Fixing Japan's Over-Tourism Problem

Above, it used to be that one could get a nice serene photo of the Kinkaku-ji
"Golden Pavilion" without crowds "photo-bombing" the shot. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Back when I first started taking trips to Japan 18 years ago, the numbers of foreign tourists was quite small, under (way under) ten million a year. Most of those tourists just mainly stayed in and around Tokyo. I had no problem with crowds because there weren't any.

Today, over 20 million foreign tourists are visiting Japan annually, but the Japanese are ill-prepared for the influx and are now having to deal with over-tourism.

Amy Chavez has an interesting article on this problem in the Japan Times.

It begins with:

I was speaking with a woman the other day who had recently been to Japan. She acknowledged that Japan is the “in” place to travel to and, as if to qualify this fact, complained that “Kyoto was so crowded, I couldn’t even get a photo of the Golden Pavilion because of all the Chinese tourists.” 

It’s convenient to blame Japan’s over-tourism (and bad tourist behavior) on the Chinese, but consider this: Parameters for tourists have been in place all over the world since well before the Chinese ever started traveling abroad. Such constraints still exist as some countries have realized the only way to control their guests’ behavior is by setting clear rules. Nowadays, travelers are so used to abiding by such precedents that we hardly notice them anymore. 

So why has punctilious Japan been slow to implement countermeasures to mitigate the effects of over-tourism here? When compared to places I’ve been recently, this country seems bereft of rules that elsewhere are considered travel industry standards. For example, why does Japan continue to allow group tour participants to run holus-bolus around temple grounds and sacred places? Such liberties are unheard of in, say, the cathedrals of Europe. In most other countries, you’d also likely be arrested if you defaced or damaged property. 

Indeed, this aggrieved and ill-prepared nation is not only blaming tourists, it is encouraging acrimony and feeding xenophobic sentiment by threatening to ban non-Japanese group travelers from specified venues — a harsh response from a nation that, in the 1980s, was renowned for its own ill-mannered tour groups abroad.

To read more, go here.