Update: the VIDEO for this article is under JIJ TV “Tokyo Halloween” or if you prefer, you can watch the youtube video directly here . Enjoy! – Marcus
October 31, 2009.
A tall, leggy woman in pink lingerie outfit struts down the street. Behind her, gawkers with camera phones and Digital SLRs snap pictures, creating spots of blue flashes in the nighttime. Behind her, snapping video on a tiny handheld camera is another woman; covered artfully in tape so she appears to be wearing a skirt, leggings and a brassiere. They are impossible to ignore. Men nudge each other in the arms when they see them and ladies chuckle at the display. The two exhibitionists have a powerful mixture of sexual and extroverted body language. As people cheer them on as they walk to and fro, I come closer. I’ve been observing them from a distance of roughly fifty feet. I take a better look at the two, and laugh to myself. They are both men.
This is Halloween night in Roppongi, the “Gaijin Central” of Tokyo, Japan. Here, a lot of the foreigners who live here come to party, drink and meet cute Japanese girls. Each time I come to Roppongi I am surprised by the explosion of mixed couples I see.
It’s a little chilly, and I’m feeling a little stressed. Mainly because Japan is expensive, and sometimes in travelling I don’t really realize I overreach a little bit in my trips. A Viking walks past me and gives me the nod. I’m wearing a smooth silver mask which makes me appear to lack all emotion. I feel withdrawn and quiet, falling into character. People stare at me occasionally, and some Japanese girls say “Kowaii” (scary). I’m shooting video of the mayhem.
The stars of the strip are a set of power rangers who all seem to be basketball players in real life. A group consisting of Wolverine, Captain America and two Spidermen are doing the rounds, laughing it up with girls and guys as they snap pictures and flex fake muscles. There are men well over six feet in dresses and seven inch platform heels, girls in Rilakuma bear outfits and people wearing almost nothing at all. I like the noise around me, as I stand quietly in my mask. My outfit doesn’t attract attention, it wards it off. My calm, expressionless face is reminiscent of Mike Myers, Jason, or any number of masked psychotic killers. I film in peace.
I see Fred Flinstone and Wilma walking around as well. Every conceivable type of character is out and about. Men dressed like playboy bunnies, girls dressed a little more skanky than normal, old drunk men acting bizarre, a Disney character here or there. Near a popular Star Bucks, a guy with a black brief is holding massive dildo by his groin, as a girl eagerly holds it, smiling for the camera.
“That’s tasteful.” a tall man mutters as he walks past.
I see a poorly organized Darth Vader costume. The fellow is wearing the Darth Vader helmet and his chest piece, but a black jersey and blue jeans with black shoes with exceedingly white laces. Add to that a short stature and his Darth outfit was dead.
Further up the strip, a short man in a red loincloth is doing aerial splits by holding his right leg out and up with one hand while the other is around whomever wants to take a picture with him. An American guy in a dinosaur outfit is doing a jiggy dance by the sidewalk. Two short, attractive Japanese girls wearing skinny jeans with thongs visible walk past him. One of them rubs a hand sensually across his dinosaur chest. For a moment the guy stops his jiggy, and watches the girls cross the street. His friends appear. “Damn dude, let’s cross the street.” He says. The friend is wearing a similar costume, large and voluminous. It appears to be a horribly obese duck.
I go back down the strip and make a pit stop near the McDonalds. A set of very attractive women of mixed ethnicity are grabbing people with interesting outfits nad taking pictures. One girl is dressed like a dominatrix maid. The other looks exactly like Ashley Simpson, which doesn’t seem like an outfit. They stop Peter Pan (a woman), Winnie the Pooh (if he was a chill black dude), the Power Rangers (all seven of them) and a host of random individuals. One of the girls leans back comfortably on a rough-looking Japanese guy with a shaved head wearing a Jailbird outfit. They have specific and recognizable accents. I think they are from California.
Beside me, a girl says something to two men a few feet away. She screeches as she learns they are from Texas, her home town. She is African-American with a solid flair of uptown in her mannerisms. The guys from Texas are in town for a 15 hour layover before headed back to the states. They were previously in Thailand and China.
Behind me, Fred Flinstone is talking to a massive biker who speaks in an almost classic stereotypical jive. The man is a tall African-American in a huge biker jacket. He doesn’t seem like he’s wearing any costume, save a little face paint on his cheek, and I wonder who he is, and what he’s doing in Tokyo. On the street, two men in red jumpsuits sprint through moving traffic, causing cars to screech and blare their horns. It is completely wild.
Everyone has glassy eyes, and every club, bar and restaurant is filled to the brim with patrons. A man wearing a Dracula outfit walks past me.
“Fuck yeah! Mario and Luigi in the FUCKING BUILDING! “he says to a guy in a Mario costume in line. I roam some more, watching a set of Japanese nurses with blonde hair walk by in a stream of colour and giggles. I don’t know where everyone is going, but they are all walking very fast.
There are so many people it is hard to discern race or nationality. All I can see are bobbing heads and flashes of colour from the outfits. I pass Don Quixote, the place where I bought my mask, remembering a middle-eastern looking fellow that asked me if a man wearing a Witches’ hat was okay.
I like Halloween in big cities. It is such a raging ball of energy, watching people lose themselves in costume and drink. The crowd is so diverse it doesn’t even feel like Japan. With all the masks, elaborate outfits and foreigners, I feel like I’m in New York, though I’ve never been in New York for Halloween.
I’m meeting some friends at a bar near the strip, and as I walk down a small street to go to the bar, I see a set of people dancing. Barack Obama, Two Spider men, Captain America and Wolverine. A lady in a bunny outfit is grinding Captain America, and a guy in a Yellow Jumpsuit mysteriously starts humping a hazard cone.
I enter the bar, hearing the laughter of Roppongi fall silent as the door closes, and I chuckle, because I know the night isn’t over.
Traveling can expose you to vistas you may never see anywhere else. For example, today I sat on a pier somewhere near Bentenijima, a town a few trains stops away from Hamamatsu, in the late evening. The water was dark and quiet, and the city lights far away, illuminated the blackness like a small box covered with fireflies. Every few minutes, a train would appear as a long snake, streaking across tracks in the distance, before disappearing into a tunnel. As I sat there, I spoke with a friend of mine, Emi.
Emi was sitting in the darkness, her long hair like a veil. She was barefoot and wearing a floral dress, the patterns hard to distinguish. We were talking about life. As she sat there in the darkness, and me beside her, I felt an interesting sense of time and space. Earlier, I had come here for a Salsa barbeque. Through Emi, I had transportationto the event with a cool young Japanese man named Taka. He had been to Jamaica, on a cruise with his wife of two months, Marie. Meeting him was a notch in a long sequence of introductions I had been flooded with since my arrival to Japan. The salsa crowd had been introduced to me by Emi, and I had marveled that first night the way everyone had looked at me, wide-eyed and curious, the question marks like invisible halos over their heads.
That night, many girls requested a dance from me, some so shy to touch my hands I could feel them trembling with every step we took. It had been a whirlwind and intriguing, a barrage of sensations doused with the indigo of the club’s black lights. But here, in the open, it wasn’t the same. My Japanese was hardly conversational, and I’m not a serious Salsa enthusiast anymore. I had danced for years in different clubs, but I lost my passion for it. As I approached the Barbeque area with Taka, we parked in a lot across the road. An old totem pole grabbed my attention, and I snapped a picture with it.
The park itself was a family center, with tables set up for groups to sit, and a rocky path lead to the beach nearby. I was quiet for most of the time, regretting that I hadn’t eaten before I got there. Everyone brought beef or pork to cook, neither of which I ate. I sipped Pepsi and slowly ate vegetables, grumbling at my ineptitude of foresight. Also, I didn’t know there was a fee for the barbeque. Someone brought a little chicken with them, so I was able to eat a few tiny morsels of food, but the barbeque had a price tag of 1000 yen, which I didn’t know. After paying for my meal and grumbling at the emptiness of my stomach, I heard there was a Salsa party afterward, at
a local venue. At some point during this Barbeque, Emi had arrived, looking regal in a black suit. She had taken some kind of exam for teachers, but seemed upset because she didn’t feel like she passed it. After the Barbeque ended, we took a group picture.
We walked over to the club, and I groaned. It was another 1000 yen to go into the club and all I could see beyond me were a sea of Japanese bodies. I started to feel a little choked; something that occasionally happens to me in a completely homogenous environment. Two things were working against me; prohibitive spending for things I did not want to do, and distance. Even if I wanted to leave, I had no way to get home. I sighed and made small talk with the Japanese Salsa crowd, who asked me repeatedly why I wasn’t dancing.
I didn’t feel like explaining to them I was hungry, and didn’t like Salsa dancing that much. I also couldn’t bother to say that I wasn’t in the best spirits to begin with. I sat in a chair, thinking about Japan. Even though this was a different country and a different set of rules of meeting people was essentially the same. You don’t need language to have fun. Cost doesn’t matter, the choice is whether or not you want to take what you can from what’s there. So far, I didn’t feel like taking anything. In the past I would have loved something like this, dancing the night away with a group of Japanese people, happily grabbing every girl that laid an eye on me. But in some way they all felt like obstacles; barriers in this new world. So I went outside.
I sat on the pier, watching mostly fathers and sons fishing in the nighttime. Everyone had a small flashlight on a string around their neck, and it was quiet, save the occasional laugh of a child. I felt a little sad and cold, so far away from friends and family, unable to have fun. It felt like a curse, this “wall” I saw in front of me. I tried to think of five years before, when I leapt at the chance to do anything involving fun, wherever I was. Had things become so dark? Was happiness so elusive?
I sat there for a long time, and soon a few of the Salsa group were on the pier beside me. They stood there like statues, chatting with each other while Emi spoke to me. They went back inside to dance, and I started chatting to Emi about life. She was searching for something meaningful in the world, looking at ways to feel better about herself and her life. I told her about choices and journeys, connections and ways of looking on reality. I told her an interesting yarn about meditation, personal psychology and the power of making decisions. It sounded good to me, and I started to feel a little better. In the midst of this conversation, with Emi and I sitting barefoot there together, I
wasn’t sure how to think of her. She was definitely become a friend, and I her confidant. I didn’t have the luxury of imagining anything else. After my brief time in Japan thus far, the idea of a young woman wanting anything from me even remotely sexual seems vague and unrealistic.
After our long conversation, we walked back inside. The party was in full swing, and I could feel the heat from the dance floor. Near the reception area, a tall Japanese man was giving massages to women, who had formed an eager line. I glanced inside. Bodies moved to and fro with amazing precision. Everyone was Japanese, and I looked at their long silky hair, twinkling eyes and smiling teeth. Then I sat back on the couch. Something in me wanted to dance, to reach out and lose myself in the crowd, but I couldn’t. A girl I met at the barbeque came over to me, telling me to come inside and dance. I told her I didn’t feel like it, and she didn’t seem to understand. My responses were protracted and awkward, and I sighed once more and walked outside.
Now it was completely dark, save the lights of a few vending machines. Emi asked me if I wanted to get an ice cream, and I said yes. She treated me to a cone, and I stood by a railing near the entrance for a while. Soon, a few people were leaving, and I got a ride back into the city. Two very genki women were in the car, and excitedly asked me questions about Salsa and Jamaica. They were fascinated to learn that their car was called an “S.U.V” in the states. In Japan, one of them
said, the car is called “4.W.D”. I laughed at this.
The girls in the car were cute, but I knew I would never know them much better. The gulf of language and culture was always there, too wide for me to cross. I came out of the car at the Hamamatsu station, where I had parked my bike. I thanked them and told them goodnight. I unlocked my bike and headed into the city, hoping to find something exciting to do on a slightly chilly Saturday night.
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