This Japanese city has canceled its cherry blossom festival to stop over-tourism. It didn’t work
It took a decade of noise, trash and at least one tourist defecating on a resident’s lawn for the city of Fujiyoshida to declare a problem.
This small town at the foot of Mt. Fuji in Japan made headlines around the world earlier this year when it canceled its annual cherry blossom festival in an effort to restore peace and order to its streets.
But a recent effort to curb what it calls “tourism pollution” has not worked. Record numbers of foreign tourists are descending on the city this spring, lured by a weak yen and great photos on social media.
“It used to be very quiet,” said tourism official Masatoshi Hada. Behind him, a sea of tourist groups pass through the red gate that leads to the city’s 1,300-year-old shrine, the main attraction of this throng of people passing through the neighborhood.
Young couples stand with locally made ice cream. Children trade Fuji apple slices. And just as Hada tells the CBC camera crew that tourists seem to throw away less trash these days, a middle-aged mother takes a bag of trash from her purse and dumps it on the side of the bridge.
Fujiyoshida’s fame – and for some, his current misfortune – began with a single, postcard-perfect image that has been causing headaches for locals since the virus emerged nearly a decade ago.
“People see the combination of Mt. Fuji, pagoda and cherry blossoms as something that represents Japan itself,” Hada said.
He shows us a map, indicating where they have posted security guards to direct pedestrian traffic. The crowd of pensioners wearing neon vests now hovers around 13,000 people a day during the year.
‘You have to get a picture’
The city learns more every year, he says: where to put garbage cans and portable toilets, which are roads to block traffic. They don’t stop tourism, Hada explains – they don’t want to guard the flowers. But this time, they don’t want to promote the city with festivals, either.
Even the tourists themselves are surrounded by crowds.
Hazel Mulinyawe, 20, from California, said she was attracted to online influencers, but found “a lot” of crushes to deal with. An Argentinian couple traveling through Japan on a working holiday visa said they were frustrated by the large number of tourists concentrated in a few places, popular with TikTok and Instagram.
“You have to get a picture,” Sebastian Rodriguez said, pointing to his phone. “But you’re losing ground.”
What happened in Fujiyoshida is being repeated in cities and nearby areas all over Japan. Sarah Mizuguchi, founder of Tokyo-based Shun Tours, describes a sharp decline in the “quality” of tourists over the past decade, and says it only adds to the resentment 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 picture,” she said.
Mizuguchi’s solution: small tour groups teach visitors about Japanese culture, with its emphasis on social order and good manners.
Understanding visitor behavior
But Yusuke Ishiguro, an associate professor at Hokkaido University who studies the world’s most popular tourist destinations, has a more pessimistic view of tourist behavior, and insists that only reservation systems and lotteries can combat the worst effects of overtourism.
It’s about reducing the population to 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 he wants.”
More Canadians are visiting Japan than ever before, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization, and they are among the most visited in history. This March was the busiest in the country, with over 3.6 million people passing through.
But as Japan has its “For You” moment, other societies are pushing back. Gion, a historic district in Kyoto, has inspired creative content creators to enter the streets of old. And Fujikawaguchiko, another town with a pristine view of Japan’s iconic mountain, erected black tarps to prevent crowds from taking the same photo of a convenience store.
It’s not just communities that suffer when the landscape is swept away by the storm of algorithms and hashtags, says Lauren Siegel, senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich. While it’s difficult for everyone, including Siegel, to resist building a journey around top-rated Instagram posts, it also blocks the experience of the journey, reducing the journey to a digital object.
“It’s a circle of independence,” Siegel said. “You go, you see a beautiful place on the Internet – geotagged, so you know exactly where the photo was taken. Then you go to that place, create the same kind of content … there is no added value to your experience.”
Local benefits
Despite the three-hour lines to Fujiyoshida’s shrine observatory, the city at least sees some added value in all the chaos.
Fujiyoshida says that many hotels and restaurants have sprung up in recent years, creating job opportunities that entice people to live there. This, officials say, actually helps reduce the number of people in civil war, which is a major social problem in all rural areas of Japan. And not everyone in town thinks so, either.
Mori Hitoshi has lived in the same house at the foot of the temple for the entire 94 years of his life. It had never been like this: noise, people walking through his clean and shady yard. He says there are more foreigners here now than Japanese.
But he’s used to it. After all, there are no places like this in the world. It’s good, Hitoshi tells us, that people want to visit, to experience the beauty of their hometown.
“I mean, people will come,” he said, stepping back as if to say: shouganai: “You can’t stop it.”
