Shibuya Ward, one of Tokyo's most popular tourist destinations, has launched a strict crackdown on street littering, imposing on-the-spot fines as illegal dumping has surged alongside a sharp rise in visitors.
According to NHK and other local media on Wednesday, Shibuya Ward began cracking down on illegal littering across the entire district that day, imposing a fine of 2,000 yen (about 19,000 won) on violators. Enforcement officers are patrolling areas with heavy foot traffic, including Shibuya Station and Harajuku, with payment procedures carried out on the spot when violations are caught.
Given the high proportion of foreign tourists in the area, multilingual enforcement officers have been deployed. Fines can be paid not only in cash but also by credit card and QR code, a measure designed to boost the effectiveness of collection.
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The move is tied to Japan's decades-long policy of reducing public trash bins. Since the 1990s, Japanese local governments have steadily cut the number of public bins, citing rising management costs and illegal dumping.
At the time, some areas saw garbage pile up around the bins themselves, and cases of household waste being dumped secretly were not uncommon. As fees were introduced for residential waste disposal, public bins were effectively misused as an outlet for household trash.
Safety concerns also came to the fore after the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Calls grew louder to eliminate places where explosives or hazardous materials could be hidden, accelerating the removal of trash bins from stations and public spaces.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, convenience stores removed bins from outside their shops one after another, making public trash bins even harder to find in Japan's urban centers. Osaka City, which had about 5,000 street bins in the late 2000s, has since removed most of them, and hundreds of bins around Tokyo's Shinjuku Station have also been taken down.
Shibuya Ward is not relying on enforcement alone. It is also encouraging convenience stores and takeout shops to install trash bins. The plan is to address the litter problem by combining administrative enforcement, cooperation from private businesses, and an on-the-spot collection system.
"Illegal littering has been hard to stamp out, so we've strengthened our measures," a Shibuya Ward official said. "We will enforce strict rules on waste disposal and build cleaner streets."
