Shibuya Ward administration continues to try to distance the neighborhood from its Halloween party place image.

With October here, it’s time for Halloween fans to start getting their decorations, costumes, and party schedules ready. Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, though, would prefer that you don’t include it in your plans.

On Monday, Shibuya Ward Head Ken Hasebe appeared at a press conference in which he declared “Shibuya wa Halloween wo oyasumi shimasu,” or “Shibuya is closed for Halloween.”

▼ Hasebe’s press conference

Impromptu street parties held on the night of October 31 and/or the preceding weekend played a large part in popularizing Halloween in Tokyo, and by extension much of Japan, with a surge in awareness and crowd sizes beginning in the early 2010s. However, as more and more people began to pack the area around Shibuya Station and the Center-gai shopping street, the number of high-profile incidents of drunken and disorderly conduct, vandalism, littering, and violence increased. Last year, Shibuya Ward put up signs stating “No events for Halloween on Shibuya streets” in English and “Shibuya is not a Halloween event venue” in Japanese, and this year’s posters will bear the same English message, with “Shibuya is closed for Halloween” in Japanese.

Several countermeasures will be put in place to kill the Halloween buzz, the first of which has already gone into effect. As of October 1, consumption of alcohol on public streets in the part of the neighborhood around Shibuya Station is banned, year-round, between 6 p.m. and 5 a.m., the first year-round public drinking ban to be enacted in Tokyo. In addition, the Shibuya Ward administration is asking that convenience stores, department stores, and liquor shops in the area refrain from selling alcoholic beverages between 6 p.m. and 5 a.m. from the evening of October 26 through the morning of November 1.

On October 25, 26, 30, and 31 a total of 130 ward employees will be patrolling the neighborhood, and they’ll be joined by a force of 185 police officers on October 30 and 31, who will also be setting up 10 crowd monitoring towers, including at least one in the plaza in front of Shibuya Station where the famous statue of loyal dog Hachiko is located. Speaking of Hachiko, the statue will be fenced in and covered (i.e. not visible) on October 30 and 31, and on those nights fences will also be installed in the plaza creating one-way passages into and out of the station, which is also scheduled to have a portion of its Hachiko Ticket Gate closed down to slow the flow of people into the area.

▼ The year-round drinking ban area, marked in yellow in the video at the point cued here, will be expanded to include the red areas as well for the Halloween period.

All of this speaks to a tricky wrinkle to the situation, which is that the Shibuya Ward government can’t directly ban celebrating Halloween on the streets of Shibuya, in the sense that they can’t make it illegal to dress up in costumes and walk around the neighborhood. Instead, the plan seems to be making Shibuya an inconvenient place to party, with the hope that it’ll be enough of a hassle that people simply decide to stay away from the neighborhood on the affected nights.

Source: Shibuya Keizai Shimbun
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