Essay

Halloween costumes

By Jackie Hoffart

As a kid, I loved Halloween because it was a chance to be anything I wanted to be, just for a day.

And my sister and I really did get to dress up as pretty much anything we wanted because my grandmother, a seamstress, always made our costumes by hand and on request.

In elementary school, I remember being a crazy clown, a precocious leopard and, best of all, a chocolate chip cookie. That year, some people thought I was dressed as a potato, but I pretended to ignore them.

In junior high school, I went through a slightly experimental costume phase. (By this stage Grandma had shifted her attentions to my younger cousins.) I won best costume in my class one year for being Charlie Chaplin, which I quite enjoyed despite the teasing I got for my "Hitler moustache."

Another year, I decided to wrap myself in tin foil and go as "The Leftovers." That's the year I learned the importance of research and development in proper costume execution. It turns out that tin foil doesn't "breathe" and isn't very flattering either. They said I looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, which was a shockingly uninspired take on my clearly high-class concept.

Defeated, I took a break for the next few Halloweens, preferring instead to preserve my creative genius for future audiences. That sense of failure only grew into resentment through high school, where I pretended I was "too grown up" to really care about it anymore.

In university, I played along with everyone else who saw the 31st of October as just another day to party. It wasn't until I came to Japan, ironically, that I really got my Halloween mojo back.

One day, for no particular reason, I drew a picture of a bento man — a man whose body was a bento box. He was bowing at 90 degrees. I called it "obentover." As in, o-bent-over.

For Halloween that year, I created a real-life version of "obentover." I built a giant bento backpack using materials from the hyaku-en shop.

It had little tempura ebi, renkon, sausages, tsukemono, a tamago sushi and onigiri too. It was so much fun to make and a massive hit at the Halloween party held at my favorite cafe in Onomichi. I won the costume contest, too.

Better than that, though, I felt like I had redeemed myself for all those years of giving up on Halloween. I mean, it doesn't get much more conceptual than dressing up as the real-life version of a drawing based on a word play — but I let go of caring what other people thought. And I think that's why it worked. I think that is perhaps how it always works.

Shukan ST: November 5, 2010

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