Western and Japanese haunted houses are actually completely different. Although they are called houses in Japan, the interior of Japanese haunted houses provide space for a pseudo-outdoor experience where you will encounter a strange world of ghosts within our own. In Western haunted houses, the house contains the evil and is therefore a type of monster in and of itself. In the rooms, you will encounter the ghosts of past events that took place in the house.
In addition, modern haunted houses are built like mazes to keep you from knowing where the exit is.Fear and anxiety continue to build as you lose sight of how long it will last and when something will happen (just like our daily mindset during the COVID-19 pandemic).
When you finally reach the exit and escape the state of terror at the peak of your fear and anxiety, your mind clears and is filled with joy and peace of mind. The haunted house experience also includes comforting others by smiling and saying things like, “That was terrifying!” afterwards.
*There is a Japanese style haunted house run by Namuthunder at the entrance of the exhibition. Those who don’t like scary things can avoid it by using the route labeled“Not Scary.”

Inside Japanese haunted houses, time has frozen at 2 o’clock in the middle of the night, and it is incredibly dark, much like in Western versions. In many horror movies, the horror begins in the evening and continues onward into the night.
Darkness has been scary since the beginning of time. There could be something strange lurking in the dark that may hurt you. Most horror movies end when the heroes find a solution just as dawn breaks, but as aftershocks continued to occur for days after the Kumamoto Earthquake, there are many people who had to wait for the same relief each dawn.
On the other hand, there is also a peculiar fun unique to nighttime. The brilliant illumination of urban life has a beauty completely different from daytime, and, of course, there are rich and romantic times spent admiring the stars, the moon, and the cherry blossoms at night.

There are many Japanese ghost stories, such as “Hyakumonogatari (100 Strange Tales),” that date back to the Edo period, and horror manga and novels are still popular to this day. The city dwellers’ fascination with and search for ghosts produced creatures such as Kuchisake-onna (Woman with a torn mouth), human-faced dogs, and human-faced fish in the Showa and Heisei eras, and last year Amabie became incredibly popular as an epidemic prevention symbol.
Since the Edo period, urban ghosts have appeared at the edge of daily life where boundaries blend vaguely, such as a dark road at midnight and places people would not usually go.
Giving a shape to an object of fear (something that cannot be understood) and determining a place where it appears is a basic way to accept, understand, and cope with the existence of unknown beings (just like disaster prevention and COVID-19 countermeasures).