According to Reuters, individuals were forcibly escorted from Miyashita Park in the Shibuya district by people who appeared to be police officers and city officials.

It is claimed they are homeless people who have occupied the area for the past decade. 

The Shibuya area, a major shopping and tourist hub, is due to be heavily renovated over the next three years.

Four new skyscrapers are due to be built around the Park site. 

Fences were erected by police around the construction site earlier today.

It lies around two kilometres from the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium where table tennis is due to take place during Tokyo 2020. 

Handball competitions will also be held in the Yoyogi National Gymnasium in the Shibuya district.

People remained inside the perimeter and more gathered to protest the order.

"The problem is that homeless people were still stranded inside," Kiyoshi Hasegawa, a professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University, who researches disputes involving homeless communities, told Reuters.

Official statistics drawn-up by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare estimate there to be only 6,235 homeless people across the whole of Japan.

Around 25 per cent of these reportedly live in urban parks in metropolitan areas.

A Tokyo 2020 spokesperson told insidethegames that the protest, while concerning general construction work designed to be completed by 2020, had no direct relation with an Olympic and Paralympic-related project.