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Spooked by Halloween mayhem, Tokyo’s famous Shibuya district tells revelers, “please do not come”
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Tokyo – While boosting tourism is usually part of the job description for a local politician, the mayor of one Tokyo district is taking a different tack: He’s pulling up the welcome mat.
“This year we’re making it clear to the world that Shibuya is not a venue for Halloween events,” Ken Hasebe, the mayor of one of the city’s most well-known and bustling wards, told reporters this month at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. “Please do not come to the Shibuya station area for Halloween.”
Shibuya ward is going to unprecedented lengths to dissuade visitors in the days leading up to October 31. In addition to the “Don’t visit” campaign, public drinking in the area will be banned starting days before Halloween, and the district’s 35 local stores will be urged to stop selling alcohol. Some 300 private security guards have been hired and 150 city officials will help patrol and enforce the no-smoking and no-drinking ordinance, in addition to scores of police.
CBS News/Randy Schmidt
A former advertising executive who later started a street-cleaning nonprofit before winning office as an independent, Hasebe described how Shibuya’s once-spontaneous, al fresco celebration of elaborate homemade costumes had degenerated into something closer to a giant outdoor frat party.
“The situation is much more serious than just over-tourism,” he said. “We’re talking about massive dumping of trash, arrests for molestation, voyeurism, property destruction.”
Most worrying to civic leaders is the prospect of crowds overwhelming Shibuya’s charming but cramped warren of bars, noodle joints and apparel shops. Absent extreme security, they warn, Shibuya is at risk for a crowd-crush disaster like the surge that killed more than 150 Halloween revelers in the South Korean capital last year.
CBS News/Randy Schmidt
While Shibuya’s pre-pandemic Halloween crowds peaked at about 40,000 in 2019, authorities have been bracing for as many as 60,000 people to show up this month, Hasebe said. As much as 70% of the crowd, he estimated, would be non-Japanese. Katsuhiro Nishinara, a Tokyo University expert on crowd surges who has been advising Shibuya ward, called preparations “perfect,” and said authorities would focus on routing pedestrians through one-way corridors on shopping streets and subway stair exits.
“There is a risk around the stations, especially subways,” he told CBS News. “If someone pushes, or they have to push in front, then a stampede easily occurs.”
Japan is a country with a population one-third the size of the United States’ — but all those people are squeezed onto a landmass roughly the size of California, so the Japanese are no strangers to deadly crowd surges. In 2001, a stampede on a pedestrian bridge in the city of Akashi left 11 people dead and hundreds injured. The tragedy spurred a rethinking of how to police organized events — but not spontaneous gatherings, like Halloween, World Cup celebrations or New Year’s Eve.
CBS News/Randy Schmidt
Shibuya’s mayor has his job cut out for him: The neon signs, giant ad screens and skyscraper-studded cityscape surrounding Shibuya train station make the district one of Japan’s biggest and most-photographed tourist draws.
Visitors patiently line up just to snap pictures in front of the famous but otherwise unremarkable Hachiko dog statue and to stroll through what may be the world’s busiest pedestrian street crossing, the Shibuya Scramble. The iconic junction’s intersecting crosswalks fill up with as many as 3,000 pairs of feet every time the light changes, and it’s even featured as a backdrop in Hollywood movies, including “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” and the horror film “Resident Evil: Afterlife.”
Carving pumpkins, munching candy corn and toilet-papering houses never really took off in Japan. In fact, to many observers, Japan’s version of Halloween bears a closer resemblance to the original free-spirited, come-one-come-all, ancient community harvest festival it’s based on — albeit updated by urban youth.
Attempting to explain Halloween’s explosive popularity among young Japanese, a store manager told business magazine Toyo Keizai in 2015: “In school, Japanese are thoroughly hammered into conformity. So, the pent-up desire for self-expression and transforming oneself is far more powerful here than in the West.”
CBS News/Randy Schmidt
Shibuya initially welcomed the revelers, even setting up temporary restrooms and changing rooms, but the district reversed course in recent years as the crowding escalated to potentially dangerous levels. Foreign visitors — liberated by Japan’s easy access to alcoholic beverages and the absence of open-container laws — had started getting rowdy.
Crowd-surge experts, including Hidemasa Yoshimura, a professor of architectural planning design at the Osaka Institute of Technology, are skeptical about the don’t-visit-Shibuya campaign.
“Saying ‘Don’t come here’ won’t have much impact,” he told CBS News. He advocates posting electronic signs that let pedestrians know in real time what’s ahead, similar to highway signs warning motorists about traffic jams further up the road.
Those who come to Shibuya at the end of this month will see a heavy police presence, meant to keep crowds flowing and orderly, aided by officers known as “DJ Police” stationed atop special mobile platforms, issuing a stream of gentle admonitions, occasionally in English: “Beware of pickpockets… please keep moving.”
For those who want to observe the festivities from a distance, live cameras stream the action at the Scramble crossing and the adjacent shopping and bar district, Center Gai.
CBS News
“Siri, what the heck?” David Sedaris on talking to one’s devices
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I was in a restaurant when the fellow at the next table picked up his phone. “Siri!” he commanded. “Call Paul Bower!”
Oh, right, I thought. That can be done. By other people, I mean.
The first thing I do when getting a new phone or iPad is to disconnect Siri, in part because she’s so maddeningly obsequious, but mainly because she feels like cheating, a short cut to what’s already a pretty extraordinary short cut. If I want to know how many vodka tonics it might take to kill someone my older sister’s height and weight, the least I can do is type the questions into Google.
The way you talk to a person says a lot about you, of course, but so, too, does the way you talk to a device. I think of all the people I know who are using a GPS, rely on it for everything, then turn on it when they near their destination: “Will you shut up already!”
Then there are those like my friend Patsy. The two of us were driving from Nashville to Knoxville not long ago, and decided to stop midway so I could see where she went to college. “Heeey, Siri!” she said in a tone that suggested fun, “Can you get me directions to Sewanee, Tennessee?” In what seemed to me like no time at all, Siri answered, “I can’t find that.”
“The University of the South?” Patsy said. “In Sewanee, Tennessee?”
“I can’t find that.”
Patsy lowered her voice and turned to me: “She does this all the time now.”
I whispered back: “It seems to me like she’s not even trying.”
“Siri?” Patsy said. “Can you please get me directions to…” She named a town that was close to Sewanee, figuring we could make it from there to the college on our own. When Siri came back with the information, Patsy thanked her with what seemed like genuine gratitude. Mixed into it was a hint of pride, the sort you feel when you’re patient with a terribly old person, or someone who’s new on the job and hasn’t quite figured out the register.
If Siri was a person, you knew that Patsy would give her a big bonus at Christmas! And that Siri would use that money to fly home for the holidays and say, when asked about work by her parents, “My boss? She’s pretty cool. I mean, yeah, I really like her!”
For more info:
Story produced by Amy Wall. Editor: Emanuele Secci.
More from David Sedaris:
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New York City’s 92nd Street Y at 150
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At the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, you’ll find folks doing exactly what you’d expect at a community center – swimming, playing basketball, creating. But did you know Groucho Marx used the gym here, and Martha Graham taught dance here?
As CEO Seth Pinsky tells it, the organization’s remarkable history stemmed from a simple mission: “The 92nd Street Y was founded 150 years ago by a group of German Jewish civic leaders who saw a large number of Eastern European Jews coming to the United States, and they felt that that population needed a home, a safe place. And they said, ‘Let’s create a Jewish version of the YMCA.'”
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Everyone is welcome at 92NY. The historic Kaufmann Concert Hall is emblematic of this welcoming spirit. Truman Capote first read from “In Cold Blood” here, and Kurt Vonnegut debuted “Breakfast of Champions.” When Emma Lazarus wrote the words that gave voice to the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), she was teaching English to Jewish immigrants at the 92nd Street Y.
The stage has played host to Holocaust survivors (Elie Wiesel), musicians (Rod Stewart), Supreme Court Justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg), scientists (Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson), and politicians (Hillary and Bill Clinton), not to mention some of the biggest names in film, TV, theater and comedy.
In 1960, choreographer Alvin Ailey premiered “Revelations,” now one of his most well-known works, on this stage. Salie asked, “Why do you think that someone like Alvin Ailey was welcomed here at the 92nd Street Y when he wasn’t welcomed anywhere else?”
“Jews have a long history of being excluded,” said Pinsky. “And as a result of that, it’s a very important value for us not to exclude others for the same reason.”
Last fall, not long after the October 7th Hamas-led attacks on Israel, the 92NY drew heat for choosing to postpone an event with an author who was publicly critical of Israel. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Viet Thanh Nhuyen, maintains he was given notice of the cancellation last-minute, before some organizers moved the event to a local bookstore not affiliated with 92NY.
But as changing times present new challenges, Pinsky said they are still guided by one of their founding values, “tikkun olam.”
“Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase that means to repair the world,” said Pinsky. “And that’s a very important part of what we do. We’re trying to enrich people’s lives. We’re trying to build community.”
Programming at 92NY ranges from ceramics to parenting to art history, as well as a nursery school, performances, and the famed 92NY Talks series.
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Eighty-two-year-old Lincoln Field has been taking guitar lessons from Ed MacEachen here for decades; a few floors below, Joanne Krantz is busy bejeweling herself at the famed Jewelry Center; and Peter Stokes jumped into a pick-up basketball game here nearly 50 years ago, and he’s never stopped coming, for cardio and camaraderie. “It’s also a great meeting place to meet people,” he said. “Since I started playing basketball, I have lifelong friends now.”
A century-and-a-half ago, the founders of the 92nd Street Y may not have foreseen all that it would become, but Pinsky is sure their vision has remained true: “It’s a place for people to make their lives more meaningful,” he said. “It’s a place for people to connect to other people and not feel alone and isolated. And I don’t see that changing in the coming 150 years in any way.”
For more info:
- 92nd Street Y, New York City
- Photos courtesy of the 92NY, Jack Prelutsky, Lura Burnette and Michael Priest Photography
Story produced by Lucie Kirk. Editor: Karen Brenner.
CBS News
New York City’s 92nd Street Y at 150
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