28 October 2018, a little after 1 a.m. The Shibuya Scramble Crossing — the intersection from every stock photo of Tokyo — is doing what it now does on Halloween weekend: several thousand people in costume, phones raised, filling a road built for pedestrians in ninety-second bursts between light changes.
A kei truck, a delivery van barely bigger than a golf cart, gets swallowed by the crowd and stalls. The driver climbs out to find a police officer. By the time he gets back, a knot of people has rocked the truck up onto its side.
Somebody was already filming. By morning the clip is running on news broadcasts in four countries, and Shibuya City has a headline it did not choose and now cannot un-choose: this is what Halloween in Tokyo looks like.
Nobody planned any of this. The Scramble Crossing had already been drawing spontaneous, non-Halloween crowds for years, big enough after certain football results that the ward had learned to treat a packed intersection as recurring civic weather rather than an emergency. Halloween arrived on top of that habit and grew into the loudest version of it: costumes optional, a reason to gather mandatory, each year's crowd filming itself for an audience the year before had built.
The truck earned Shibuya its first real countermeasures. Ten people, including three foreign nationals, were referred to prosecutors. The next Halloween, the ward introduced its first temporary street-drinking ban and paid for more than a hundred extra guards along Center Gai. It worked about as well as a single fence works on a river — the crowd came back the following year regardless, swollen further by a weak yen and a record run of post-pandemic inbound tourism.
What sharpened the response after that wasn't really about noise or litter. In October 2022, a crowd surge during Halloween festivities in Seoul's Itaewon district killed more than 150 people, and every city with an unticketed, unfenced street gathering the size of Shibuya's read that report the same way. For 2023, Mayor Ken Hasebe skipped straight to the cameras: a giant banner reading "NO Halloween Events" went up outside the station, roughly thirty-five nearby stores agreed to stop selling alcohol from 27 to 31 October, and Hasebe told reporters, "This year we're making it clear to the world that Shibuya is not a venue for Halloween events."
It is one of the few public-safety campaigns anyone can point to with a controlled before-and-after. Center Gai had drawn an estimated 25,000 people at its 2022 peak; in 2023, after the "stay away" campaign, it drew roughly 16,000. Hasebe put the number Shibuya had avoided at around 60,000, his estimate of a normal, unaddressed Halloween that year. The ward liked the result enough to stop treating it as seasonal: on 1 October 2024, the temporary Halloween-only rule became a standing ordinance — no drinking on the street anywhere near the station, every night, 6 p.m. to 5 a.m., all year round. Breaking it carries no individual fine; patrols simply ask people to stop. A separate, related ordinance does fine businesses ¥50,000 for failing to install the public trash cans it now requires.
By 2025 the annual Halloween operation had become a logistics exercise in its own right: 125 security guards and 90 ward staff on the street, the roads around the station closing to traffic from the afternoon of 31 October to the next morning, and the Hachikō statue — the other object everyone wants a photo standing on — fenced off entirely. None of this bans Halloween itself. Trick-or-treating still happens, and a costume party inside a bar or club is exactly as legal as it was in 2012. The narrower target is a person in costume, standing in the road, blocking it, holding a can.
This reads like a city that finally lost patience and reached for the law. It is closer to the opposite. In June 2013, after Japan drew with Australia to qualify for the World Cup, a riot-squad officer stood on his car at this exact crossing and talked an ecstatic crowd into going home peacefully — nicknamed "DJ Police" for lines like "you are the twelfth man on this team, and the team is famous for good sportsmanship." There were no incidents. Nobody was arrested. Shibuya has never actually tried to stop these crowds from gathering — it has spent over a decade trying to talk them into behaving once they already have, first through one likeable officer with a bullhorn, now through a banner, a mayor's press conference, and an ordinance. The law is not a rejection of the old approach. It is the old approach, finally written down because a single charming cop does not scale to several hundred thousand strangers with cameras.
- The 28 October 2018 truck-flipping incident sent ten people to prosecutors, including three foreign nationals, and became the event that ended Shibuya's hands-off approach to Halloween crowds for good.
- Center Gai's Halloween peak fell from an estimated 25,000 people in 2022 to roughly 16,000 in 2023 after Mayor Hasebe's "stay away" campaign — a drop he credited with avoiding a crowd he estimated could otherwise have reached 60,000.
- Since 1 October 2024, street drinking around Shibuya Station has been banned every night of the year, 6 p.m. to 5 a.m., by standing ordinance rather than a seasonal rule. There is no individual fine for it; a separate ordinance instead fines businesses ¥50,000 for not providing the public trash cans it now requires.