By Alex Low
Japan rarely needs an introduction in conversations about the world’s most desirable travel destinations. From postcard landscapes and meticulously preserved history to video game mascots and one of the planet’s most influential food cultures, the country exerts a magnetic pull on visitors that hardly requires explanation. But what long functioned as a source of national pride has gradually become a double-edged sword, one that now shapes Japan’s economic priorities and increasingly complicates its policymaking at every level.
Photo: Sebastian Kurpiel/Unsplash
Nowhere is this tension more visible than in Kyoto. Once defined by its quiet neighbourhoods, narrow residential streets and carefully preserved temples, the city has in recent years become a focal point of local frustration. Residents have raised concerns that heavy tourism pressure, including tour buses and short-term rentals, is affecting housing affordability, daily life and the protection of cultural heritage.
In some neighbourhoods across the country, this dissatisfaction has spilled into daily interactions: a number of restaurants have begun refusing entry to foreign patrons, sometimes posting conflicting signage in different languages, illustrating just how fraught the relationship between visitors and locals has become. What was once marketed as an immersive encounter with tradition now risks overwhelming the very communities meant to sustain it.
Economic Benefits
Photo: Alex Low
For all its tensions, tourism has delivered tangible benefits to Japan. In the years leading up to and following the pandemic recovery, inbound travel helped revive regional economies, sustain small businesses and offset structural challenges such as an ageing population and a shrinking domestic consumer base. Hospitality, retail and transportation sectors have come to rely on foreign visitors not merely as a supplement, but as a stabilising force in national growth strategies.
Photo: Tiplada M/Unsplash
Yet this growing dependence has also exposed a vulnerability. Tourism is uniquely sensitive to forces beyond Japan’s control, from global shocks to diplomatic signals, a reality now resurfacing as political rhetoric and regional tensions begin to ripple through travel demand.
There is a historical irony at the heart of Japan’s tourism dilemma. In the decades following the Second World War, the country deliberately recalibrated its global image, shifting away from militarism towards a model of soft power rooted in culture, design, technology and everyday aesthetics.
Cultural Appeal
Photo: Alex Low
From animation and consumer electronics to cuisine and urban order, Japan’s appeal was carefully cultivated, and remarkably successful. That success, however, has produced an unintended consequence. A nation once focused on making itself palatable to the world now finds itself grappling with the pressures of being almost too irresistible to visit, its cultural capital translating into physical strain on cities and political exposure to external shocks.
Japan’s tourism dilemma ultimately reflects the limits of soft power as a governing strategy. Cultural appeal can open doors, revive economies and reshape global perceptions, but it cannot be easily calibrated or contained once demand reaches a critical mass. As Japan confronts overcrowded cities, diplomatic headwinds and an industry vulnerable to external shocks, the question is no longer whether tourism has succeeded, but whether the country can redefine its relationship with being desired.
In a world eager to consume Japan, the greater challenge may be learning how, and when, to say enough.
