Street Kart Asakusa: License Rules, Costume Rental, and Real Cost

Street Kart’s Asakusa location sits at 3-25-31 Nishi-Asakusa, a few minutes’ walk from Senso-ji, and the pitch is simple: rent a costume, rent a kart, drive it on real public roads past Kaminarimon and the Skytree. We did it on a November afternoon in 2023, Adam in a Pikachu onesie, Lindsay in My Melody, and the girls watching from the sidewalk since drivers have to be old enough to hold a license.

Why it’s called Street Kart and not something more obvious

The company wasn’t always called Street Kart. For years the go-kart tours running through Tokyo’s streets traded under the name MariCar, leaning hard on Mario Kart-themed costumes and kart styling. Nintendo sued in 2017 over the name and the costumes, the case went all the way to Japan’s Supreme Court, and the company lost, with a final order to pay Nintendo 50 million yen in damages and drop anything that traded on the Mario Kart name. The rebrand to Street Kart followed, along with visible “Unrelated to Nintendo” stickers plastered across the karts themselves. The route, the license requirement, and the basic format of the tour never changed, only the branding and some of the costume choices did. It’s worth knowing going in, because older reviews and blog posts online still call it MariCar, and searching that name still points to the same current business.

The license requirement first, because it decides everything

This is not a theme park ride. The karts are street-legal and the route runs on open roads with regular traffic, so Japanese law requires an actual driver’s license to get behind the wheel: a valid Japanese license, an International Driving Permit issued under the 1949 Geneva Convention, an SOFA license for US forces personnel, or a home license plus an official Japanese translation if you’re from one of a handful of countries (Switzerland, Germany, France, Taiwan, Belgium, Monaco) whose licenses Japan doesn’t otherwise recognize without one. Show up without the right paperwork and staff will turn you away at the counter, no refund. That single requirement is also why this is an adults-only activity for a family like ours. Cora, Harper, and our third daughter rode in nothing, they stood on the sidewalk and watched two costumed parents drive past.

What it costs

Street Kart Asakusa runs a tiered pricing structure rather than one flat number. Booking an early slot, roughly 10 AM to 5 PM, currently runs about 5,000 yen a person, and a 7 PM slot runs closer to 6,000 yen. Walk up without a discount or book a slot outside those windows and the regular price is 12,000 yen or more per person. The gap between the cheap slots and the regular price is large enough that timing the booking matters more than almost any other decision in planning this one out.

The price covers the kart rental itself, fuel, the costume, a guide who leads the group through the route, and basic insurance, though that insurance carries a 50,000 yen deductible per vehicle if something gets damaged on the run. Our tour was the shorter Asakusa route, 45 minutes to an hour, weaving past Kaminarimon gate and Nakamise shopping street before opening onto wider roads with the Skytree visible in the distance. Longer courses exist at other Street Kart locations around Tokyo, but the Asakusa shop’s signature run is built to be short enough to do as a single afternoon stop rather than a half-day commitment.

The costume part is not an afterthought

Costume rental is built into the price, not a separate add-on, and the shop keeps a rack of characters to choose from beyond the two we picked. Everything gets washed between renters. Staff hand out the costume before the safety briefing, not after, so the entire group ends up standing around in full character gear listening to driving rules, which is a stranger experience than it sounds like from a photo. The costume doesn’t change how the kart drives or what the tour covers, it’s purely the visual hook that makes this route recognizable from a hundred identical Asakusa street corners, and it’s clearly the reason most people book this specific activity over a plain rental car or taxi tour of the same neighborhood.

Booking it in practice

Slots go through Street Kart’s own site or third-party platforms like Klook and GetYourGuide, and the shop asks everyone to show up 30 minutes before the booked time to handle the license check and costume fitting before the briefing starts. That buffer matters more than it sounds like it would. A rejected license at the counter isn’t just a wasted booking, it can knock the rest of a group’s plans for the day sideways if the go-kart run was supposed to be the anchor activity. We’d booked ours as a mid-afternoon add-on to an Asakusa day that already included Senso-ji, so the 45 minutes to an hour the tour ran fit cleanly into a schedule that had temple visiting on one side of it and dinner on the other.

Was it worth it

Yes, with the caveat that the price gap between an early slot and a regular one is real money, and booking a 10 AM or 1 PM window instead of walking up cold roughly cuts the per-person cost in half. Two of us drove, three of us watched, and the watching half had just as much fun as the driving half, laughing from the sidewalk every time a kart full of a Pikachu and a My Melody rolled past a red light. It’s not a cheap activity by Tokyo standards, even at the discounted rate it’s a real line item for two adults, but it’s also not the kind of thing you can replicate anywhere else, a legal, guided, costumed drive through one of Tokyo’s most recognizable neighborhoods, past a temple gate most visitors only ever see on foot.