Halloween in Japan

Happy Halloween! It's been very interesting celebrating an American holiday in another country. The Japanese do not celebrate Halloween, although it is slowly catching on in one form or another. Since the kids' school, the American School in Japan, knows that the school activities are the only exposure to Halloween some kids will get, they go way out!

We had the usual school parade and classroom parties. But then there was a school carnival--The library was trasformed into an incredibly scary spook alley. And there were lots of Halloween games,some with an Asian twist, like how many candy corns can you get in the cup using chopsticks in 30 seconds? Emily got 18, she is actually very good with chopsticks, but Trent is still learning. He got paired up against a little Japanese boy. The poor kid didn't stand a chance. :)

There are a few pumpkins here and there around Tokyo, but no pumpkin patches. Even though we did not carve jack-o-lanterns this year, the kids still had a great Halloween. Besides all the school activities, they also had a stake primary party and a group of foreigners in our neighborhood organized a little trick or treating. Two weeks ago, fliers went out around the neighborhood and we had to rsvp if we wanted to partipate in the trick or treating. We later received a map of the neighborhood with little pumpkins on the houses/apartments we could trick or treat at. Most of the Japanese neighbors did not participate, so we had to follow our map very carefully. Anyone in an apartment building, like us, would set up a table and chairs in their entry way to share with all the families in their building who were participating, so it was just one stop per building for the trick or treaters. Here are some of our pictures.

Trent is the ghost with three eyes on the bottom right.



Jake did not sleep through the school activities in his stroller as I had planned. I had to resort to other tactics to get him to stay in his stroller for three hours, for the parade, carnival and class parties. It was a long day for him.