Shibuya Halloween: 9 people arrested for theft, assault, and groping【Pics & Videos】

06:06 cherishe 0 Comments

Insane crowds caused a standstill on Shibuya streets as police kept partygoers in line. 

Thousands of revellers took to the streets of Shibuya last night for Tokyo’s most notorious unofficial Halloween street party. Following last year’s ruckus, where people were arrested for overturning a truck, Shibuya officials were keen to prevent those scenes from recurring this year, with hundreds of police and private security teams out in force to keep the crowds under control.

They even brought out the heavy equipment, using trucks rarely seen in everyday situations.

This year at the Halloween street party there were girls in skimpy outfits…

▼ A guy dressed as a Tenga cup…

▼ Anime girls…

▼ Chiitan…

▼ And Kim Jong Un, with his finger on the red button.

However, what really surprised everyone was the crowds. There appeared to be many more people at the event this year, which may be due in part to the Rugby World Cup bringing more international tourists to Japan at the moment.

Shibuya is pretty popular at any time of the year, but last night the crowds were on a whole other level.

It was shoulder-to-shoulder outside the station, with people saying it took over ten minutes to walk across the Shibuya Scramble Crossing from the station gates.

▼ A view of the scramble crossing, with the station complex behind it.

All the streets leading to the scramble crossing were packed.

Despite the widespread ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol in the area, there were still reports of nuisance on the night. However, with over 6,000 people gathering in the area for Halloween, this year only nine arrests were made.

According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, the nine arrested were all young males, including an 18-year-old man, who put his hand up a woman’s skirt and touched her body, a 22-year-old college student who got into a heated quarrel with a riot officer, a man who slapped a store clerk across the face, and a man who stole a wallet from a trouser pocket.

As you can see in this video below, though, it takes a lot for police to arrest people. Even these youths who rode through the city on the bonnet of a car and then tussled with police after they were stopped weren’t immediately handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police vehicle.

Thankfully, however, the only hint of truck-toppling on the night came when this guy was spotted cosplaying as the toppled truck from last year.

Whether it was due to the police presence, the strict ban on alcohol sales and consumption in the area, or possibly a combination of the two, everybody today breathed a sigh of relief that there weren’t any major scenes of chaos on the streets of Shibuya this Halloween.

Let’s hope this new trend continues, and with bubble tea cosplay bringing couples together and cosplay cleanup crews restoring our faith in humanity, Shibuya Halloween may just be turning a corner with an improved image for future years.

Source: NHK via Otakomu  
Featured image: Twtter/@tomostarshi
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