Halloween in Heiwa

Saturday night there was a raging Halloween party in my house.

To summarize, there were loads of Japanese people in body suits, we floated two kegs of Tokyo Ale, had live performances from an improvisational guitar player and two didgeridoo players, set off 10kg of dry ice in my bathroom, nearly burned down my bedroom, and exploded a trash bomb in my kitchen.

Happy Halloween!

Crazy Will came over early Saturday afternoon to lend a hand getting everything set up. He brought over a bunch of snacks and sake, and then together we went shopping for colored light bulbs and dry ice.


Crazy Will

In order to buy the dry ice, I asked two ladies at a nearby convenience store where to go. They looked in the yellow pages and found a place just down the road. It turned out not to be a shop of any kind, but a scary Japanese lady's house with deer heads on the wall. Very bizarre.

With a hunk a hunk a burning dry ice in hand, we returned to my house and started changing light bulbs to create a dark and eerie atmosphere.

Crazy Will carved a fake foam pumpkin for me (it's hard to find real pumpkins in Japan) and we started lighting candles all over the house.


Atmosphere lighting

The party got off to a very slow start. Until about 8pm, Crazy Will and I were the only two people sitting in a darkly lit house in full costume looking confused at each other with beer in our hands.


Slow Start

One by one people started to file in, and then about 9pm the hordes came. My house was soon swarming with somewhere between 20 and 30 costumed people. Some I'd never met. Including a couple Americans, one dressed as an elaborate giant sperm and another dressed as professional wrestler with a moose hat.


Moose

By 10pm, a crew of body suits rocked up carrying countless plastic bags full of food and a toy bazooka. They fired three warning shots of confetti into my kitchen, dropped all the bags on the floor, and then completely took over the room.


Body suits in the kitchen

They started cooking large pots of nabe, a kind of stew with various vegetables and noodles, while my friend Jason began experimenting with the dry ice in the sink.


Meat & Smoke

Eventually the dry ice blocks became a hazard in the kitchen when they started expanding inside the freezer, so they were taken and dumped into the toilet.

For the rest of the night, every time someone flushed the toilet, pillows of smoke came billowing out and saturated all the toilet paper rolls with water vapor.

Spooky & stinky.

When the food was finally ready, people took they're steaming hot vegetable/noodle soup into the living room and settled into an ambient guitar set by a local musician named Kei.


Kei

Kei's short ambient set lent well to the chaotic costumed craziness of people going in and out of the room and was followed by two short sets of didgeridoo in the kitchen.

The only other drama for the night came when a candle in my bedroom burned down too low and put a fiery hole in my plastic dresser, but it was quickly extinguished before any real damage could be done.

Sometime after midnight the crowds started to trickle out and go home leaving a handful of people to relax and watch DVD videos late into the night.


The last stragglers

All in all I think everyone had a great time amongst all the red lights and will remember their Halloween in Hiewa experience for years to come.

It was a fun night for children of all ages.