00:00:01 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to Haneda Airport. I'm on my way to Hokkaido to Asahikawa. But this broke yesterday. It was something that we knew, writing on the wall. They've been talking about this for a very long time, but finally passed the ordinance in Shibuya Ward, one of Tokyo's 23 wards, to ban public drinking on the streets year-round, all the time, for good. I think it's a good thing. This is something that's been an issue in Shibuya for about 10 years. And I'm going to show you the article from 2014, on the first time that Shibuya was just completely trashed from the Halloween events.

00:00:35 John Daub: But let's take a look at this article and discuss where exactly it is and how this is going to impact you guys. Tokyo Shibuya Ward approves year-round ban on street drinking. Revised ordinance imposes no penalties on violators. That might be the headline there, the last part. If you do get caught, I think they just have... It's all bark and no bite. They can tell you to put your drink away or something, but they're not going to penalize you. And that's odd. I'm not sure how this all is going to go down, but I'm really curious to see how this all works.

00:01:10 John Daub: This is coming from the Yomiuri Shimbun, which is one of Japan's biggest newspapers. You can see the Halloween no events for Halloween because of what happened in the past. A revised ordinance that imposes a year-round ban on nighttime street drinking in Tokyo Shibuya Ward was unanimously approved by the local assembly, everybody, on Monday. The ordinance was revised to address the increasing number of problems such as littering and excessive noise caused by people drinking on the streets. The revised ordinance, which takes effect on October 1st, does not impose penalties on violators. That is very interesting.

00:01:44 John Daub: The current ban prohibits outdoor alcohol consumption in certain ward areas. Not all of Shibuya Ward, but most of the Shibuya Station area during the time around... You can see I highlighted it. No penalties. What? The revised ordinance not only extends the ban year-round, but expands it to include areas around Shibuya Ward office. So they've expanded the areas from years past. The Maruyama-cho area, home to many nightclubs, in addition to Shibuya Station, that includes the busy Shibuya Scramble Crossing, will also have enforcement there. The prohibition will be imposed between 6 p.m. and 5 a.m. with security guards patrolling the area.

00:02:28 John Daub: I think they should just do it 24 hours. Get people used to not drinking at all on the street. You know? I'm not sure why it needs to be done at all. Many countries have laws like this that people travel to, that have thousands of people... hundreds of millions of people going to, and nobody complains. The ban is in response to issues including when Shibuya Ward was thrown into a state of disturbance as drunken young people toppled a mini truck and were subsequently arrested on Halloween in the autumn of 2018.

00:03:26 John Daub: Station such as obstructing traffic. I've seen a lot of people trying to cross the street there on red lights and instances like near misses. We've seen a lot of people just drunk out of their minds on the streets of Shibuya. Also something that's very worrying, drug use is apparently up according to some articles. You know, it's a lot of confusion here. Let me show you the area that the Yomiuri Shimbun has listed from before the revisions and after. So the ones in the light gray, light brown were the original ones and the dark brown are the extended areas, which includes way north of Tokyo Hands, which I think everybody knows where that is. Of course Hachiko Scramble and the station area but the backside of Shibuya Station now and Miyashita Park is included on this as well. And I think this is where there's a lot of nightclubs in those areas and Dogenzaka as well in the ban.

00:04:23 John Daub: So this is sort of a big deal. Now this is the catalyst and this is going to mean that there's going to be a lot of other places that are looking at this, a lot of localities, Shinjuku in particular, to see how this plays out and if it has an impact. What they're going to do is probably enact a ban in a lot of other areas including Roppongi, including Shinjuku, places with problem areas where there're too many tourists and there's a lot of trash. So this goes back to 2014. Let me pull up this article here. Like I was just searching, yeah you know what, I remember when it was that bad 10 years ago.

00:05:13 John Daub: This is 10 years ago, check it out. I'm going to move over here to the side. With the coming of the dawn in Shibuya on the morning of November 1st, 2014, the area resembled an urban waste dump. Strewn in the streets and sidewalks were beer cans and bottles, PET bottles and plastic bags crammed with waste of all sorts. Discarded paper dampened by the light rain that fell clung obstinately to the ground. The mountains of trash, reports J-Cast News, had been deposited the night before by costumed revelers who had descended on the area by the thousands to celebrate Halloween. Their masks, painted faces were broadcast live on NHK and other TV channels.

00:05:55 John Daub: So the entire country was seeing this as madness ensued. This is more like mischief night. The problems came afterwards. The costumes, the containers along with unconsumed remnants of what they ate and drank as well as discarded pieces of costume were strewn about. What appeared to be zero concern for keeping the streets clean. This is how Japanese feel. This looks like a translation, like zero concern. It's like how could foreigners do this to our home. There's residents here. Only a few months ago Japanese won international praise as in the World Cup in Brazil when supporters of their national football team voluntarily picked up refuse at a venue. But this time the crowds at Shibuya seemed indifferent to litter.

00:06:47 John Daub: It wasn't just all foreigners. They're saying that it was a mix of people. Not surprisingly a stream of complaints emanated from Twitter and other social media. "Shibuya has become a waste dump," tweeted one. One of the most controversial news stories in the history of Shibuya. "One the photos of Shibuya make it look like a total slum," another posted. "Hey you Halloween poopers, have fun but don't forget to bring your morals with you," admonished another. Like these are the residents of Shibuya who vote, who the mayor of Shibuya Ward represents. And this has been going on for a very long time as you plainly see. So yeah, this was no surprise that this was going to come down.

00:07:26 John Daub: I don't know if they can ban the Halloween events, but I think they should really start to dissuade it. I don't know. I'm not a big Halloween reveler. And I think that there's a lot of issues that come from the Halloween events. Halloween in Japan is not famous. It's not known for anything. I guess Disney brought it here and certain things, but it's not something that we celebrate in Japan anyway. So I think you learn it if you go to an English school or maybe you learn it in elementary school.

00:08:08 John Daub: I'm just looking over here. There's like an Ohtani jersey area. That's pretty cool. And here's Haneda's Terminal 1 where I'm taking a JAL flight in a second. So I'm not really sure what the long term is for the Halloween event. But I'm going to be keeping my ears to the ground on this. And I'm going to be looking and see how Shibuya has not yet done a press conference to talk about what the specifics of this, why they did this. We would like to hear more. I think it's Hasegawa-san. I'd like to hear more from the mayor of Shibuya and kind of wrap my head around this ordinance and the purpose of it year-round.

00:08:42 John Daub: Because I got to be honest with you, the residents of Shibuya, if you see this from 10 years ago, they're kind of sick of it. And I've been living in Japan for a very long time and I'm kind of sick of it as well. And I just don't like seeing my home and this is my home trashed. I don't like seeing people getting drunk on the streets. And it's like, I don't know if it's a right. It's like a privilege that we have in Japan to be able to drink a beer outside that Americans don't have. And I'm not saying it's Americans that are causing the trouble, but it's like, well, you can drink a beer outside. So then you end up doing that all the time because it's something that you don't have at home.

00:09:18 John Daub: There's lots of issues around that, including the abuse of alcohol, which I think is already a problem in Japan. I hate to see tourists coming here and abusing alcohol as well. And if you're young, I kind of get it. I'm not innocent either. I went to a big university and had drinks at football games and whatnot, but I also knew not to abuse it. And I knew that the last thing you want to do is to get in trouble in Japan. And now we don't know if there's going to be any violation penalties that could come. I think maybe that's something they discussed later. But right now there's no penalties for it.

00:09:57 John Daub: And don't know how they enforce it and I'd like to hear from you guys what do you think about Shibuya's drinking ban now official. Do you think that people are going to follow it and how are they going to enforce it? I've seen these older security guards, usually retired people that are taking a part-time job to try to talk to foreigners, some of them who can't speak English. I think it'd be fun to hire other foreigners to do this, right? Why not hire other foreigners? I would do it. But guess if you are told to put it away and you don't want to do it, what happens next? I want to hear what the mayor's plan is for when people are so drunk they don't listen to the directions of staff, security staff patrolling to make sure that this doesn't happen. How do they enforce it? I really don't know.

00:10:55 John Daub: Brandani's in the house dropping in to say aloha, gotta go back to work. Thank you Brandani, thanks for the message. I'm looking forward to seeing you real soon. She's on her way to Japan as well again. But there you go. I'll walk around a little bit of Haneda just for a second. I just checked into my flight going up to Asahikawa and I'll bring you up there, maybe one or two live streams in Asahikawa but I have work to do.

00:11:21 John Daub: What's Aaron Judge doing in Japan but they have a Giants and a show. Hey, isn't that cool? Wait he got another stolen base. He's on the precipice of 50-50. Wow yeah Japan is very much watching to see what his stats are by the end of the year and that's pretty exciting stuff. There you got the Tokyo Giants, Yomiuri Giants I should say, they're the sponsors. That's kind of cool. You could pick up a jersey here, you can pick up a Yomiuri Giants jersey. That's a pretty cool gift I think.

00:11:59 John Daub: Well thank you Ramsey, silent. All right guys I gotta go and get the flight, gotta get the Asahikawa and start filming. But if you have any questions I would love to read your comments down below. This is sort of a big deal, it's changing the culture a little bit where we had this privilege to drink outside is being taken away because of actions of people that are drunk and alcohol has that problem with a lot of people. So let me know what you think below and I'll see you in another episode real soon in a couple of hours maybe from Asahikawa. Hey guys thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Bye! Mata ne!