In Japan, they do not celebrate Halloween, so every year at JCMU they put on a party and invite about 80 children under the age of 10 and their families to come and do some things like face painting, walking through a haunted house, and of course trick or treating along the halls of the dorms. And naturally this all took place on…..October 21. I’m not exactly sure why they held in on this day, but for the Japanese kids it didn’t really matter anyway. We had been preparing for the party for about a week now, with people putting up decorations, making a haunted house, scrounging up costumes (how hard is it to find a costume in a country that doesn’t do Halloween? really hard), and organizing our little activity groups. I was supposed to be in a group called Pumpkin Says, which I first thought would be us telling the kids the parts of the face of the pumpkin in English. Turns out that it was supposed to be a Simon Says kind of game. So not really needing any kind of prep work for it, my group was set until right before the party started, at 4:30pm.

So what did I do for a costume? Well, not really having a clue what I should dress up as, I figured I’d finally give the kimono I bought on my last trip to Japan some good use. And with my limited resources, I figured the only thing that I would be able to dress up as would be a Japanese ghost. In Japan, ghosts (obake) are depicted as usually wearing white kimonos, having very pale faces, no legs, and wearing a white triangle on their heads. I’m not really certain what the origin of the white triangle symbolism is, but think of it like the halo in Christianity. So, Friday afternoon I cut out my little white paper triangle. I had tried to find white face paint but in my several searches of the local stores, I couldn’t find any at all. That and I had no real shoes to wear with a kimono, so I came to the party with my kimono, paper crown and wool slippers. Luckily once I got there the face painters were able to hook me up with some face paint so that not only did the Japanese people (who would have known what I was anyway), but the Americans there now could stop asking me what I was.

Finally at 4:30pm the party started, and I hung around in my group a little while, but there wasn’t much need for me, that and teaching Japanese kids the rules of Simon Says was slightly complicated so not many kids wanted to participate, but soon I started to wander around the party and take pictures. All the Japanese kids were so cute, most of them dressed up as witches or pumpkins. After about an hour the party was over, and the kids were then taken in groups through the bottom floor of the dorm for a little trick or treating. By this point I was getting tired of walking around in a kimono and not being able to eat or drink anything with my makeup on, so I took a quick shower and got ready for the ‘after party’, where a bunch of Japanese college students were coming over to JCMU to hang out with us. At the after party we got free food (sushi!), and then we had a costume contest for all the JCMU people who dressed up. Cassidy (in her cute Jack-in-the-Box costume) got 2nd place!! After that we kind of escaped the party together and crashed back in my room and exchanged pics for a while, and here are a few of them:

Obake-san and the winning Jack-in-the-Box:

During the festivities:

Trick or treating:

And totally unrelated to the Halloween party is this awesome picture that Cassidy took using a panoramic feature on her camera. Doesn’t it look cool??