Japan’s Undertourism Problem

Heard the popular narrative that Japan has a chronic overtourism problem? It’s not true, and I believe this framing is both destructive and an obstruction to the huge opportunity that inbound tourism presents to the struggling under-touristed regions of Japan.

Overtourism is a problem — where it exists

This article is not an attempt to diminish the negative effects of overtourism. Degradation of natural environments, damage to historical buildings, and disruption of local communities are genuine problems. The poster child for this in Japan is the ancient capital of Kyoto. Kyoto isn’t just a tourist wonderland, it’s home to 1.5 million residents who need to catch the bus, or pay their rent. The problem is that elsewhere in Japan, the term is conflated with “a large number of foreign tourists”. Lots of tourists isn’t the same thing as overtourism.

Is Tokyo suffering from overtourism?

No.The Kanto region, of which Tokyo is the biggest part, is home to approximately 43 million people, which coincidentally matches the number of guest nights by foreign tourists in 2023. As overwhelming as that number sounds, that’s the resident population of the region on any given day versus the number of tourist nights in a whole year. That means that on any day, residents out number tourists by as much as 365 to 1 — hardly a tsunami.

The overtourism boogey man also reared its head before Halloween this year, when both Shibuya and Shinjuku wards implemented countermeasures to address the perceived hordes of costumed foreign tourists. So let’s take a quick look at Shibuya and Shinjuku through the overtourism lense. Both are mega shopping, commercial, and entertainment districts designed to serve hundreds of thousands to millions of visitors each day. Given that there are very few to no residents near the places where overcrowding has been happening for decades, the disrupting local communities claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Neither can claim to have a natural environment worth preserving and historical buildings and precincts are mainly re-creations.

Maybe there needs to be a bit more honesty. The thing both wards have a problem with is behaviour like drinking in the streets that they perceive to be driven by foreigners. Both cite surveys which seem to consist of people walking around and doing a rough count. Whether they’re visitors, foreign residents, multi-cultural Japanese citizens or foreign-looking Japanese, it doesn’t seem to matter. WHatever the cause, overtourism this clearly is not.

How about Asakusa?

Unlike Shibuya and Shinjuku, Asakusa is a neighbourhood with a long history and a vibrant local community. However, the tourist crush is almost exclusively limited to the area around the station and the Nakamise Dori approach to Sensoji Temple. Nakamise Dori has been lined with souvenir shops since the late 17th century. The street is and has been (for the last 25 years that I remember) intensely crowded with tourists. But the idea that Asakusa locals might be crowded out from the souvenir shops is absurd. Moreover, take any parallel or perpendicular avenue from Nakamise Dori, and the crowds quickly thin out to almost nothing.

Tokyo has a capacity problem not an overtourism problem

Domestic tourists have a legitimate complaint about Tokyo and unlike their foreign counterparts, they can vote. The massive rise in foreign tourist arrivals has had one very clear impact. Hotels in the capital cost a fortune. On average, Tokyo business hotels are roughly 50% more expensive than they were in 2019. This is clearly due to the inbound tourism surge, but it’s not like Tokyo doesn’t have plenty of places to build new hotels. Do you blame the tourists for coming or the developers and urban planners for being too slow to build new hotels?

Wait, isn’t this article about undertourism?

Indeed it is, but as with the political discourse, this article has fallen for the shiny distraction of overtourism! The same report cited above on visitor nights shows the stark difference between the hot spots of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto and the rest of the country. The whole region of Tohoku — consisting of the top half of the island of Honshu – receives just 3.4% of the number of foreign visitor stays that the Kanto region does.

Almost without exception, Japan’s regions are stuck in an inevitable downward spiral of economic decline and depopulation. Inbound tourism is the perfect solution for these problems. It’s not a product problem either — the regions are filled with stunning landscapres and rich cultural traditions. The missing ingredient is awareness. Outside of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima, awareness of Japan’s regional cities and countryside is extremely limited. National, regional, prefectural, and municipal level Destination Marketing Organisations pump billions of yen into glossy videos and shiny pamphlets — that nobody watches or reads. So what’s the answer?

New Zealand: Land of Hobbits

Just three films produced by Peter Jackson in New Zealand more than 20 years ago continue to attract visitors to the regions of New Zealand. The set of Hobbiton is located on a farm in the middle of nowhere but attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors. New Zealand’s Southern Alps also attract millions of visitors looking for a slice of “Middle Earth”. Japan’s natural assets, outside the big cities are at least as impressive as those of New Zealand and much easier to access. 2024 saw the huge critical success of the Shogun reboot, bringing Japan and Japanese culture to a broad western audience. But where was it filmed? Yep. Canada. If a fraction of the regional promotional budget went into encouraging international productions to film in the Japanese countryside, the awareness issue, and Japan’s undertourism problem, would both be solved.