March 17, 2023: The Year Tokyo's St. Patrick's Day Parade Finally Came Back
Real details on Tokyo's St. Patrick's Day Parade and Green Ireland Festival: free admission, Asia's first St. Patrick's parade, and what the family found at Yoyogi Park the year it returned from a 3-year COVID hiatus.
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We landed in Tokyo on March 17, 2023 without realizing the date mattered: that specific day was the first time Tokyo’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade had run in three years, paused the whole pandemic stretch, and we walked straight into its comeback without having planned a single part of it.
This isn’t a small, improvised thing
Irish Network Japan started the parade in 1992 with the Embassy of Ireland’s own endorsement, commonly described as Asia’s first St. Patrick’s Day parade, not a recent novelty import. It ran in Roppongi originally before settling into its current route down Omotesando-dori. After a three-year COVID pause, 2023, the exact year we happened to be there, was its real return to the streets. Later editions have drawn crowds estimated around 30,000 spectators, a real, established annual event rather than a one-off expat gathering.
The festival next door
Alongside the parade, Yoyogi Park hosts the Green Ireland Festival (formerly called the I Love Ireland Festival) near the park’s event square by the NHK building, real Irish food and drink stalls, live music, and green everywhere. Admission to both the parade and the festival is free, no ticket, no gate, walk-up access the same as any public park event. Food names at past editions of the Yoyogi festival have included corned beef, colcannon, rasher sandwiches, and Irish stew, genuine Irish dishes rather than a green-dyed approximation, sold a la carte from individual stalls the same way any festival food court works.
The green beer, explained
The drink in our own photo is exactly what it looks like: green beer, dyed for the occasion, a real St. Patrick’s Day tradition rather than anything uniquely Tokyo. Our own video calls it out specifically as green tea beer at this festival, a real local twist on the usual food-dye version. What stands out is the setting more than the drink itself, a tent in a Tokyo park, with an Irish parade having just passed by on a major Tokyo shopping street an hour earlier.
Was it worth stumbling into
Completely, and the free admission does real work here: neither the parade nor the festival asks anything of you beyond showing up, so finding it unexpectedly costs nothing to enjoy once you’re there, only the food and drink you choose to buy. If you’re in Tokyo in mid-March on purpose, checking the current year’s parade date against your own itinerary is worth the two minutes, this isn’t an event you need an expensive ticket to build a day around.
Getting there
The parade runs along Omotesando-dori, a short walk from Omotesando Station on the Tokyo Metro Ginza, Chiyoda, and Hanzomon lines. Yoyogi Park’s festival grounds sit a short walk further on, reachable from Harajuku Station or Yoyogi-Koen Station depending on which side of the park you’re approaching from, both easy additions to a day already built around Harajuku or Meiji Shrine.
