Wedging myself away from the crowd, I fled Nishiki Market through a backstreet exit, leaving behind the hordes of foreign tourists trudging onward shoulder to shoulder. Rather than a trip for groceries, the experience felt as though 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 various teas, Japanese confections, and prepared foods.
Near where I had parked my bicycle sat a diminutive, gray-haired Japanese woman in a kimono covered by a kappōgi apron, perched on her shopping trolley and watching the wall of people in front of her. Having just fought through the mob simply to buy ojako (baby sardines) and tofu, I understood the dread the elderly woman must have felt as she summoned the energy to stand up and enter the arena.
“Konnichi-wa,” I greeted the obaasan, 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-final wa properly. Men in Kansai can use wa at the end of a sentence 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 moving to Honolulu 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. Amazingly enough, instead of being rebuked with “Small kine tryin’, brah,” all my new friends—Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, and Samoan—told me the same thing: “We no longer think of you as the haole from the Mainland. You are simply the haole now.”
Honolulu and Kyoto—two adopted homes, each with its own distinctive language and culture, yet bound by a shared tradition of welcoming the world while quietly grumbling about it.
The Overtourism Everyone Forgets
“They don’t bother to learn our culture.”
“They have bad manners.”
“They treat our home like a theme park.”
“They suddenly speak their language and expect everyone to understand.”
“They stay in their own bubble.”
“They’re buying up all the commercial property in town.”
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 recited them like a 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 swarms not seen since Pearl Harbor. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of Japanese visitors more than doubled.
Japanese tourists became an extraordinarily visible presence in Waikiki. They filled hotels, restaurants, shopping centers, buses, and beaches, all the while pioneering the art of selfies long before iPhones and selfie sticks 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 recognized the need to learn Japanese. I once heard a tall, scantily clad blonde tease a group of Japanese university students walking down Kalākaua Avenue by calling out, “Gakusei waribiki!” (“Student discount!”)
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 Pineapple 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 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 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 dealing with these damn Japanese people.”
“But Yoshi, you’re Japanese American.”
“I know. That’s why I feel so conflicted.”
I now know how he felt. Whenever I walk along the crowded sidewalks of Shijō, I often get intentionally shoulder-bumped by some foreign man unwilling to share any space even as I’m trying to turn to the side to avoid him. More recently, while at Fushimi Inari, I saw an American man parking his butt on a ceremonial offering table while posing for a photo in front of a small shrine, and I started running toward him.
“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 hostility toward Japanese people so much as helplessness in the face of rapid change. They watched familiar places cater increasingly 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 feeling respected, heard, and included in decision-making. Most local residents recognized the economic benefits of tourism, provided 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 kahuna 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 not separate 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.
Their gentle messaging invited visitors to share in these aspirations, reflecting the spirit of aloha through positive reminders that welcome and responsibility must flow together, and always ending with one beautiful phrase:
“Mahalo for your cooperation.”
While most tourists are generally understanding and cooperative, there are always a handful who are not. We’ll call them the “other guys.”
They come from every country, religion, ethnicity, gender, and political persuasion imaginable. They share one distinguishing characteristic: they’re jerks.
I have a theory, admittedly unsupported by any scientific evidence, that these “other guys” emerged from a different pool of primordial soup than the rest of us, except theirs was simmering a few degrees hotter. Ever since, they have carried a genetic mutation that renders them permanently incapable of being convinced, satisfied, or cooperative.
Because these “other guys” exist, cities often panic and build their entire tourism strategy around them. They erect signs covered in red slashes. “Don’t take photos.” “Don’t eat while walking.” “Don’t block the streets.”
But a public campaign based entirely on “Don’t” is fundamentally ineffective. For the average, well-meaning tourist, a wall of prohibitions strips away the joy of hospitality, replacing it with a low-grade anxiety that they are constantly breaking an invisible rule. For the “other guys,” however, a “Don’t” sign is an invitation. It marks the exact boundary of the status quo, practically daring them to challenge it just to see what happens. When you treat every visitor like an encroaching nuisance, the rebels double down on being jerks, and the polite travelers simply stop trying.
The reality of a hyper-connected world is that nobody gets a free pass anymore. Coexistence requires a clumsy, sometimes frustrating network of compromises, and that burden falls on everyone.
Tourists have to accept that a historic neighborhood is a living community, not a theme park set; they must compromise by accepting restrictions on when and where they can wander. But local residents and municipal governments have to make compromises, too. They have to move past the stage of emotional venting and invest in the invisible infrastructure of crowds: widening sidewalks, adding trash cans, and accepting that a thriving city is a changing city.
Hawai‘i eventually came to recognize that tourism was not a temporary phenomenon but a permanent reality. The conversation gradually shifted from whether tourists should be present to how tourism should be managed. The focus expanded beyond visitor behavior to encompass environmental protection, crowd management, public infrastructure, economic participation, and resident well-being.
Kyoto has begun moving in that direction, but it has yet to fully embrace a similarly regenerative vision.
The city’s public discussion of overtourism remains heavily focused on what visitors should not do. At the same time, the people responsible for shaping Kyoto’s future often seem to be talking past one another. City planners, transportation officials, hotel operators, commercial developers, Buddhist priests, okamisan, and leaders of traditional arts all have legitimate concerns, yet too often they appear to be pursuing separate agendas rather than a common strategy.
Regenerative tourism requires something different. It requires recognizing that tourism is not an external force imposed upon Kyoto but an integral part of the city’s modern economic reality. Despite being one of Japan’s most important cultural centers, Kyoto faces structural fiscal constraints. A large student population contributes relatively little in income tax revenue, many of the religious institutions that define the city’s character enjoy tax-exempt status, and Kyoto lacks the concentration of major corporate headquarters found in business centers such as Osaka and Tokyo. Yet the city must still maintain the roads, transit systems, public spaces, and infrastructure that serve both residents and millions of visitors each year. Visitors benefit from those investments, and it is reasonable that they should help support them.
Most Kyoto residents should remember this lesson. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when visitors vanished almost overnight, Kyoto found itself confronting a severe fiscal crisis. The experience demonstrated that while tourism can generate friction, the absence of tourism can create far greater problems. The question is not whether Kyoto should have tourism, but how it can manage tourism in ways that benefit both residents and visitors.
More importantly, Kyoto needs a positive vision of itself.
Few places on earth possess such an extraordinary concentration of cultural resources. Tea ceremony, flower arrangement, calligraphy, kyūdō, traditional crafts, seasonal festivals, temple architecture, gardens, and mountain landscapes offer opportunities that extend far beyond the familiar photo circuits of Gion, Higashiyama, Arashiyama, and Fushimi Inari.
Hawai‘i eventually learned to place the beauty of the islands at the center of its visitor experience. Kyoto’s equivalent is not scenery but living culture. The soul of the city is not found in a projection-mapped temple wall or the latest seasonal illumination. It is found in the thousands of volunteers who devote themselves to preserving traditions such as Aoi Matsuri, Gion Matsuri, and Jidai Matsuri. It is found in tea practitioners, flower arrangement instructors, shrine parishioners, okamisan, and the countless ordinary citizens who quietly sustain Kyoto’s cultural life.
One occasionally hears a visitor emerge from a temple and joke, “Oh boy, another ninth-century temple.” What a shame. Such a reaction misses the fact that Kyoto is not a collection of tourist attractions but a living history book. A visitor can walk through the elegance of the Heian court, the age of the samurai, the upheaval of the Meiji Restoration, or the spiritual tranquility of sacred mountains without ever leaving the city. A temple that has survived civil wars, earthquakes, political upheaval, and a millennium of history should not require synchronized LEDs to hold the public’s attention.
Rather than concentrating ever greater numbers of visitors into the same neighborhoods, the city could do more to promote northern Kyoto’s scenic walks, lesser-known districts, and cultural institutions. Instead of focusing so heavily on prohibitions surrounding maiko photography, Kyoto could create more opportunities for visitors to respectfully photograph and learn about traditional culture in appropriate settings away from residential streets.
Traditional arts could be promoted in neighborhoods beyond the city’s most crowded districts. Visitors should leave Kyoto not merely with photographs, but with an understanding of the people and traditions that made those photographs possible in the first place.
Most importantly, Kyoto’s stakeholders need to get on the same page.
Regenerative tourism is not merely about reducing harm. It is about cultivating affection for a place while ensuring that the people who live there continue to benefit from sharing it with the world. A successful strategy should make residents feel respected, visitors feel welcomed, and both groups feel invested in preserving what makes Kyoto special.
For all the complaints one hears about overtourism, my own experience has been that Kyoto people are remarkably kind. The obaasan at Nishiki Market seemed more resigned than angry at the tourists and did not demand that tourists go home. She simply wanted to relieve the congestion so she could buy her groceries.
Kyoto obaasans are tougher than they look. Anyone standing near the bus exit when they are getting off will tell you that.