Shibuya’s war on Halloween is stupid and misguided.

Once upon a time in Roppongi, Halloween parties became a thing. In the 2000’s clubs had popularized Halloween events and there were streets filled with costumed revelers having a great time. No police, no security guards, and it all went very smoothly.

Fast forward to 2026, and Shibuya has become the epicenter of Japan’s Halloween parties, but it has turned into a police state.

Cops everywhere, security guards harassing costumed revelers, and it’s a dystopian scene. Shibuya Ward is to blame. Mayor Ken Hasebe essentially declared war on Halloween parties a few years ago, and it continues to be an expensive waste of tax money that doesn’t fix anything. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the ward’s own numbers.

Follow the money

This year, Shibuya Ward has set aside about ¥74 million (roughly $490,000) for its Halloween crackdown, according to the measures it announced on September 30. Here’s where it goes: about ¥58 million for “station-area safety,” which mostly means private security. ¥14 million for flags, banners and signage telling you to behave or stay away. And a grand total of ¥2 million for trash.

Read that again. Garbage is the one problem everyone actually agrees is real, and it gets less than 3% of the budget. The scolding signage gets seven times as much.

So what does ¥74 million buy? About 185 private security guards across October 30 and 31. Roughly 70 ward staff walking around lecturing people about manners. Around ten monitoring towers, including one in Hachiko Square. A fence boarding up the Hachiko statue itself from the morning of the 30th until the evening of November 1. And requests to 62 liquor stores near the station to stop selling alcohol on the night of the 31st. That’s before you count the police, who are paid for separately.

What doesn’t it buy? Toilets. The ward has said outright that there will be no temporary toilets or changing areas this year. Thousands of people will be packed into Center Gai at the peak, and the plan for them is apparently to hold it. Seriously?

And this isn’t a one-off. The ward spent about ¥103 million in 2019, about ¥58 million in 2022, and about ¥58 million again last year. Add this year’s ¥74 million and those four years alone come to nearly ¥300 million, close to $2 million, and that’s only counting the years where the figures are easy to find. A Waseda University business school professor has put the typical annual bill at ¥70–80 million and pointed out that Shibuya gets very little economic return for it.

Even the locals called it years ago. After the ¥100 million operation in 2019, the head of the Center Gai shopping street association told reporters that pouring ¥100 million into security “has to be called a waste.” That was seven Halloweens ago. Shibuya Ward kept writing the checks.

Tokyo has a Halloween culture. For the past decade, costumes have been front and center in Shibuya on the weekends following up to the actual Halloween day, which fortunately is on a Saturday this year.

Ken, it isn’t working

Guess what Ken? You haven’t achieved anything. The parties are still going strong, the kids are still having fun, and you’re just wasting a bunch of taxpayer money on trying to stop something that is unstoppable.

The ward’s own crowd counts prove it. Years into the crackdown, the peak crowd in Center Gai was still around 18,000 people in 2024. Last year it fell to about 4,200, the lowest since the ward started counting, but it rained. The ward’s forecast for this year? Roughly the same as 2024. After all the bans, the fences and the guards, Shibuya is budgeting for the same crowd it had two years ago. Last year’s spending worked out to about ¥13,800 in tax money for every person counted on the street at peak hour.

Then there’s the new littering fine. Since June, anyone caught dropping trash anywhere in the ward can be fined ¥2,000 on the spot. In its first four months it pulled in about ¥2.8 million from roughly 1,400 tickets. That’s less than 4% of this year’s Halloween bill.

Shibuya has always been the epicenter of Japan’s youth culture. No one dispatched a gestapo of anti-fun goons before this stupid war on Halloween. Hasebe didn’t even pretend otherwise at his September press conference. He said he wants people to know that on the 31st, Shibuya “is not a town where you can dress up and enjoy Halloween all night.” That’s the mayor of Japan’s youth-culture capital, spending your money to tell young people to go somewhere else.

A better idea

What do I think? Ken, quit this performative useless exercise to stop something that cannot be stopped, and instead deploy some trash cans and encourage the kids to enjoy responsibly. The ward has only now committed to putting public trash bins near the station this fiscal year. Better late than never, but imagine if even a fraction of that ¥58 million security line had gone into bins, toilets and cleanup crews from the start. That would save taxpayers a lot of money and stop making Shibuya look like a police state every Oct 31.

Interested to hear more about the story of how Halloween became a Tokyo staple event and came to be where it is today? Watch this video on the origins, what’s going on now, and where we think it’s going to go: