Growing up in a deeply religious Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles, when the country seemed to be staring into the abyss of civil war, the sight and sound of sandwich-board evangelists declaring apocalyptically that 'The End is Nigh' and 'Ye Must Be Saved' were very common.
It is a predicatably a much less common sight in Japan's flexible and pragmatic religious milieu, so I could not help but be struck by the incongruity of the appearance this Christmas of modern day sandwich-boards, alive and well and replete with speakers and night-lights, in the least likely environment of Tokyo's ever frantic, funky Shibuya neighbourhood.