Mr. Wally just got a little tougher to find

Where’s Waldo? Not on the Mong Kok street corner he once occupied, and he’s not happy about it

The busker from Japan who goes by the performing name “Mr. Wally” – a nod to the character in the popular children’s book series – is crying discrimination after allegedly being told by police to stop performing in the popular pedestrian zone on Sai Yeung Choi street.

The costumed singer – who was fined by police in the same area two years ago due to a noise complaint — took to Facebook this week to say he had been forced to halt his performance simply because he’s a foreigner, an assertion police dismissed out of hand.

“I explained: ‘I come here with a working holiday visa,’” he said in a Sunday Facebook post. “But the police said: ‘only Hong Kong ID card holders are entitled to perform here.”

“It is very expensive to live in Hong Kong,” he wrote in follow-up post. “Without the performance zone in Mong Kok, it would be very difficult for me to make a living here.”

The police, however, refuted the singer’s claim, saying officers never told him that being a foreigner disqualified him from busking, newspaper Ming Pao reports.

In fact, they say, he was just one of many performers they had warned to mind their noise levels per local zoning regulations, albeit with the help of an interpreter in Mr. Wally’s case.

But the singer insists that the police version of events was simply meant to fool a public that had been squarely on his side in the 2015 confrontation.

“Wally” said he had never received any complaints from nearby shops. In addition, he had kept his sound system’s volume down to avoid bothering other people.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” he wrote. “But the police did not make any apology. Instead, they lied to protect themselves.”

The truth, in this case, might prove harder to find than Waldo.