The holiday tradition of SantaCon started a couple of decades ago in San Francisco and quickly spread internationally. Participants don Santa cosplay and basically parade through the streets in a loosely-organised massive pub crawl. Or, as the Tokyo SantaCon organisers put it: ‘Santacon is a non-denominational, non-commercial, non-political and nonsensical Santa Claus convention that occurs once a year for absolutely no reason.’
The New York SantaCon is the largest in the world, but Tokyo has been putting on a solid one of its own for the past seven years. With the plethora of ¥100 shops in Tokyo, the organisers ask that you not just don a little Santa hat but a full costume to participate. There’s no fee to join – just pay for what you eat and drink in each pub stop. The santa route hasn’t been announced yet and in fact will only be made public the day before the event (this Friday Dec 14).