LETTER FROM KYOTO
Just as the maple trees have begun to redden and the ginkgos have assumed a blaze of golden yellow, foreign tourists have begun to return to the former Japanese imperial capital. Kyoto is the cradle of Japan's identity through its history, art and sacred character and is situated in a magnificent natural environment. It has, over the course of just a few years, become a magnet for mass tourism from abroad. The surge has upset the peaceful and refined atmosphere of this city of 2,000 temples and shrines, where the past sustains the present so intensely that it appears to have escaped time.
Starting just as the pandemic got underway in March 2020, the sudden drop in foreign mass tourism was initially accompanied by a sense of relief among the locals. In the preceding years, Kyoto had suffered the full impact of the ambition of the previous prime minister, Shinzo Abe (2012-2020), to increase the annual number of foreign visitors to the archipelago to 40 million by 2020 and 60 million by 2030. After the drastic decrease of the last three years, the government of Fumio Kishida has revived these objectives and intends to attract more than 40 million tourists in 2025, the year of the World Expo in Osaka.
For many years, Kyoto saw mainly Japanese tourists and was the primary destination for groups of high school students exploring the richness of their national culture. Then, from 500,000 in 2008, the number of foreign tourists reached 10 million a decade later.
New routes with signage
Although they represented a minority of the 50 million total visitors to Kyoto in 2019, the influx of foreigners has affected the lives of locals. With them have come traffic jams, public transportation cluttered with bulky luggage, garbage left in the streets and in gardens, flashbulb photos catching maiko (geisha apprentices) rushing in the early evening to various traditional restaurants and groups of people clustering in front of the stalls of goods and foods that line the narrow covered passageway of the picturesque, 400-year-old Nishiki market, disrupting the activities of the merchants.
Even small residential areas had begun to suffer from the rather intrusive presence of foreign tourists staying in the local Airbnbs. Such rentals flourished to the point where the municipality had to take severe measures to regulate private accommodations. The brightly colored kimonos rented by tourists also gave the downtown an aura of a Disneyland-for-adults. And, as in Venice, what had been an inconvenience to the locals turned into a source of frustration.
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