Japan | Summer Haunted House Tradition in Full Swing

(Tokyo) Halloween is still a few months away, but haunted houses are in high demand in Japan, where chills are a summer tradition.

In Japan, summer is generally associated with the dead. It is believed that the souls of ancestors return to their home altars during the Obon festival, which takes place in mid-August.

Haunted houses are also considered seasonal because of their air conditioning and the chills they cause in a country where stifling heat and humidity prevail in the summer.

In Tokyo’s Namjatown theme park, kimono-clad, red-eyed ghosts convulse in pain and stagger toward visitors, wandering and moaning like zombies.

Standing out from the dim light of the place, Misato Naruse, 18, told AFP that she had come with her friend Himari Shimada to “cool off”.

“I broke out in a cold sweat without even realizing it. That’s how scared I was,” says the student, next to her friend of the same age, exhausted and speechless.

Japanese summers are becoming increasingly difficult to bear, partly due to climate change.

“This year it’s even hotter” than last year, Misato Naruse said. “And I wonder how hot it will be in a few years.”

Japan experienced its hottest July in 2024 since records began 126 years ago, with temperatures 2.16 degrees Celsius (37.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.

In central Tokyo alone, 123 people died of heatstroke in July, when extreme heat waves amplified by climate change struck, forcing a record number of ambulances to be deployed in the Japanese capital, local authorities reported.

“Cool the liver”

Many Japanese haunted mansions play on their reputation as a refreshing place by using slogans like “a thrill that takes away the summer heat.”

The success of these establishments can be explained by the tradition of kabuki theater, according to Hirofumi Gomi, who has worked for three decades as a producer of such frightening experiences.

According to tradition, kabuki theaters struggled several centuries ago to attract spectators in the summer, as they were reluctant to crowd indoors because of the heat.

But the situation changed when the actors left aside human feelings to depict scenes of horror, combining surprises and special effects like contemporary haunted houses.

“For patrons baking in the heat, the dazzling visual effects and captivating stories about spirits were more bearable than the intricacies of life stories,” Gomi says.

“So maybe it’s not so much that haunted houses cool down” visitors, he says, but rather “that they make them forget the heat momentarily.”

At the Namjatown Haunted Mansion, which is thought to be an abandoned place infested with spirits, organizers say they are confident about the scary tricks they have concocted.

“In Japanese, we say ‘kimo ga hieru’, or literally ‘to cool the liver’, which is a reference to having goosebumps,” Hiroki Matsubara of the managing company Bandai Namco Amusement told AFP.

“We believe that visitors can experience being frightened, surprised or even ‘chilled to the liver’, which we hope can help them enjoy a feeling of freshness in summer.”