Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyororin
I don`t know anything about the Osaka one, but there were a LOT of issues with the Tokyo one. Was it started as and intended to block people from riding on the trains? No - but that is what it ended up doing. Eikaiwa teachers who wanted to get dead drunk and party apparently ruined the whole thing.
I wish I could find the Japanese thread that I read elsewhere about it back right after it happened, but there were quite a few stories of people being flat out accosted and shoved out of the cars. That big drunk guys would let the cute girls on, and shove the businessmen away from the doors, etc. There were also a lot of talk about groping getting way out of hand, and just general misbehaving and tearing up of the trains by people who thought it was hilarious that they had "gaijin power" and that the train operators couldn`t really do much to them.
The following year there were protests. This did not surprise me.
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I think there were issues with the Osaka one, but it was more about overcrowding than anything malicious. And they were riding the loop for hours for only a couple hundred yen. Again, I am not endorsing it, I just felt (from what I had seen and read) that it was intended to be in good fun and to create some sort of Halloween tradition for foreigners living in Osaka.
It is a holiday I missed when I lived in Japan, so I can respect that level of having fun and following the "friskiness" of the holiday.
If things got over-the-top in Tokyo (or Osaka) it does not surprise me. What you describe, Nyororin, is deplorable, and people that would shove people off train cars should be arrested and detained.