As the red light district of the world’s largest metropolis city, it comes as no surprise that Kabukicho is lively throughout the day and into the night. But step away from the neon lights of the main strip, and the area can come across as eerily quiet.
Yet even in the quiet side streets, it is still easy to come across a bit of drama.

Imagine this – As you’re making your way to the train station from an evening at an izakaya, you stumble across what seems like a scene straight out of Yakuza or Grand Theft Auto. Only it’s not a drunken brawl involving two unruly gangsters, and is instead a rough and tumble between a pair of rats.
It seems it’s not only us humans who can cause a commotion on the streets of Tokyo. The rodents like to play it rough too.

The image was posted on Twitter by @ Mio20200912, who described the scene as a fist fight between two rodents who had ‘raised their swords’.

The image has gathered more than 200,000 likes, and has comments such as;

‘It makes me imagine a fairytale-like story about a war between a village rat and a town rat.’ @aki23kon7ka4si
‘Kabukicho often has fights on the streets...this is scary’ @Keighot
‘A city where even the rodents quarrel’ @ogu314
‘It reminds me of a tale I was told when I was younger about a sumo wrestler rat’ @BooksMisato

Others commented on the size of the rats themselves, as they compared them to the bicycle wheel in the photograph.

Whilst we will never know the true cause of the fight, it is interesting to imagine how the two rodents came to be locked into such a vicious and dramatic tussle at 2am in Kabukicho.