Street Kart Tokyo: What It Costs to Go-Kart in Costume Under Skytree
Real cost, real requirements for Street Kart Tokyo: costumed go-karting past Tokyo Skytree, roughly 10,000 to 17,500 yen, and the license you need first.
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Grandma and Grandpa took the girls for an afternoon in November 2023, and instead of a quiet lunch, Lindsay and I put on a Pikachu onesie and a My Melody costume and drove go-karts through public Tokyo streets with Skytree looming overhead. It’s one of those activities that sounds like a joke until you’re actually buckled in and merging with real traffic, and it isn’t cheap, so here’s what it actually costs and the one requirement that catches people off guard.
What it costs
Street go-kart tours around Tokyo aren’t one fixed price, they scale with route and duration. Shorter routes through Akihabara or around Tokyo Bay start closer to 10,000 to 12,500 yen per person for about an hour, while longer tours covering more ground, ours included a stretch past Sensoji Temple and under Skytree, run higher, up toward 17,500 yen. The price covers the kart itself, the costume rental, an English-speaking guide who leads the group through traffic, and the photos the guide takes of you along the way, which is where most of these photos came from.
The requirement that isn’t optional
You cannot rent one of these karts on a whim. Every operator requires a valid driving credential before they’ll let you on the road: either a Japanese driver’s license, an International Driving Permit under the Geneva Convention, or, for a short list of countries including Switzerland, Germany, France, Taiwan, Belgium, and Monaco, your home license plus an official Japanese translation. An International Driving Permit is cheap and easy to get from your home country’s motor vehicle office before you leave, but it has to happen before the trip, not at the counter in Tokyo. Budget that as a real, if small, extra cost on top of the tour price itself, and don’t book a slot assuming you can sort the paperwork once you land.
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Street go-kart experience, Asakusa
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Why it isn’t called MariCar anymore
If you’ve seen older photos online of people doing this in full Mario, Luigi, or Princess Peach costumes and a company name that sounded a lot like “Mario Kart,” that’s not how it works anymore. The original operator, MariCar, was sued by Nintendo directly over the name and the Mario-branded costumes, lost all the way up through Japan’s Supreme Court, and was ordered to pay tens of millions of yen in damages. It rebranded as Street Kart, dropped the Nintendo-adjacent name, and moved on to a broader, ever-changing costume closet, which is how our own rental session landed on a Pikachu onesie and a My Melody outfit rather than anything from the Mario universe. The karts and the landmark routes are unchanged, the wardrobe is just a different, and legally safer, lineup than it used to be.
Where it starts
Most operators run out of garages around Asakusa, a short walk from Sensoji Temple and Tokyo Skytree, both of which end up as backdrops on the actual route rather than something you have to detour to see. That’s part of what makes the cost worth weighing seriously, you’re not just paying for a go-kart, you’re paying for a rolling tour past two of Tokyo’s most recognizable landmarks with nobody honking at you for driving something that looks like it escaped a video game.
Was it worth it
For a one-off date, yes, without much hesitation. It’s not a cheap hour, and the International Driving Permit is genuinely one more thing to arrange before the trip rather than an afterthought, but nothing else on this site has gotten this many strangers to point and wave at us. If you’re already planning to see Skytree and Sensoji on foot anyway, doing that same ground from behind the wheel of a go-kart in a Pikachu costume is a very different, and very memorable, way to cover it.
