Shibuya, literally translated to English as “The Bitter Valley” is one of the most overcrowded places on the planet. The 15km² ward has an estimated resident population of over 2,000,000 people, and given its popularity for shopping and nightlife, has a great influx of crowds from the suburbs, countryside and abroad, meaning that at any given time there could be as many as 164 people per square metre. For every 10 people there is 1 convenience store, 15 vending machines, 3 love hotels, 2 taxis, 12 cockroaches and 25 iPhone zombies. The crowds can be a huge problem, often resulting in injury or even death from crushing. As a result, children have a curfew after 7pm and pets have been banned.

A typical Saturday afternoon at scramble crossing.

I now live and work in the valley, which can be great fun but pretty tiring at times. One of the main problems is getting home at night. Even though I live pretty close, the density of human beings means that sometimes the only way to go home is by crowd surfing, which the police have been clamping down on recently. The easiest option is to just find a place to drink until morning then go straight back to work.

The crowd surf commute.

So, imagine our predicament when one of the Shibuya skate clan elders decided that he would love nothing more than to celebrate his 40th birthday by having a BBQ on the streets of Shibuya. Given the population problem, the fact that open fires are illegal and Tokyo in January is freezing balls, this has got to be one of the stupidest ideas a bunch of idiots can come up with. And only a bunch of idiots could pull it off.

First we realised we’d need a load of beer and this is when the Kirin beer sticker campaign came into play. Each can has a sticker on it and if you collect enough they send you a free six-pack. Luckily when all of your friends are borderline alcoholics you can quickly assimilate several thousand stickers. As the word spread hundreds of friends and strangers would collect and donate their beer stickers. If you look up FTC Tokyo on Google Maps, there’s even a comment from Australia’s most elite piss swilling professional skateboarder, Callum Paul, advising customers to bring in the stickers to help out the staff. Cheers Callum!

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So once we got our crates of ale delivered from the friendly people at Kirin, we were good for booze, but what about meat sticks? It wouldn’t be a true sausage party without stacks of grilled meat. Here is where we called in the services of FATBROS HQ’s own Mr. Fire, who came armed to the teeth with heaters, tables, spice racks, sushi starters, pans of steak, pots of hot oil to deep-fry chicken and all kind of side dishes of marinated fish, fried noodles, etc… KP crew came though with enough whisky to make sure nobody could walk by the end of the night and even when the cops turned up, there were so many people that they didn’t even realise we were having a BBQ and left us to it. Success! Welcome to the ghetto gourmet valley yo!

Birthday boy.

Laurence Keefe
@laurencekeefe