(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Leave the world of the living behind.

Stories, fables, and ghostly tales await.

The Akio line attack, Tokyo, 31st of October.

The night parade of 100 demons.

In the old capital, there were nights you

did not go outside.

Not a suggestion, not superstition for the servants.

The court kept calendars for this.

There were men whose professional job it was

to work out which nights those were, and

noblemen cancelled journeys over it.

And you can read about it in their

diaries because they wrote it down the way

you'd write down a dentist appointment.

On those nights, the streets of Kyoto belonged

to something else.

So, before we begin, have you ever been

in a crowd, a proper crowd, a festival,

a night out, thousands of people, and had

a moment of understanding how little of it

you could actually see?

Have you ever watched something happen in public

and not been able to tell, for at

least a few seconds, whether it was real?

Whether it was a fight or a joke,

an accident or a stunt?

Well, here's the only one I actually really

want to know.

In those few seconds, before you knew, what

did you do?

Because I think most of us assume we'd

move, that we'd be the ones who move,

and the uncomfortable thing about tonight's story is

that it's the best documented case I've ever

found of a few hundred ordinary people being

handed exactly that moment on video from several

angles, and what nearly all of them did

for the first eight seconds or nine seconds

was nothing at all.

And they weren't cowards.

They weren't slow.

They were being perfectly reasonable.

That's the problem.

On that specific night, in that specific city,

the reasonable reading of what they were looking

at was, is this part of it?

Part of the event?

Tonight's crime happened on Halloween, the 31st of

October in Tokyo, on a train.

And the old story I'm going to pair

it with is about a procession of monsters

that walks through the streets of the capital

on one appointed night.

And the single rule that governs it, the

rule every version agrees on, is that a

human being who looks at the parade does

not survive it.

My name is the tale teller.

Your tale teller.

This is Hayakumono Gatari.

The Collar.

Hayaki Yagyo.

The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons.

The core of it is very simple.

On certain nights after dark, the yokai come

down into the city.

Out of the hills and the rivers and

the abandoned houses and the old broken things

at the back of the storehouse.

And they walk.

Together.

In a procession down the main streets.

Through the capital.

They're not hunting.

I want that clear from the start.

It isn't a raid of sorts.

It's a parade.

They're enjoying themselves.

There are drums in some tellings.

There is dancing.

It is, by every description we have, a

celebration.

Which happens to be taking place on the

road outside your house.

And this was not vague.

MediEvil Japan had a system.

The nights the parade would occur were calculable.

The court's diviners, the Onyoi, worked them out

from the calendar and published them.

And the nobility planned around them.

There are court diaries in which a nobleman

records that he did not go somewhere on

a particular evening because it was a Hayaki

Yagyo night.

Think about that as a lived experience.

Not monsters might be out there.

Rather, monsters are out there on the 14th.

And I've moved my meeting to the 15th.

And the rule is absolute.

If you see the parade, you die.

Not if you attack it.

Not if you interfere.

If you are out on that road and

you look at what's coming down it, you

die.

Or you are taken.

And in the versions where you're taken, nobody

is ever very clear about where to.

Which I've always found the more frightening of

the two.

So you stay in.

Shutters closed.

Lamps low.

Nobody near the street side of the house.

And at some point in the night it

comes past.

And you lie there and you listen to

it.

And you do not look.

And at dawn it's over.

That's the other harp of the rule and

it matters.

The parade ends at daybreak.

The demons go back to wherever they came

from.

And the road outside becomes an ordinary road

again.

And in the you walk down it on

the way to the market.

Same street.

Same stones.

It's yours again.

For a while.

Now the most famous Hyakki-Yogyo story.

Because who doesn't like a good horror parade

story?

There was a young nobleman of the Fujiwara.

The great family.

The ones who effectively ran the country.

And he was out at night in a

carriage.

He had made a mistake with the calendar

or hadn't checked.

Or was young and didn't take it seriously.

The road ahead of him filled up.

He saw them.

The whole procession.

Coming the other way.

Down the street he was on.

Everything you've ever seen in a Japanese scroll

painting was there.

The long-necked ones.

The one-eyed ones.

The things with too many arms.

The old umbrella hopping along on one leg.

And we'll get back to that one.

The drums.

The noise.

The entire celebrating mass of it.

Coming directly toward him with nowhere for him

to go.

And he did what you would do, which

is nothing at all.

He sat in the carriage.

He could not move.

And he could not run.

And he waited to die.

And the parade came up to him.

And stopped.

Dead in their tracks.

Pun intended.

And one of them said, The Sansho Darani

is here.

And they went around him.

And kept going.

And left him alive in the road.

The Sansho Darani is a Buddhist incantation.

A protective text.

A few lines of Sanskrit, transliterated, used for

exactly this sort of thing.

And the young man didn't know it.

He hadn't learned it.

He wasn't carrying a charm.

He hadn't brought protection.

Hadn't done a single thing to deserve walking

out of that street alive.

What had happened was this.

Years earlier when he was a child, his

wet nurse had taken the text and sewn

it into the collar of his robe.

And never told him.

She did it in the way people do

things for children.

Quietly.

For her own reasons.

Without expecting credit.

Probably without expecting it to ever matter.

And one night, decades later, in a street

full of monsters, the only reason that man

got to go home was an act of

care performed by a woman whose name we

don't have.

Who he had almost certainly stopped thinking about.

And who could not possibly have known what

she was saving him from.

Hold on to that.

The collar.

We're coming back to it.

One last piece before Tokyo.

The hundred demons of the parade aren't all

monsters out of the mountains.

A good number of them, and in the

illustrated scrolls, a startling number, used to be

objects.

Do you recall me saying the umbrella?

Yes.

Tsukumogami.

The belief is that a household object which

reached a hundred years old acquires a spirit.

A tea whisk, a lute, a sandal, a

cooking pot.

And in the oldest version of this, what

tips them over isn't age alone.

It's being thrown out.

They were used and used and used.

And then at some point they stopped being

useful and somebody put them out on the

road.

And the scroll shows them coming back up

that same road, animate and furious, to join

the parade.

So when you picture that night parade of

100 demons, don't picture an invasion from somewhere

else.

Picture the city's own discarded things coming back

to the main street in a procession.

On one appointed night, in enormous numbers, having

a wonderful time.

And every door shut and nobody looking.

The biggest night.

Halloween is not a Japanese festival.

It has no roots there.

It arrived commercially, late, through theme parks and

in retail, 90s, with no religious content and

no tradition attached, and it should by rights

have stayed a shop window theme.

Instead, it became, in about 20 years, one

of the largest street events in the country.

Shibuya is the centre of it, and if

you've seen footage of the scramble crossing, that

enormous intersection where the lights go red in

every direction and a few thousand people cross

at once from all sides.

Well, picture that at night, on the 31st

of October, with the crossing full and the

side streets full and the whole district effectively

closed by the sheer volume of bodies, hundreds

of thousands of people in costume.

An amazing sight to see.

And these are not children's costumes.

It's an adult event.

Japanese Halloween cosplay is genuinely world class, and

the thing people go to Shibuya for is

to look at everybody else.

So, one night a year, in the capital,

the streets fill up after dark with an

enormous celebrating procession of monsters who have come

in from everywhere, and the entire activity is

looking at them.

I'm not going to labour that.

You've got the idea, and we'll come back

to it.

Now, let's go back two months earlier.

One piece of context first, because without it,

you'll think this came out of nowhere.

On the 6th of August 2021, two and

a half months before Halloween, a man boarded

an Odakayu Line commuter train in Tokyo with

a knife and attacked passengers.

Ten people were hurt, one seriously hurt.

He told the police he had wanted to

target women who looked happy.

He was later sentenced to 19 years.

That same month, there was an acid attack

at Tokyo subway station.

I want to be careful here because Japan

has a violent crime rate most countries would

consider a rounding error, and the reason that

these attacks were national news is precisely that

they are not normal there.

This is not a story about a dangerous

city.

Tokyo is, by the numbers, one of the

safest, largest cities that have ever existed.

But that summer there was a run of

them, and they were on trains.

Which in Tokyo isn't a detail, it's the

whole thing.

That city runs on rail in a way

almost nowhere else does.

Everybody is on a train all of the

time, and at 8 o'clock at night

on the express between stations, you are in

a sealed metal box moving at speed with

a hundred strangers and no way out.

The Purple Suit.

Well, Sunday, the 31st of October 2021, the

Keio Line runs west of Shinjuku into the

suburbs.

At around 8 in the evening, the 10

-car train is running back toward Shinjuku, crowded.

It's a Sunday evening in Tokyo on the

biggest costume mart of the year, and on

board there is a 24-year-old man

in a purple suit, a bright green shirt,

and a tie.

Sound familiar?

Nobody looked twice.

Why would anybody look twice?

That is a good costume, on the correct

night, on a train heading toward the single

largest costumed event in the country.

If you'd be standing opposite him, you would

have the way you register a nurse's uniform

in a hospital, which is to say, not

at all.

Possibly, you'd have thought, that's a decent joker.

He was carrying a survival knife with a

30cm blade.

He also had a bottle of lighter fluid,

and both of those things, if you had

seen them, on that train, on that night,

with that suit on, would have read as

props.

He told police later that he had planned

this specifically, that he'd chosen a crowded express

on Halloween, on a service where people would

not be able to get off.

I'm not going to give you more detail

on his planning than that, and I'll say

why out loud.

There were copycat attacks in Japan after this

one.

It was raised in court, and the railway

companies had to redesign their security around it.

8 o'clock.

In the carriage, there is a man of

72.

We don't have his name.

Japanese reporting generally doesn't publish victims' names in

cases like this, and I think that's the

right instinct.

And it does mean the person at the

centre of tonight's episode stays anonymous the whole

way through.

He's 72, we know that.

He's on a train, that's what we get.

And the man in the purple suit stabs

him in the chest.

Now, here's where tonight's episode actually lives.

For somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds, and

we know this with unusual precision, because people

filmed it, because everybody films everything now, a

carriage full of adults watched a man in

a Joker costume do something violent to another

passenger, and a significant number of them thought

it was a performance.

That is, in the account.

Passengers said afterwards that the first reading was

that this was a Halloween stunt, something staged,

the kind of thing a person in a

very committed costume might do on the one

night of the year when a person in

a very committed costume is at an ordinary

sight.

Some of them were amused for a second.

That's in there too.

Somebody somewhere in the carriage half laughed.

And then the knife came up, and there

was blood on it.

And the man in the suit started moving

down the car and reading the change all

at once in everybody in about a second

and a half.

And this is where I have to tell

you what a Tokyo Express train is.

It's a 10-car tube.

The cars connect, so people ran.

That's what the footage shows.

A mass of people moving as one body

toward the far end of the carriage and

through into the next one and the next,

piling up at the doors between cars.

But the train is moving.

It is between stations at speed, on an

express service not scheduled to stop.

The doors were locked while it's in motion,

which is a safety feature and which on

that night meant several hundred people were locked

in a tube with a man with a

knife and nowhere to put themselves except further

along the tube.

Somebody pulled the emergency cord.

The fire.

And while that was happening, while the car

emptied toward one end, he moved the other

way into a different carriage and he poured

out the lighter fluid.

Across the floor, across the seats, the long

bench seats that ran down beside both sides

of the Japanese commuter car are upholstered in

a sealed metal tube with sealed windows and

no through drought.

And he lit it.

You need to be clear about what that

actually is because a fire on a train

sounds like a headline and the reality is

something else.

An enclosed railway carriage with a liquid accelerant

fire in it fills with smoke almost immediately,

not in minutes, in seconds.

The smoke comes off burning up holstery and

plastic fittings.

It's black and it's toxic.

It goes to the ceilings first and then

comes down.

And the useful air in that tube is

at knee height and dropping.

And the thing that kills people in fires

is almost never the fire.

So what you have at approximately eight o

'clock on Halloween night, 2021, is a moving

sealed metal container full of people in costume

with a fire at one end, filling with

smoke with locked doors traveling at speed between

stations.

The train stopped at Kokuryo Station.

And it stopped wrong.

It had come in under an emergency stop

and it did not line up with a

platform the way a train normally does.

And the result was that the carriage doors

could not open properly against the platform barriers.

So they went out the windows.

That's the image from this case.

And it's the one you'll have seen if

you've seen anything on this case.

Kokuryo Station, a stop train, people climbing out

through the carriage windows onto the platform, office

workers, people in costume, a woman being pulled

through a window frame by two strangers on

the platform side, smoke coming out behind them.

17 people were injured.

The photograph, another thing that made this a

story the whole world looked at.

Because while that carriage emptied through the windows,

while the smoke came down and people were

being hauled out of the burning train by

their arms, somebody looked back down the car

and filmed it.

He is sitting down on one of the

long bench seats in the purple suit and

the green shirt with his legs crossed at

one knee.

The car around him is on fire and

filling with smoke.

And he has a lit cigarette.

And he's just sitting there smoking it, watching.

That footage went around the planet inside about

two hours.

And I'd ask you to hold two things

about it at once.

The first is that it's one of the

most purely sinister pieces of video to come

out of any crime this decade.

And there's no honest way to describe it

other than that.

The second is that he was performing.

He knew the phones were on him.

The entire costume was a performance.

The pose is a performance.

The cigarette is absolutely a performance.

He wanted that image to exist.

It exists.

And I've described it to you.

Which is its own problem.

I don't have a clean answer to it,

really.

But it is what it is.

After, Kyoto Hattori was arrested at the scene.

He had not run.

He told police that he adored the Joker

from the Batman films and that his life

had no worth to him.

That he wanted to kill a large number

of people in order to be sentenced to

death.

I'm going to state that once and leave

it there.

He underwent three months of psychiatric examination and

was found criminally responsible.

In July 2023, the Tachikawa branch of the

Tokyo District Court sentenced him to 23 years.

That's really not enough.

Prosecutors had asked for 25.

His own defense argued for 12.

On the grounds that lighting the fire did

not demonstrate an intent to kill the 12

people in the carriage.

The court disagreed.

About 10 of them definitely disagreed.

And the man of 72 stabbed in the

chest with a 30-centimeter blade survived.

Which is a miracle in itself.

And thank goodness.

So did everybody else.

17 injured.

Nobody killed.

On a burning locked train.

That is not luck.

And that's the whole point of tonight.

What was in the collar?

So the parade.

Back to the parade.

One night a year, after dark, the streets

of the capital fill with an enormous celebrating

procession of monsters.

We know this.

Who have come in from everywhere and the

whole business of the night is looking at

them.

Shibuya at Halloween is a Hyakuyagyo.

It isn't a metaphor and it isn't a

stretch.

It's structurally the same event.

Appointed night.

Capital city.

Streets handed over.

Everybody in a shape that isn't theirs.

And it ends at dawn.

And in the morning the crossing is a

crossing again and people go back to work

to cross it.

But the old rule is the opposite of

the modern one.

And that's the hinge.

The rule of the night parade is do

not look.

Stay in.

Shut the door.

Let it go past.

Every protective instruction in a thousand years of

that story is the same instruction.

Don't go out there.

Don't watch.

And Halloween in Shibuya is a festival whose

entire content is going out there and watching.

We took the one night when you cannot

tell a person from a monster and we

made it the night when everybody goes out

specifically to look at monsters.

In a crowd of several hundred thousands.

And we made the inability to tell the

difference into the entertainment.

And it works.

It works brilliantly.

Almost every year.

And it's genuinely joyful.

And I don't want this to land as

and that's why Halloween is bad.

Because that's not the right conclusion and it

sure isn't mine.

But on that one train for about eight

seconds the safeguard the old story insisted on

was gone.

And it was gone for a perfectly good

reason.

Which is that on the 31st of October

in that city a man in a monster

costume holding weapon is not a warning.

He's the point.

He's what you came to see.

Now the collar.

I said we'd come back to it and

here's why I built the whole episode around

that story.

The young nobleman in the carriage in the

street in front of the parade does nothing

right.

He doesn't fight.

He doesn't flee.

He hasn't prepared.

He hasn't learned the words.

He has not earned a single thing.

He survives because of something somebody else sewed

into his clothing years earlier without telling him.

For no reason except that she cared about

him and it was the sort of thing

you do.

17 people were hurt on that train.

Nobody died.

On a locked moving burning carriage with an

accelerant fire and no drought and the doors

held shut by the system that is supposed

to keep you safe.

That is not luck.

And I've been thinking about why for about

two weeks.

Somebody pulled the emergency cord which means somebody

in that carriage inside those eight seconds finished

working out what they were looking at before

the rest and did the correct thing immediately.

The train stopped which means a driver and

a signaling system and a protocol and about

140 years of accumulated institutional paranoia about exactly

this all of which worked.

And when the doors wouldn't open against the

platform people went out the windows and the

footage shows what that actually was which is

strangers on the platform reaching into the smoke

carriage and holding people out by the arm.

Not one or two, dozens of them immediately

with the smoke coming out over their heads.

None of those people knew they were going

to do that.

None of them had prepared.

Nobody had told them.

Why would they?

That's the Sonshotarani.

That's what's in the collar and that was

the emergency pull cord.

It isn't a charm and it isn't courage

and it isn't a plan.

It's the accumulated residue of a very large

number of people over a long time quietly

doing unglamorous things on the assumption that somebody

might one day need them.

The cord, the protocol, the drill, the instinct

to grab a stranger's arm.

None of which anybody on that train had

any idea they were carrying.

And the parade came up the road and

it stopped and it went around them.

The Blowing Out.

Before you go, have you ever been in

a crowd and understood how little of it

you could see?

Have you ever watched something and not known

for a few seconds whether it was real?

And in those few seconds, what did you

do?

I'll tell you the only thing I've got.

You don't get to find out in advance.

Nobody on that train knew which of them

was going to be the one who reached

for the cord and the ones who did

reach for it were not, as far as

anybody can tell, special.

They just had something sewn into the collar.

Same as you.

And before I put this one out, this

lovely little candlelight of mine, we have three

more episodes for the Halloween Spooktober to get

through.

And I want to say my big thank

yous to you, the listener, for listening.

And I am your tale teller.

Right now, I'm going to go through my

thank yous for all those who support me.

I'm glad to be back after my month

hiatus, even though I still had episodes being

put out.

It's good to be back and sharing these

tales once more.

So thank you for your patience.

So have a wonderful rest of your weekend

and week.

For those who are interested, I'm going to

go through my thank yous, my Patreon supporters,

then make this whole podcast possible.

I'm so grateful to thank my amazing Ode

Night Tea Titan and friend of mine, the

brilliantly wonderful and super generous Matto Star.

Matto, I thought about you riding the carriage

sequence, and not for the hammer reasons this

time, for the other half of you, because

this is a story with no score.

Every piece of horror you and I love

tells the monster is coming before the monster

comes.

And that's what the strings are for.

Bernard puts three notes under a doorway and

the audience knows and the people on screen

don't.

And the whole delicious agony of the form

is the gap between those two facts.

Those passengers had no music, Matto.

Nobody got those three notes.

They had a man in a good costume

on the one night of the year when

a man in a good costume is normal.

And the first warning they received was a

knife already moving.

So question for you in the comments.

This is to you, Matto, and to all

those listening.

Horror's oldest tool is telling the audience what

the characters don't know.

What happens to the form when you take

that away?

Is a monster nobody can see coming even

a horror story?

Or is it something else that we don't

have a word for?

You've got better instincts on this than I

do, Matto.

What are your thoughts?

Thank you so much, Matto, for your support,

kindness, and love.

Thank you as always, Legend.

Have a great week ahead.

To my white tea warlords, three in number.

Lesasaurus Rex, whose birthday is, well rather was,

yesterday.

Huge happy birthday to you, absolute legend.

Now Lesa, who has I'd wager the fastest

reaction time in this community, physically, and who'd

have been out that window first and hauling

someone else through at second.

Lesa, your whole discipline is making the right

move automatic before you need it.

That's literally tonight's episode.

I have a feeling you would have saved

countless of people on that carriage.

Thank you for your support and thank you

for your kindness, mate.

Have a great week.

Maya, the queen of cats, my second white

tea warlord, who notices.

This is an episode about people taking eight

seconds to read a room and you're the

one person I know who'd have read it

in two.

Cats don't give the benefit of the doubt

and neither, I've observed, do you?

Maya, thank you so much for being my

supporter and pal.

Have a great week ahead as well.

And my third white tea warlord, Sangeetha the

Seer, in a story where the entire tragedy

is that nobody saw it coming.

Sangeetha, I'd have taken you on that train

over any security system they've installed since.

Trust me.

Rather, trust you and your ability to see

ten steps ahead.

Thank you, Sangeetha, for your support and friendship.

Have a brilliant week ahead as well.

Warlords, one question for the three of you

together and all those listening.

A man walked out of the night parade

alive because a woman he'd long stopped thinking

about sewed something into his collar when he

was a baby and never mentioned it.

So what's in yours?

Who put it there?

Go and answer that one to the actual

person, not to me.

And to the Earl Grey enforcers and all

supporters thereafter, I am extremely lucky to have

the following supporters.

Big thank you to Chad Warren, Peter Raffaelli,

Joss Heather, Juicebox Andy, Divided by Zero, Paige

Kramer, Not Plain Jane, Michael Krupp, and Steve

the Creeper.

Thank you so much for your support.

If you want to support this channel, this

podcast, and like these episodes, feel free to

visit my Patreon which