Why Japan resents its tourism boom
Foreign visitor numbers have grown more than fivefold, but for some the surge is a reminder of the country’s economic malaise
Leo Lewis and Harry Dempsey in Tokyo
Just before 5pm, the evening sunlight on Sagami Bay is picture perfect.
Joshua Li, poised on the pavement in a three-piece suit, starts his run past a security guard to the middle of the road.
His fiancée follows, a stylist hoisting the folds of her gown on the way.
A crowd of dozens of tourists, spilling into the traffic, gives the Taiwanese couple a respectful 10 seconds for their photos before pouring on to the narrow street for their own pictures against a sought-after backdrop: the Kamakurakokomae railway crossing.
Sited near a heavily concreted stretch of beachfront, it happens to be the opening frame of one of Japan’s most famous manga comics.
“We are both huge fans of Slam Dunk, and it’s kind of how we met,” says Li, now safely back on the overcrowded pavement with his bride-to-be.
“This is one of 12 different manga and anime scenes we are visiting for the wedding pictures.”
The couple’s joy as visitors, though, is not necessarily shared by their hosts.
Taking a cue from European cities such as Barcelona and Venice, residents of Japan’s most congested hotspots like Kyoto, Nara and Osaka have started talking about a crisis of overtourism.
The issue has even featured in the contest to elect a new leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
The numbers certainly bear them out. Annual foreign visitor arrivals to Japan have surged from just 6.7mn in 2005 to nearly 37mn in 2024, with 2025 already on track to be another record year.
On one level, the pair’s town-hopping, manga-inspired itinerary is the sort of thing Japan has been actively encouraging for many years.
Successive governments have taken advantage of international fandom for Japanese culture and mounted well-funded campaigns to lure foreign visitors, helped by showpiece events such as the Covid-delayed 2020 Olympics in Tokyo and the current World Expo in Osaka.
The government has set a target of 60mn annual visitors by 2030, implying an increase of roughly 50 per cent from current numbers.
There are plenty of merchants who are benefiting from the steep rise in arrivals and Japan has not, so far, resorted to the public protests seen in some Spanish and Italian cities.
But at another level, the continual scrums outside the Kamakurakokomae crossing and other popular spots around the country, along with some visitors’ unruliness, noise and failure to observe Japan’s intricate rules and etiquette, have begun to test its cherished omotenashi, or hospitality.
In Kamakura, a seaside city south of Tokyo that was once Japan’s capital, Japanese and foreign visitors outnumbered permanent inhabitants more than 90 times over last year.
Tourists tend to concentrate their trips on a relatively narrow “golden route” through Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka — adding to the sense of excessive crowding, focusing local grievances and irritating the parts of the country that have yet to feel any of the economic glow.
Locals are bristling about rising prices and unaffordable residential rents.
“Success as a tourist country has come a bit too quickly for a lot of people in Japan,” says another wedding photographer, as he waits for the next change of lights with a Thai couple.
“People have gone from calling it an ‘inbound boom’ to calling it overtourism in just a few years, and there have been a lot of complaints . . . about tourists behaving weirdly,” the photographer adds.
“But I think the main problem is that nobody was really prepared.”
The furore may reveal far more about Japan’s ageing, shrinking population and its relative economic decline than it does about the behaviour and volume of tourists, according to Toshinori Tanaka, a researcher on tourism issues at Kyushu University.
“Overtourism is of course a capacity issue, but there is a big psychological factor,” he says of a country that once dispatched hordes of tourists around the world.
“Japan is now cheap for outsiders, and people feel it is being taken advantage of.”
The recent prevalence of the term overtourism — along with the uglier kanko kogai or “tourist pollution” that has proliferated as a social media hashtag — raises questions over whether either is being used legitimately.
Daisuke Abe, a specialist in public policy at Ryukoku University, says that while overtourism basically refers to the disruption of ordinary people’s lives or the spoiling of the tourist experience, it remains unclear whether much of Japan has yet crossed this line.
A big part of the increase in overseas tourist arrivals relates to a relaxation of visa rules for Chinese and other Asian visitors about a decade ago, and the huge expansion of the international flight capacity at Tokyo’s Haneda airport.
The weak yen, which has fallen by about 45 per cent against the dollar since the end of 2010, has been a powerful magnet and helped erase Japan’s old image as an overly expensive destination.
It has also suppressed the ability of younger Japanese to travel overseas and compelled them to take domestic holidays instead.
Japan’s baby boomers, who stomped round tourist hotspots in large groups toting the latest cameras during the country’s economic peak in the 1980s, are now in their late seventies — and are as likely to be providing care to elderly spouses as they are jet-setting round the world.
For the over-75s, who now represent roughly 16 per cent of Japan’s population, the arrival each winter of tens of thousands of young Australians on low-cost flights for cheap skiing in Japan merely exacerbates the sense of economic humiliation, Tanaka says.
“Nobody likes being told by tourists how cheap everything is, when not long ago Japan was the most expensive country in the world.”
The result is that more Japanese visitors are now rubbing shoulders with more foreign ones at many of the country’s main tourist spots, resulting in surging prices.
The average cost of rooms in the hotels tracked by Tokyo Shoko Research, an independent market research group, has more than doubled since 2021.
Rates at the top establishments in popular cities have increased by even more.
Key locations, particularly the most popular temples, in the ancient capital of Kyoto are so busy that many Japanese have come to regard the cultural and culinary hotspot, famed for its traditional Geisha entertainers, as no longer worth visiting.
That city in particular, says Abe, may have satisfied a definition of overtourism that means normal life is no longer possible for its inhabitants.
Organisers of domestic school trips say they have started to notice schools choosing other cities over Kyoto, a city where visits were once regarded as a rite of passage for Japanese children.
“The problem for students and teachers visiting Kyoto is that it nowadays takes a lot of time to move from one part of the city to another, and sometimes they end up not being able to visit all the sites they intended to,” says the Japan School Trip Association.
Many schools were now exploring alternatives such as Kanazawa, Nagasaki and Hokkaido.
“It’s not just the number of tourists, but the rising costs that have made it difficult for schools to continue going to Kyoto,” it adds.
Abe acknowledges that employment and consumption are increasing and that the boom is economically positive.
“But in certain parts of Kyoto, the very existence of tourism feels negative,” he adds.
“The number of hotels has increased so sharply that rents have risen and people cannot live there, and there is no real sense that the lives of Kyoto residents are improving.
“If we just keep pushing forward with tourism for the sake of its economic benefits, the downsides will just become more and more obvious,” he concludes.
This is not the first time Japanese media have declared an overtourism crisis.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, with the economy booming, high-speed trains connecting big cities and disposable income in everyone’s pockets, young families began taking domestic trips en masse.
In contrast to the modern perception of Japan as an exceptionally neat, clean and orderly country with impeccable manners, those early tourists were often spectacularly messy and high spirited when holidaying around their own country.
Conservatives balked at the apparent desecration of Kyoto, Nara and other sites. Newspapers carried opinion pieces decrying the tourism pollution.
In one notorious 1971 article, the anthropologist Tadao Umesao declared that “the most frightening thing is that people living in places known as tourist destinations, by becoming conscious of tourism, forget that they are the protagonists of their own land and culture, and start becoming the servants of strangers”.
In 2025 a version of that same dismay, stoked by the sense that foreign visitors are unable or unwilling to grasp the importance Japanese attach to rules and manners, has become a favourite source of online anger, occasionally tinged with xenophobia, by Japanese who now feel besieged in their own cities.
Viral videos of tourists eager for a photo chasing Geisha through the streets of Kyoto, or swinging on the sacred torii gates, of littering, rudeness on trains, of suitcase abandonment, graffiti and other infractions, have created the impression of a greater onslaught than is truly the case, say tourism experts in Kyoto.
Chieko Tanaka, a Kyoto-based advocate of better relations between tourists and residents, has produced a substantial set of recommendations for the improvement of tourist behaviour and how Japan itself should respond, called the Touristship Action Guide.
A more accessible version of the 90-page book is due out soon.
“When I came to Kyoto, I saw a lot of tourists whose behaviour was loud, and who made the city crowded, and I also saw local residents not welcoming them,” Tanaka says.
“I realised that this was something that required a new word, so I want to introduce the world to the idea of Touristship.
It’s like sportsmanship — a code of proper behaviour — but for tourists,” she adds.
“Japan’s issue isn’t overtourism — it’s touristphobia.”
Her coining of the phrase touristphobia, say political analysts, is particularly apt as the theme has taken on a clear political dimension.
There has always been a strong undercurrent of anti-Chinese feeling baked into the anti-tourist sentiment, says one organiser of package tours from Shanghai.
The issue of tourist behaviour has already emerged as a favourite theme for the new generation of populist politicians and a key point of debate in the LDP leadership election.
As Japan has aged and its population has shrunk, its labour shortages have become increasingly acute, creating new demand for an immigrant workforce to fill the vacancies.
The resulting influx of foreign residents, who now represent about 3 per cent of the total population of Japan, has created its own set of political rumblings and has been seized on by the right wing as an impending calamity for the country as a whole.
Some politicians have managed to conflate the short-term annoyances caused by tourists behaving inappropriately with the longer-term warnings about the impact of mass immigration on life as Japan knows it.
Sanae Takaichi, the arch conservative LDP politician — and former minister of state for the soft-power, tourist-attracting “Cool Japan” strategy launched in 2013 — is the frontrunner in a race that could result in her becoming the country’s first female prime minister.
In the opening press conference of her campaign, Takaichi, who has taken a strong line against immigration, repeated allegations of widespread abuse by foreigners of the sacred deer that roam the ancient city of Nara — despite local officials saying they have no reports to that effect.
“I want to address the quietly growing sense of anxiety and anger that many Japanese people are starting to feel,” she said.
If Japan is to prevent that public anxiety becoming worse, alleviate the effects of overcrowding and spread the positive economics of tourism more widely, say experts, it needs to encourage two things.
One is repeat visits by tourists who no longer need to see the most popular sites.
Another is better infrastructure to encourage tourists to explore the many parts of Japan — a country that stretches over 3,000 kilometres from Hokkaido in the north to Kagoshima in the south — that are still comparatively untouched by foreign visitors.
That may be much easier said than done.
Fukui prefecture, north-east of Kyoto, boasts a world-class dinosaur museum, a Zen Buddhist temple where Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once aspired to become a monk, and dozens of sake breweries — all the ingredients to attract foreign tourists to Japan and be the antidote to overcrowding in Kyoto.
Yet Fukui has languished as Japan’s second least-visited prefecture by foreign tourists, as measured by hotel stays.
The region’s hopes of becoming a more regular fixture on the tourist map were lifted last year when Japan’s bullet train was extended from Tokyo to Fukui City, cutting journey time down by an hour to less than three hours and eliminating any changeovers.
But Tomoko Mineyama, a 20-year veteran at Fukui station’s tourist information booth, which was split into two in expectation of a surge in visitors, says there has only been a “marginal increase” and it was most definitely “not overtourism here”.
“I thought things would change with the bullet train but the increase has been far less than I had expected,” she says, adding that only about five to 10 foreign tourists made enquiries each day compared with Japanese visitors that can range from 80 to 300 per day.
Her diagnosis of the problem was that the number and quality of hotels had vastly improved but public transport to access the dispersion of attractions scattered across Fukui’s countryside was lagging behind.
Even if it is successful in hauling more tourists in, Fukui faces the reality of an acute demographic crisis: it has the worst labour shortage in Japan, with the largest number of job openings per jobseeker.
But as of now, the shortage being felt by the hotels and inns is not workers but visitors.
“We still don’t have nearly enough tourists,” says Shigeru Saigyo, Fukui City’s mayor.
“I haven’t really heard of situations where there were too many tourists and not enough staff to handle them.”
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