Wedging myself away from the crowd, I escaped Nishiki Market through a backstreet exit, leaving behind the hordes of foreign tourists trudging onward shoulder to shoulder. What should have been a simple grocery run felt instead like I had accidentally stepped into the queue for It’s a Small World at Disneyland.
Gone were the weekday mornings when you could leisurely push your bicycle through the arcade, admiring the meticulously arranged displays of fresh meat, fish, and produce while inhaling the scents—both pungent and sweet—of teas, Japanese confections, and prepared foods. Now many of the shops that once served as Kyoto’s Kitchen have been converted into Japanese tapas bars for foreign tourists wanting a taste of Kyotica.
Near where I had parked my bicycle sat a diminutive, gray‑haired Japanese obaasan on her shopping trolley, wearing a kimono tucked neatly beneath a kappōgi apron. Having just fought through the mob myself, I understood her look of dread as she gathered the energy to stand up and enter the arena.
“Konnichi‑wa,” I greeted her, bowing slightly before slipping in behind her to unlock my bicycle.
“Konnichi‑wa,” she responded, unfazed that I was a foreigner. “Era’i kotcha. Nishiki mo nigiyaka ya na. Gaikoku no hito, yō Nihon ni ki haru wa.” (“Goodness me. Nishiki is certainly bustling today. So many foreigners are coming to Japan these days.”)
She tilted her head slightly, as if wondering whether I had caught her drift. That tilt communicated all I needed to know: her comment about the foreigners was far from flattering.
“Ugokahen na. Kyō, ojako kau no ni sanjuppun kakaru wa.” (“The crowd isn’t moving, is it? It took me thirty minutes just to buy some baby sardines.”)
I hoped I had landed the sentence‑ending wa properly. Men in Kansai can use wa without sounding feminine, but the intonation has to be right. Her wry smile told me that I had—or at least that she approved of the effort.
I had felt the same anxiety upon arriving in Honolulu, my home before coming to Japan. There, I had to learn new words and the proper Island pronunciation of old ones, beginning with the state’s name, Hawai‘i. Even after mastering its pronunciation, I had to learn to stop moving my head like a bobblehead every time I said it.
To me, Honolulu and Kyoto—my two adopted homes—both have their own distinctive language and culture, but as I hear the quiet grumbling in Kyoto, I can’t help remembering my life in Honolulu and the many aspects that the two cities share.
The Overtourism Everyone Forgets
“They don’t bother to learn our culture.”
“They treat our home like a theme park.”
“They only speak their language and expect everyone to understand.”
“They stay in their own bubble.”
You may have already guessed that these words were spoken by residents of Kyoto, and you would not be wrong, but residents of Spain, Italy, Bali, and Greece, to name a few, have also echoed them like a city planner’s mantra. I first heard them while living in the Rainbow State during the 1980s, long before the term “overtourism” had even been coined.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the height of Japan’s bubble economy, Japanese tourists arrived in Hawai‘i in record numbers. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of Japanese visitors more than doubled.
In Waikiki, Japanese tourists became an extraordinarily visible presence. They filled hotels, restaurants, shopping centers, buses, and beaches, all the while using disposable cameras to perfect the art of the selfie long before iPhones and selfie sticks ever existed. Japanese office ladies lugged oversized suitcases through hotel lobbies. Dive bars along Waikiki, with their three‑dollar happy‑hour drinks and free pupus, disappeared, giving way to duty‑free shops and designer boutiques. McDonald’s added sōmen noodles to its menu. Storefront signs that had once been only in English appeared in Japanese as well.
Even the streetwalkers understood the need to learn Japanese. I once watched as a tall, blonde in shorts and tube top tease a group of Japanese university students, calling out, “Gakusei waribiki!” (“Student discount!”) as she was walking along Kalākaua Avenue.
What I hated was that she spoke better Japanese than I did.
The giant tour buses were impossible to miss. They circled O‘ahu nonstop, ferrying visitors to destinations such as the Dole Plantation, Hanauma Bay, and the Polynesian Cultural Center. From behind their tinted windows, Japanese tourists photographed everyday scenes with the enthusiasm of safari‑goers spotting exotic wildlife: a girl carrying a boogie board, a Hawaiian‑Portuguese family having a barbecue in the park, or a yellow school bus pulling away from a local elementary school.
Aside from feeling as though their daily lives had been turned into a TV reality show, residents faced deeper concerns. Japanese companies were buying hotels, condominiums, golf courses, retail properties, and other pieces of Hawai‘i itself, crowding out opportunities for people who lived there. To some, the Islands seemed to be turning into Japan’s forty‑eighth prefecture, and some Japanese visitors behaved as if they already had.
Ironically, that same investment helped shield Hawai‘i from the S&L crisis that plunged much of the Mainland economy into recession, demonstrating that the relationship with Japan was often mutually beneficial.
For those working downtown, like I was, there were locals acting as intermediaries with the Japanese property owners, but at the frontlines the frustration was real. I remember visiting a friend working at the DFS Galleria, who suddenly turned to me and said, “I hate these damn Japanese people.”
“But Yoshi, you’re Japanese American.”
“I know. That’s why I feel so conflicted.”
Now I know how Yoshi felt. Whenever I walk along the crowded sidewalks of Shijō, I often get shoulder‑bumped by some foreign man unwilling to yield “his” space, even as I’m turning sideways to avoid him. In those moments, I catch myself saying, “How I hate foreigners.”
And recently, at Fushimi Inari, I saw an American man park his butt on a ceremonial offering table while posing for a photo in front of a small shrine, and I found myself running toward him before I even realized what I was doing.
“No, no, no, you can’t do that!”
“Oh, is this wrong?”
Duh.
Been There, Done It
Like Kyoto residents today, what many residents in Hawai‘i felt was not true hostility toward Japanese people but a sense of helplessness in the face of rapid change. They watched familiar places cater increasingly more to visitors and investors while their cultural heritage and way of life were commercialized, packaged, and sold for the entertainment of Japanese consumers, much as they had been for visitors from the Mainland.
The Aloha Spirit may have become a marketing slogan, but it was rooted in ho‘okipa, the Hawaiian tradition of welcoming guests with generosity and care. What many feared was that a genuine expression of welcome, as simple as placing a lei around a visitor’s neck, was being commoditized. Beneath the grumbling lay a deeper anxiety: that prosperity was coming at the expense of identity and the freedom to live their own lives.
Over time, Hawai‘i learned through great difficulties that the tourism industry required more than emotional venting. Civic leaders realized that a healthy visitor economy depended on residents maintaining a positive attitude toward visitors, and achieving this would require residents to feel respected, heard, and included in the decision‑making. Most local residents recognized the economic benefits of tourism, as long as it was managed responsibly.
Despite decades of efforts to diversify the economy, tourism remained, and still remains, the stream that sustains island life. The challenge was never whether tourism should exist. The challenge was how to channel its benefits while protecting the natural beauty, cultural heritage, and communities that gave the Islands their character.
The answer many eventually embraced was rooted in aloha itself.
Aloha is often misunderstood as nothing more than a greeting. In Hawaiian culture, however, it represents a deeply held belief about one’s responsibilities to both people and place. The ancient kahunas taught that living with aloha meant sharing positive energy with everyone and everything in one’s environment. For the ali‘i, aloha represented a balance of empathy and discipline. Respect flowed upward from the people, while responsibility flowed downward from leaders entrusted with the care of land, resources, and communities.
That principle survives in the phrase Aloha ‘Āina, love of the land. More than affection, it implies stewardship and obligation. Protecting beaches, reefs, watersheds, cultural sites, and neighborhoods was therefore inseparable from tourism policy. For many residents, it was tourism policy.
Residents made clear that what they wanted was not less tourism but responsible and regenerative growth. They wanted a visitor industry that protected access to beaches, roads, cultural landscapes, and local communities while managing crowds before they became disruptive. They wanted tourism’s economic benefits to flow visibly to local businesses, workers, cultural organizations, and public infrastructure. They also wanted visitors to arrive with a better understanding of Hawai‘i itself: its place names, history, customs, and responsibilities.
From those principles flowed a gentle messaging that invited visitors to share in these resident priorities, reflecting the spirit of aloha through positive reminders that hospitality and responsibility flow together—and it always ended with that one beautiful phrase:
“Mahalo for your kōkua.”
If Hawai‘i is famous for the spirit of aloha, Japan is famous for omotenashi, hospitality. Kyoto is especially known for a style of omotenashi shaped by centuries of ritual, etiquette, and unwritten social rules. To foreign visitors, however, that world of nuance is often reduced to a handful of simple prohibitions:
“Don’t take photos.” “Don’t eat while walking.” “Don’t block the streets.”
For the average, well‑meaning tourist, a wall of prohibitions strips away the joy of hospitality and replaces it with a low‑grade anxiety that they are constantly breaking an invisible rule. For a small minority indifferent to rules or manners, however, a “Don’t” sign can become an invitation, marking the exact boundary of acceptable behavior and daring them to challenge it.
A more effective approach is to invite visitors to become partners in preserving a historic neighborhood and to see it as a living community rather than a theme park. Most people willingly accept restrictions when they understand their purpose. For the few who do not, a visible police presence and a willingness to enforce laws protecting safety and property are essential.
Hawai‘i eventually learned that tourism was not a temporary phenomenon but a permanent reality. The conversation shifted from grumbling about tourists to managing tourism. Kyoto has begun moving in that direction, but it has yet to fully embrace a similarly regenerative vision.
Few places on earth possess such an extraordinary concentration of cultural resources as Kyoto. Just as Hawai‘i placed the beauty of its islands at the center of the visitor experience, Kyoto’s appeal lies in its living culture. That living culture cannot be found in projection‑mapped temple walls or seasonal illuminations, but in the thousands of volunteers who preserve traditions such as Aoi Matsuri, Gion Matsuri, and Jidai Matsuri, along with the tea practitioners, flower arrangement instructors, shrine parishioners, okamisans, and ordinary citizens who quietly sustain Kyoto’s culture and heritage.
Visitors should leave Kyoto not merely with photographs, but with an understanding of the people and traditions that made them possible.
Undoubtedly, a surge in tourism brings its share of frustrations, but beneath many of them lies something deeper: the fear of change itself. Yes, I miss the dive bars across from Waikiki Beach, the tofu ice cream at Nishiki Market, and the ease of approaching a maiko‑san on the street for a photograph. But the obaasan and I each have our own memories of a Kyoto that no longer exists. It is time for the next generation to make their own.
Besides, Kyoto obaasans are tougher than they look. Anyone standing near a bus exit when they are getting off will tell you that.