The big Izuhara Town Halloween Event finally took place this past Saturday, as organised by local super nice musician lady who is like a reserved, Japanese version of a 60s John Lennon contemporary and in small part by three of us southern ALTs.  It went pretty well with six of us foreigners plus a bunch of native volunteers.

The eternal struggle...

Facing the back door, the slideshow screen.

Creepy big spider the organiser made.

Preinvasion / Cauldron that the organiser made.

We had a trick-or-treat trail running from the local burger joint through the town, costumed foreigner teachers or Japanese volunteers giving out candy, leading to the final location.  Rose, Gavin, and I added our decorations to what was already set up, on the evening before and just after the day at Nishi Elementary’s Halloween party.  I tested out my slideshow still in its early stages, as of course I waited to the night before to finish it up.

This simple but cool, little Halloween explanation and photos slideshow played on the big screen at the venue.  Lucky for me I was saved by one of my JTEs who I had previously asked to help run the event.  Not an hour before the event was set to begin, at the pre-event pow-wow, dressed as a Chinese bourgeoise woman she quickly fixed my rough Japanese translations explaining things like the holiday’s origins, various highlighted costumes, games, and pumpkin carving.

I’m glad we didn’t plan out a bunch of mini games for the final venue, because there was barely breathing room in the place when it was time for the foreigners to introduce themselves and their costumes.  Instead, after that we taught the kids the Hokey Pokey and danced it, then as time was running late barely fit in time to sort through the chaos and give out our three best costume prizes.

They're ravenous... Run for your lives!

Proof of the survivors.

As a reward, we got a free lunch at the venue’s little café that was set to be quite busy for the day.  Next up a wedding reception was scheduled to take place there or be catered from.

This venue is a recently built, pretty building made mostly of wood meant as a community centre.  Some old guys play the ancient Chinese game of Go there sometimes, as we witnessed when we first went to check out the place.  They have a pretty decent audio/visual setup.

Still more Halloween to come…