This November, people strolling through a park in Ebisu, Tokyo, were baffled: Several benches there had been covered with colorful knitwear, many wildly curling around the wooden poles of backrests and armrests. Next to the benches, more wondrous knitted entities were hanging from the branches of a tree.
It was an attack by the newly founded Surprise Attack Knitting Group, or Ami Kishu Dan in Japanese.
There are, of course, various other knitting groups in Japan, but this kind of "guerrilla knitting" only started in August this year. Spread all over Japan, the Surprise Attack Knitting Group now has around 15 knitting activists, all of whom found each other over the Internet. Behind the movement is Que D'accord, a collaboration originally of three but now five knitters, who have been working together since 2006.