Why Would a Municipal Government Green Light a Forza Horizon Festival?

"I wonder whether a Horizon Festival would be profitable for the hosting locality?"

Somewhat distracted by that thought, I overshot a sharp right, lost control of my vehicle and smashed into a Tokyo convenience store. Metal met metal at 120 mph.

Fortunately, this was an in-game incident, occurring during a recent Forza Horizon 6 session. I don't think my real-world Honda FIT would get up to 120 mph, and I wouldn't attempt a right turn at that speed even if it did. In the world of Horizon, damage is minimal and everyone walks away, no matter how hard and fast you collide. The inhabitants of this shrunk-down Japan are largely invisible, and when they do appear, they do so as indestructible cheerleaders kept safe behind immovable barriers.

They need not concern themselves with vehicular manslaughter.

Had this been real life, the metal barriers around the shop would not have halted my luminous green Subaru Impreza. It would have ploughed through the store front, killing driver, shoppers and combini staff alike, destroying multiple onigiri and egg sando. A messy end to the Horizon festival, and just a few of the dozens of fatalities that you would reasonably expect to occur within about five minutes of the festival kicking off.

A Horizon Festival sounds like a fucking nightmare, both from a logistic and health-and-safety point of view. So why would a municipal government sanction this? Specifically, why would Japan allow this festival to take place?

I suppose the main motivation would be the tourist dollar. The weak yen would ensure that visitors spend freely, and that extra income should eclipse the cost of having to demolish partly-destroyed convenience stores and arranging mass funerals for unlucky spectators, borne by the government. The Horizon thrill-seekers would feed unending coins into gacha machines, spend thousands of dollars at local car shops and garages, stay in expensive hotels, and buy all the ludicrously priced retro games in Super Potato and the Tokyo-area Hard Offs.

The visitors also pump money and interest into underdeveloped areas. FH6 isn't just about Tokyo; the races take in a vast array of rural areas and the speed-loving tourists are known to buy up unwanted and dilapidated properties in the countryside, turning them into six-door bastard garages. The neighbours won't like it - foreigners doing donuts in rice fields and pumping drum & bass until six in the morning - but isolated communities would benefit from the cash influx.

Touge, drifting, and revving overpowered engines in suburban areas at 11 p.m. fits well within the Cool Japan remit. Basically, driving fast is cool; Japan is cool. Cool Japan!

Ski slope operators would love to have visitors come to their slopes outside the ski season, even if they're churning up the surface in Peugeot rally cars. Japan is covered in trees, and Horizon drivers are great at deforesting large areas with their indestructible cars and refusal to stick to roads. That would save the government some money and free up space for new developments.

All that being said, I don't think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

Do you really want to open your country to an army of annoying rich kids whose only job seems to be driving expensive cars dangerously fast with complete disregard for their surroundings and the local inhabitants? I suspect they are all banned from the previous hosting nations, because of all the deaths and unpaid speeding tickets. Once they leave Japan, they ain't getting back in.

The festival must generate an ungodly amount of noise and light pollution, especially around the festival hubs, which are usually located out in the sticks. Non-stop fireworks, strobe lights, hot air balloons and stunt jets, and the constant unts-unts-unts of unending DJ sets for punters who are too wired to sleep.

Consider Tanaka-san, a tenth generation farmer. He wakes at 4:30 a.m. and heads to his fields, same as he's done every day for the last fifty years. He arrives to find a burnt-out Lamborghini in the middle of his field, a car worth more than all his worldly possessions and the land that has sustained his ancestors for centuries combined. A group of party-goers are trouncing all over his crop, dancing to some electronic noise that is unintelligible to his ears. His irrigation channels are stuffed up with drugs, a couple are shagging in his greenhouse, and some joker has put a spoiler and go-faster stripes on his Showa-era tractor.

Having failed to communicate with the trespassers - none of them bothered to learn any Japanese words besides "touge" - he returns home dejected, where he finds that some arsehole has smashed up his prize-collection of regional mascots.

It's no better in the city, where busy roads and transportation hubs are closed down to accommodate the speed-criminals. Knowing how annoyed the locals get about the tourist Mario karts that race through Akihabara and Shibuya, I doubt Tokyo-ites would react positively to the appearance of cars that shouldn't be allowed to leave the race track. The expat crowd would have a full-on meltdown. Taking everything personally, and feeling singularly responsible for every tourist who shares their skin colour, they would be aghast at the behaviour of Horizon-goers. There would be social media uproar the likes of which we haven't seen since 2008, when that Brit skinny dipped in the imperial palace moat and was chased by a gaggle of police with nets and poles. 

To be clear, that wasn't me. I was never apprehended.

And then there's the potential for embarrassment caused by cultural insensitivity and ignorance. Racers from abroad probably don't realise that crashing into an ancient temple is frowned upon here in Japan, as is twatting your 4x4 into a sacred waterfall. I suspect the racers won't have read the Japanese Highway Code and might not even know to drive on the left. They won't grasp the differences in hand signals compared to back home - waves don't really work as "go-ahead" signals when giving way to merging traffic and, in my experience, not many motorists are familiar with the wanker gesture. It's also culturally unacceptable to embarrass a Gundam.

Terrible, but I'm glad the Horizon Festival Japan went ahead, as I'm really enjoying Forza Horizon 6.