Painting the Town Red

Happy holidays, folks! In comparison to last year, I've had a very busy Christmas Eve 2012. Christmas in Japan is kind of a couple's thing, as opposed to the family thing it is in America, and I have neither a significant other or family in this side of the world. So, lonely as I am, I wasn't expecting to be doing much on Christmas. But luckily enough, Aala had plans, and I soon found out that Lo and Neal were both in on it. It didn't take much convincing on his part to drag me out for an all-nighter in between two work days (alarmingly enough.)

Neal, Lo, and Aala

 So I join him in Shibuya's Hachiko Square and find him dressed as a panda/Santa Claus (which doesn't surprise me at all, for some reason.) Before him are gathered ten valiant soldiers, ready for a mission: that of placing a Santa Claus hat atop as many statues as possible in Tokyo. Joining these brave missionaries, I become the twelfth member, and at last the group is split in two halves of six: East Tokyo and West Tokyo. Our team, East Tokyo, is formed of Aala as a Panda, Lo, wearing a frankly terrifying black mask, Neal, who also joined me for the Nichitsu raid, the dastardly crazy haired Kenichi Kato, and a very random, quiet woman approaching her middle age, named Keiko.

 As the clock struck midnight, we set off for our first mark, Ueno Park. Aala and Kenichi, who had organized and taken part in the same event last year, respectively, remember the placement of the statues, and we made short work of the famous Takamori Saigo statue. "There's another one," said Aala, "a little deeper into the park. But this one's impossible. It's twice as tall." Pwah!
 Damn right I put a hat on the statue of Prince Akihito. And the thirty foot tall mural in the museum courtyard while I was at it. That Christmas eve, I became a climbing machine.

The mural, Saigo, and Akihito

As the night drew on, we progressed down Akihabara and towards the Imperial Palace, transforming a few statues along the way. I actually managed to climb (and hat) every statue I saw, with one exception. There was the one near Shin-Nihombashi where I accidentally stepped on top of a sleeping homeless guy inside a box I failed to notice. He woke up screaming and cursing at me, and I frankly felt terrible about the ordeal. We ran off before he called the cops.

Despite it being a good night for us, though, we later found out that West Tokyo Team pretty much covered only a miniscule area and didn't even want to meet us halfway at the break of dawn. It figured, though, since we had thrown a bunch of young women into that group who had joined in just so that they could be doing something during the eve of Christmas. Unfortunate!

And that, my friends, is how those Santa hats ended up there. Merry Christmas, and whatever!