TOKYO: Halloween may not be months away, but haunted house season is already in full swing in Japan, where the search for bone-chilling terror is a long-established summer tradition.
Kimono-clad ghosts with bloodshot eyes writhe in agony and stumble towards patrons at a haunted Tokyo establishment, wandering around and moaning like zombies.
Summer is closely associated with the dead in Japan, as the souls of ancestors are believed to return to their household altars during the mid-August festival of “obon”.
A visit to a haunted house is therefore seen as a refreshing respite from the season’s often suffocating heat and humidity – both thanks to modern air conditioning and a less tangible chill down the spine.
Misato Naruse, 18, who stepped off the dimly lit ride at the Namjatown indoor theme park, told AFP she had come there with her boyfriend Himari Shimada to “cool off”.
“I was breaking out in a cold sweat without realizing it. I guess I was scared,” said a university student next to an exhausted and speechless Shimada, also 18.
Japan’s summers are getting harder to bear, partly due to climate change.
“It was very hot last year, but this year it’s even hotter. And I wonder how hot it will be in a few years,” Naruse said.
Japan experienced its hottest July since records began 126 years ago, with temperatures 2.16 degrees Celsius above average.
In central Tokyo alone, 123 people died of heatstroke last month as a record number of ambulances were mobilized in the capital due to extreme heat caused by climate change, local authorities said.
Many haunted houses in Japan record their refreshing reputations by using slogans such as “a shiver that blows away the summer heat.”
According to Hirofumi Gomi, who has worked behind the scenes as a producer of haunted house experiences for three decades, the idea can perhaps be traced back to the Japanese traditional theater form of kabuki.
Lore holds that a few centuries ago, kabuki theaters tried to attract audiences in the summer because many hated being crammed inside without air conditioning.
But that changed when the performers exchanged the sentimental human drama for a full-fledged horror – with the help of various tricks and gadgets, similar to a modern haunted house.
“For patrons wilting in the heat, dazzling visuals and engaging ghost stories were more tolerable than the subtlety of human interest stories,” Gomi said.
“So maybe haunted houses don’t cool you down so much as make you forget the heat for a while.
At the Namjatown Haunted House, which is meant to evoke an abandoned town infested with ghosts, the organizers are sure of the scary tricks they have up their sleeves.
“In Japanese we say ‘kimo ga hieru’ or literally ‘chilling the liver’ – a reference to the feeling of goosebumps,” Hiroki Matsubara of operator Bandai Namco Amusement told AFP. “We believe that visitors can experience a sense of fear, surprise or ‘chilled to the liver’, which will hopefully help them enjoy a cool feeling in the summer.”
