Posted by Jess
6 November 2010
A little hiatus from blogging this past week, but we're back! Last weekend was Halloween of course and I wanted to post pictures and tell you about our weekend festivities.
Japan has only started celebrating Halloween in recent years. Prior to that, O-bon was the Japanese version, which is the Buddhist holiday of praying for your dead ancestors and happens in August. O-bon is still a big thing here too of course, but now they have added some Western Halloween traditions to October 31st as well.
There were various events going on in Tokyo over the weekend before and the weekend of Halloween, mostly in areas where foreigners commonly live. The weekend before Halloween there were parades that the kids could march in near our house but unfortunately we didn't know about it at the time! On Friday night, Oct 29th, I came out of the train station near our house to find loads of Japanese kids running from shop to shop on Aoyama-dori (a large cross street by our place) in costume. We hadn't heard that trick or treating was going on but clearly something was organized!
As I came into our building I asked the front desk and they said that trick-or-treating would go until 8:30. So we ate a quick dinner, threw on the kids costumes and headed out around 6:30. Unfortunately, everyone was out of candy! We were able to go to two stores that actually handed out candy and then came back to our apartment building. Our building always has a candy dish out so we asked the nice front desk woman to give our kids a piece as part of the trick or treating experience. She obliged and with three pieces in their bags, we called it a night. I wish we would have known ahead of time that this was happening - we would have been out there at 5pm! I guess that's why we should learn some Japanese as apparently the shops had signs in their windows the week before.
We had some very small pumpkins from the supermarket and since we were rained in on Saturday due to some typhoon effect showers, we decided to carve them and roast pumpkin seeds.
On Sunday we headed to a local shopping mall area where there was a party being hosted by Tokyo Family magazine. The party had face-painting, balloon animals (Ella asked for a blue sword of course), food vendors and carnival games. There was also a DJ, a Kids Disco entertainment group, a hula-hooping group with light up hoops, a fashion show, a costume contest and girl-band performance. Lots to do there and the girls had a good time. We got there a little late for the dancing (but the songs we did hear probably weren't all that appropriate anyway, like Ke$ha and Lady Gaga), but we had a good time watching the performers and playing the games. The girls spent the afternoon as Aurora and Tinkerbell and were a big hit with the Japanese. The girls were asked to be in many pictures with random Japanese children. Whatever trips your trigger I guess!
Around dinner time we left the party and headed to get something to eat. We came home exhausted from the day's fun. Definitely many lessons learned if we were ever to do Halloween in Japan again. But at least the girls were able to dress up and participate in similar activities that they would have in the States, that's all that matters!
Here are some pictures from the weekend's events.
At the party:
Hope you all had a great Halloween!
Kanpai!
Jess
6 November 2010
A little hiatus from blogging this past week, but we're back! Last weekend was Halloween of course and I wanted to post pictures and tell you about our weekend festivities.
Japan has only started celebrating Halloween in recent years. Prior to that, O-bon was the Japanese version, which is the Buddhist holiday of praying for your dead ancestors and happens in August. O-bon is still a big thing here too of course, but now they have added some Western Halloween traditions to October 31st as well.
There were various events going on in Tokyo over the weekend before and the weekend of Halloween, mostly in areas where foreigners commonly live. The weekend before Halloween there were parades that the kids could march in near our house but unfortunately we didn't know about it at the time! On Friday night, Oct 29th, I came out of the train station near our house to find loads of Japanese kids running from shop to shop on Aoyama-dori (a large cross street by our place) in costume. We hadn't heard that trick or treating was going on but clearly something was organized!
As I came into our building I asked the front desk and they said that trick-or-treating would go until 8:30. So we ate a quick dinner, threw on the kids costumes and headed out around 6:30. Unfortunately, everyone was out of candy! We were able to go to two stores that actually handed out candy and then came back to our apartment building. Our building always has a candy dish out so we asked the nice front desk woman to give our kids a piece as part of the trick or treating experience. She obliged and with three pieces in their bags, we called it a night. I wish we would have known ahead of time that this was happening - we would have been out there at 5pm! I guess that's why we should learn some Japanese as apparently the shops had signs in their windows the week before.
We had some very small pumpkins from the supermarket and since we were rained in on Saturday due to some typhoon effect showers, we decided to carve them and roast pumpkin seeds.
On Sunday we headed to a local shopping mall area where there was a party being hosted by Tokyo Family magazine. The party had face-painting, balloon animals (Ella asked for a blue sword of course), food vendors and carnival games. There was also a DJ, a Kids Disco entertainment group, a hula-hooping group with light up hoops, a fashion show, a costume contest and girl-band performance. Lots to do there and the girls had a good time. We got there a little late for the dancing (but the songs we did hear probably weren't all that appropriate anyway, like Ke$ha and Lady Gaga), but we had a good time watching the performers and playing the games. The girls spent the afternoon as Aurora and Tinkerbell and were a big hit with the Japanese. The girls were asked to be in many pictures with random Japanese children. Whatever trips your trigger I guess!
Around dinner time we left the party and headed to get something to eat. We came home exhausted from the day's fun. Definitely many lessons learned if we were ever to do Halloween in Japan again. But at least the girls were able to dress up and participate in similar activities that they would have in the States, that's all that matters!
Here are some pictures from the weekend's events.
At the party:
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The Weekend: |
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| Pumpkin Carving |
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| Getting ready for the party |
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| Heading out trick or treating |
Hope you all had a great Halloween!
Kanpai!
Jess
6:18 AM |
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