I can't believe that it's already November. I've been in Japan more than three months now. Sometimes I miss America, but I'm still happy to be here in Japan, typing this in my own tiny apartment.

One thing that I missed recently was the way that America celebrates Halloween. Halloween is sort of celebrated in Japan, but not to the same extent that it's celebrated in America. The Japanese enjoy commercializing Halloween, things like selling Halloween decorations and having special Halloween ice cream flavors at Baskin Robbins, but don't really participate in many of the typical Halloween traditions. Some places do have Halloween costume parties on Halloween weekend, but trick-or-treating isn't common.

I didn't have a Halloween costume this year, so I couldn't go to the Halloween parties in Tokyo. I still wanted to find some way to celebrate Halloween though because it's one of my favorite holidays. I ended up making plans to get together and celebrate with my friend Eri. Eri is Japanese, but she grew up in America, so she was also missing the way we celebrate Halloween there. We decided to meet up in Ikebukuro (in Tokyo) to have some fun.

We started by taking some Halloween purikura. Purikura is a type of photobooth in which you can take cute photos and digitally decorate them. Once you're done decorating the photos they are printed as stickers and you can also get copies digitally sent to your cellphone. Taking purikura with friends is a very popular activity among girls and young women in Japan. I've done it several times since arriving in Japan. Eri knew a place where we could do purikura that also had costumes we could borrow for free while taking the pictures. Eri had a black cat costume and I was Little Red Riding Hood. You can see a couple of the photos we took here, along with photos from the rest of the night.

After purikura, Eri and I had dinner at Lockup, the prison themed izakaya that I had been to before. We figured that the haunted prison theme fit right in with Halloween. It was fun taking Eri to Lockup because she'd never been there before. We had a couple of the fun drinks (the kind that come served in beakers and test tubes) and shared some yummy food. It was a good time!