloween was never an official event, so there was no organizer to answer to and no plan to follow. The crowd simply kept growing, and the ward and the police kept reacting. In 2018, a group of partygoers overturned a small truck near the crossing, and four people were later arrested after investigators went through CCTV footage. According to the mayor, the pre-pandemic peak was around forty thousand people, in 2019. That’s not entirely a criticism; there was no playbook for a party nobody had organized. But nearly every measure since has been a response to a crowd that was already there. I feel it’s lucky that people haven’t actually gotten harmed.
The Ward Takes Control
Still, what followed was Shibuya ward gradually taking control. In 2019, it banned public drinking around Halloween and New Year’s. In 2022, a deadly crowd crush in Seoul made crowd safety a matter of life and death. In 2023, the ward began asking people not to come at all. In October 2024, the drinking ban became permanent, running from six in the evening to five in the morning every night of the year. In June 2026, an on-the-spot ¥2,000 littering fine took effect. One Japanese report puts the ward’s Halloween safety budget for 2026 at fifty-eight million yen.
All that said, I’m not inclined to scold the ward. After Seoul, letting a dense crowd build at a crossing with no organizer and no plan is a risk nobody could defend. And that’s the heart of it: nobody organized Shibuya’s Halloween, which meant nobody was responsible for it. The ward has simply decided that if no one else will be, it will.
The costumes haven’t gone away; they’ve gone elsewhere. To the theme parks. To Kawasaki’s parade, which began in 1997, the same year as Disney’s first event. To Ikebukuro, and to clubs and indoor events across Tokyo. And there’s a nice irony in the 2026 party hosted by Metropolis, the English-language magazine, in Roppongi: its theme is yokai, Japan’s own folkloric spirits. The foreign community’s Halloween, dressed up as Japan’s ghosts.
Whose Halloween?
Every group that has claimed Halloween in Japan has ended up renting it. Retailers sold it. Expats partied it. Crowds filled it. Now a ward office is trying to put it back in the box. None of them owned it, because it was never Japan’s to begin with. Japan’s own night for the dead comes in August: it’s quiet, it’s family-based, and it needs no security guards. A holiday without roots here goes wherever the crowd goes. Costumes are still perfectly legal in Shibuya. As for whose Halloween it is, in Shibuya, at least, it seems to belong to whoever is willing to show up for it.
Originally published at theTokyoBill.jp/kampai/ and aired on theTokyoBill Weekly podcast on October 31, 2026.
