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My first encounter with Halloween came suddenly.
A group of monsters who ran by right in front of my eyes as I was walking Shibuya Center Street on my way home at dawn.
I hastily pointed my camera towards them but it was too late.
The next year, I headed to the Center Street once again.
The place was enveloped in a strange atmosphere, unlike the usual Shibuya.
Where did they all come from?
The streets of Shibuya were flooded with youngsters in colorful costumes or bizarre makeup.
I would only have a few seconds to photograph them, so I chose the fully automatic Canon mark II for my camera, and the Tamron 45mm for my lens to make much of clarity, deciding to do all shooting only with this camera so that I could move around lightly.
I took portraits from the front, looking for attractive subjects and asking for permission to shoot.
It was at Center Street after the last train went that my gear really got going.
A chaotic mixture of truth and falsehood, in which the monsters returned to real life forgetting their guises out of fatigue from the daytime, and the onlookers had no intentions to go home.
As non-everydayness brought about such a photogenic world beyond my expectations, I stepped inside and frantically snapped away. Gradually finding my way of shooting, I continued photographing Halloween nights from evening until early morning for five years from 2015 to 2019.
Be that as it may, the imagination and expressiveness of the youth in Japan is truly astonishing. Their overwhelming youthful energy left me so stunned that all I could do was laugh.
To the dark and pop monsters who had jumped out of the darkness of the youngsters' mind, the grownups who live at ease soaked in obsolete common sense reacted with confusion and shock, and searched for pretenses to criticize them.
A strange phenomenon in the history of the island nation of Japan that has spread since a new culture came in.
Onlookers full of curiosity kept increasing year by year, eventually reaching a peak and going over the limit only to disappear completely with the coronavirus pandemic.
Please enjoy my five years’ worth of documents of the young stars who “Tokyonized” Halloween.