Madame Rotin, a furniture shop in business for more than 30 years along Tokyo's Kan-nana, the busy No. 7 loop artery in Meguro Ward, recently closed, claiming customers stopped coming because they had a hard time finding a parking space under stricter new rules to curb illegal parking.
The shop is one of many that do not provide sufficient parking space and now fear their business will suffer under the revised Road Traffic Law that took effect June 1.
Illegally parked vehicles now face immediate ticketing, a departure from the previous system in which tires were first marked with chalk and then tagged only after a certain time had passed.