It took a decade of noise, trash and at least one tourist defecating on a resident’s lawn for the town of Fujiyoshida to declare a crisis.
This small city at the base of Japan’s Mt. Fuji made international headlines earlier this year when it cancelled its annual cherry blossom festival in a bid to return peace and order to its streets.
But the latest attempt to prevent what it calls “tourism pollution” hasn’t worked. Record numbers of foreign visitors are descending on the city this spring, lured by a weak yen and stunning pictures on social media.
“It used to be very quiet,” said tourism chief Masatoshi Hada. Behind him, a sea of tour groups pushes past the red tori gate that leads to the city’s famous 1,300-year-old shrine, the major attraction for this glut of people milling about in the neighbourhood.
Young couples pose with locally made ice cream. Kids trade Fuji apple slices. And just as Hada tells CBC’s camera crew that tourists seem to be littering less these days, a middle-aged mother takes a bag of trash from her purse and empties it off the side of a bridge.
Fujiyoshida’s fame — and for some, its current misfortune — began with a single photograph, a postcard-perfect image that’s been causing headaches for locals ever since it went viral about a decade ago.
“People see the combination of Mt. Fuji, the pagoda and cherry blossoms as something that represents Japan itself,” Hada said.
He shows us a map, pointing out where they’ve placed security guards to direct the flow of foot traffic. Dozens of pensioners in neon vests now wave through 13,000 people a day during peak season.
‘You have to get the picture’
The city learns more every year, he says: where to put trash cans and portable toilets, which streets to close to vehicles. They’re not banning tourism, Hada explains — they don’t want to gatekeep the blossoms. But at this point, they don’t want to promote the town with festivals, either.
Even the tourists themselves are overwhelmed by the crowds.
Californian Hazel Mulinyawe, 20, said she was drawn in by influencers online, but found the crush of people “a lot” to deal with. An Argentinian couple travelling across Japan on a working holiday visa said they were frustrated by the sheer number of sightseers concentrated in just a handful of spots, attractions popularized by TikTok and Instagram.
“You have to get the picture,” said Sebastian Rodriguez, gesturing at his phone. “But you lose the place.”
What’s happening to Fujiyoshida is being replicated in towns and neighbourhoods across Japan. Sarah Mizuguchi, founder of Tokyo-based Shun Tours, describes a severe downturn in the “quality” of tourists over the last decade, and says it’s only compounding the annoyance of those who live here.
“They want to eat the same food, they want to go to the same attractions, and they want to shoot the same Instagrammable photo,” she said.
Mizuguchi’s solution: smaller tour groups that teach visitors about Japanese culture, with its emphasis on public order and good manners.
Understanding tourist behaviour
But Yusuke Ishiguro, an associate professor at Hokkaido University who studies travel hotspots around the world, has a more pessimistic view of tourist behaviour, and insists only reservation systems and lotteries can combat the worst effects of overtourism.
It’s about limiting the number of people in one place, he says, rather than trying, in vain, to educate them.
“It doesn’t work,” he said. “The tourist always wants to do whatever they want.”
More Canadians are travelling to Japan than ever before, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization, and they’re part of record arrivals. This March was the country’s busiest ever, with more than 3.6 million people passing through.
But as Japan has its “For You page” moment, some communities are pushing back. Gion, a historic district in Kyoto, threatened to fine content creators who intrude on its ancient alleyways. And Fujikawaguchiko, another town with a pristine view of Japan’s iconic mountain, erected black tarps to prevent hordes of people from taking the same viral picture of a convenience store.
It’s not just communities that suffer when a place is swept up in a storm of algorithms and hashtags, says Lauren Siegel, a senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich. While it’s hard for everyone, including Siegel, to resist building a trip around top-tier Instagram posts, it also hollows out the experience of travel, reducing the adventure to a digital commodity.
It’s a “circle of self-representation,” Siegel said. “You’re travelling, you see a beautiful place online — it’s geotagged, so you know exactly where the picture was taken. You then travel to that same place, create the same type of content … there is no value added in your experience.”
Local benefits
Despite three-hour lines to the observation deck of Fujiyoshida’s shrine, the city is at least seeing some added value from all the chaos.
Fujiyoshida says more hotels and restaurants have sprung up in recent years, creating jobs that entice people to take up residence there. The boom, officials say, is actually helping the community battle population decline, which is a serious social problem across rural Japan. And not everybody in town minds it, either.
Mori Hitoshi has lived in the same house at the bottom of the shrine for all 94 years of his life. It never used to be like this: the noise, people constantly walking past his neat, shady yard. He says there are more foreigners here now than Japanese.
But he’s gotten used to it. After all, there aren’t many places like this in the world. It’s good, Hitoshi tells us, that people want to visit, to experience the beauty his hometown has to offer.
“I mean, people are going to come,” he said, shrugging as if to say: shouganai: “You can’t stop it.”
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