Race through the streets of Tokyo, escaping zombies.
Can you survive to the end of the night?
Date: October 5th (Sat)
Arrive at: 18:00, Registration: 18:00-18:30
Location: Setegaya Park (near Ikejiri-ohashi station)
Maps showing Checkpoints and Safe Zones will be available here from 18:00 on the day of the event.
Race through the streets of Tokyo, escaping zombies.
Can you survive to the end of the night?
Date: October 5th (Sat)
Arrive at: 18:00, Registration: 18:00-18:30
Location: Setegaya Park (near Ikejiri-ohashi station)
Journey to the End of the Night is Back!
In October 2015, 25 organizers came together with 120 players for the first Journey to the End of the Night, dashing around the city, evading their pursuers and completing challenges. Now four years, seven Journeys and 800 players later, we’re excited to be with you again! Our next chase through the streets of Tokyo will be a horror-themed Journey on October 5th.
Contestants must dash around the city and complete challenges at five checkpoints while evading pursuit. It is similar to the Japanese game onigokko (鬼ごっこ), or a zombie version of a game of tag, with creative challenges along the way. Once caught, runners become chasers.
The course, which begins Setagaya Park, will run approximately 10km and may take 2 to 4 hours to complete while evading chasers and solving checkpoints. Oh, and playing is free! But you must pre-register!
Journey 8 Theme: Horror
The neighborhood wasn’t where you intended to spend your evening, but it’d seemed lively enough when you got off at the wrong station. That was early evening, though, and as the sun clipped behind the wrong skyline things took a turn. The passerby began to be…off. Walking as though they were wearing a new skeleton, breathing on the wrong beat. The hair on your neck began to rise, slowly. Haltingly. Like the proverbial frog in the warming pot, until you decided that leaving was the only acceptable action. This place was familiar in all the wrong ways, like a fever dream of a drunk passed out in poorly-ventilated cinema. The storefronts were at wrong angles, paths looped in false directions. Two rights made a left and gazing behind you was headache-inducing.
It was almost a relief when the zombies appeared behind you. They might not be actual zombies – voodoo? Plague? Alien meteorite? – but their eyes were glazed and they chased you in packs. An actual threat sharpened your thinking, and you began to run. Wherever you turned – North, South, East, West – Tokyo Tower was visible in the distance, and running towards it brought you back to the same intersection over and over. You’d need to find another way out of the eldritch location in which you’d trapped yourself.
Evading the zombies eventually ran you into an answer. The zombies will not set foot in some places. You couldn’t figure out why until someone gave you a task. Who they were was always right behind your tongue, a memory that failed to break into your consciousness. They promised the location of another haven in exchange for doing something inexplicable. They were quite insistent that it be done, and completing their demands would eventually get you back to Tokyo.
Can you do it? Solve their little puzzles and unravel their little games? Can you evade the hordes of the maybe-dead? Can you survive your Journey to the End of the Night?
How to Play
Rules
Follow these as you make your way to the end of the night
Goal
Find disguised checkpoint guides at each of the five checkpoints – or be consumed trying.
Tools
What you will have to bring,
what we’ll give you, and what to wear.
Origins of Journey
Journey to the End of the Night was created in 2006 by Ian Kizu-Blair, Sean Mahan and Sam Lavigne in San Francisco, CA. Their goal was to design a game that put players in the middle of a cinematic chase scene through a city at night. They were inspired by bike messenger alleycat races, urban exploration, capture the flag, parkour, and, of course, tag. Since then it has been played nearly 100 times in over 25 cities around the world.
In 2015, inspired by what San Francisco had begun, a group of 8 friends met in a typical Tokyo studio apartment and worked together to bring the game to Tokyo. Over time we grew as couchsurfers, redditors, friends of friends and other Tokyo creatives joined our team. We made mistakes, learned from them, improved our game, recruited players to help organize and have had a ton of fun… rinse and repeat.
We have been space pirates and aliens, heroes and villains, dreamers, time-travelers and pirates. We’ve made players solve physical crossword puzzles, dash through literal mazes of red-tape, create songs for Ainu gods, figure out how to ford an imaginary river with only a tiny piece of tarp as a raft, escape from jail by bribing the warden, bounce around with their feet ‘glued’ together to prevent a laser from destroying the city, write haikus about their ideas of heroism, distract dinosaurs to steal their eggs, and learn how to connect without words.
Check out the international site for all Journeys to learn more: http://ichaseyou.com/about/
Get Involved
About the Journey Tokyo Group
The Tokyo edition of Journey to the End of the Night is run by enthusiastic semi-adults not affiliated with any organizations, companies or causes.
We aim to bring childlike playfulness and wonder to those who participate in Journey, through immersion in a new world in the midst of familiarity, along with strangers and friends.
Donations
Costs add up – three months of planning, five checkpoints of props, hundreds of meters of ribbon, and prizes! Oh, and printing.
Can you help with 500 yen? If so, please bring your donation on the night of the event.
We love you and appreciate your help!
Volunteer
We are always looking for other semi-adults of all shapes and sizes to help out in any way shape or form. If you are interested in getting involved, email us, message us on Facebook or Meetup, or make a note in the registration form!