Hell is Other People

The real reason the Japanese government is so obsessed with tourism

Last year, nearly thirty seven million tourists visited Japan. To put this into perspective, that number is equivalent to almost thirty percent of the Japanese population. The comparison is even starker when you consider that the vast majority of these visitors congregate in a few major cities: Tokyo (population: 14 million), Osaka (2.7 million), and beleaguered Kyoto (just 1.4 million).

When you get as many tourists as a percentage of population as Japan does, there is bound to be friction. Stories of bad behavior abound – “nuisance streamers” provoking passerby for pageviews, paparazzi-like photographers stalking geisha in Kyoto, unlicensed go-kart drivers courting death on the streets of Tokyo. But even the well-behaved are arriving in such huge numbers that they’re overwhelming popular neighborhoods such as Asakusa and Shibuya. Fortunately, this hasn’t translated into much negativity about foreigners (or foreign residents). But nobody’s really happy about the situation. Even the tourists themselves are starting to complain.

Nevertheless, the Japanese government is forging ahead with plans to nearly double the numbers of inbound tourists to sixty million by 2030. Why? Japan’s ruling party of the LDP has historically been, shall we say, resistant to the idea of admitting more foreigners into the country, particularly refugees and immigrants. This began changing in the 2010s, but it still doesn’t explain why the Japanese government is so gung-ho on getting more tourists into places so packed to the gills that cities have begun pushing back. “Residents’ comfort level is deteriorating,” Yusuke Ishiguro, a tourism specialist, told the Mainichi. “If this were Europe, I think there would be protests.”

It’s especially curious given that until surprisingly recently, the Japanese government paid almost no attention to luring international tourists at all. So again: what gives? The short answer, to paraphrase an American aphorism: “it's the economy, stupid.”

In the Eighties and Nineties, few foreigners saw Japan as a getaway. It was the era of Japan bashing, and headlines about the country were almost universally negative. The yen was absurdly strong, making Tokyo one of the most expensive cities to live in or even simply visit. Japanese food was the butt of jokes in the Western media, and there was little interest in the country’s pop culture (aside from a handful of freaks who would grow up to write newsletters like this one.) All of this conspired to make Japan feel something like a hermit kingdom. It was the least-visited of the G7 countries until 2014.

When I first started studying Japanese, in the late Eighties, the conventional wisdom was that it was one of the world’s “less useful” languages. Natives seemed to agree: we were such rare beasts that the Japanese mass media dubbed us hen na gaijin, which meant “any foreigner weird enough to learn Japanese.” On my first visit in 1990, I was often asked “why?” by locals shocked to see a foreign face. 1990 was actually a something of a watershed year for tourism in Japan, with a record-setting three million inbound visiting the country. But by comparison, nearly eleven million Japanese traveled abroad that same year -- almost a tenth of the nation’s population. Everyone in Japan wanted out, it seemed. And the government wanted them out!

During the Bubble era and well into the Nineties, Japanese leaders relied on outbound tourists – and more specifically the large sums of money they spent abroad – to help smooth over complaints about the massive trade deficits that Japan was running with foreign countries. So, less inbound tourists were actually more, from a bargaining standpoint. Japan may not be interested in foreign products, the argument seems to have gone, but look how much more our tourists spend in your countries than yours do in ours!

The big turning point came in 1995. What was the impetus for this sudden shift in the wind? Shame played a small role – it was becoming obvious how embarrassingly little the government spent on tourism in comparison to other advanced nations. But mostly, it was cold, hard math. The stock market, which crashed in 1990, wasn’t showing signs of recovering; the Bubble was well and truly over. The population was relentlessly ageing and shrinking. Manufacturers were offshoring. Bureaucrats cast about for new ways to bolster the nation’s balance sheets.

Enter the “Japanese Tourism Policy Council,” first convened in 1994. After “intensive and heated discussions,” led by a former chairman of the trading house Itochu, the council offered a proposal in the form of the 1995 “Welcome 21 Plan.” It aimed to increase inbound visitors from what was then 3.5 million to 7 million by 2005. The council couched their arguments in cultural terms, “promoting and maintaining Japan’s standing as a truly global and internationally competitive country.” But the real meat was the promise of money: an “alternative revenue strategy” in the face of declining exports. In fact, the council argued, “Japan should strive become a nation based on leisure tourism,” because this might “lead the Japanese economy in the 21^st century.”

When you look at the Council’s report, it’s a little shocking how closely their projections mapped to the actual rise in tourism over the next decade. They didn’t quite hit seven million in 2005, but they came close: 6.7 million. In a sense this was probably better from a bureaucratic standpoint: we didn’t make it this time, but look, we’re on track! We just need more money! And the government was willing to give it to them. In 2003, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi launched the “Visit Japan Campaign,” better known by its slogan, “Yokoso! Japan.” The press release features the same mix of culture and financial appeals, declaring “a view to increasing international exchange and” – this is critical – “revitalizing the Japanese economy.” It extended the Welcome 21 Plan’s projections to 2010, aiming for ten million visitors.

But the global financial crisis of 2007-8 triggered a plunge in inbound tourists. The hyperbolic Western media coverage of the Fukushima disaster in 2011 caused even more foreigners to stay away. I recall seeing those forlorn Yokoso! Japan posters at Narita Airport during those years and shaking my head at what seemed yet another government boondoggle. But then, the unexpected. As Abenomics caused the value of the yen to drop, Japan became cheaper to visit, and tourism rose rapidly – very rapidly. In 2013, ten million tourists arrived in Japan. It took only two years for that number to nearly double, to 19 million in 2015. And, with the exception of the inevitable drop during pandemic, it has been rising steadily ever since.

Which brings us back to the original question: why is the government so focused on bringing even more tourists in, even as citizens complain? There are multiple factors at play here. One is that, unlike the various Cool Japan promotional campaigns, tourism can be easily tracked in terms of numbers. Set a goal, see if it is attained, repeat. This kind of thing is catnip to bureaucrats, particularly when there are so few other bright spots from an economic standpoint. And this industry most definitely is bright. Tourism is now Japan’s second-largest “export,” right behind cars. Visitors spent more than eight trillion yen (over fifty billion USD) in 2024. These are the kinds of numbers that affect a nation’s GDP.

On the one hand, the surge in tourism might seem to represent the fruits of thirty years of effort on the part of the government. But I don’t think so. Given its track record with other cultural campaigns, I think that they simply got lucky. The leap in interest is better explained as an extension of the Pure Invention thesis: that foreigners have come to resemble the Japanese, after so many decades of consuming gadgets, gear, and content from the country. And now they have moved from consuming products to consuming Japan itself (literally, if you take a certain anime star’s comments at face value.) Japan isn’t an exotic or even particularly distant presence for anyone Gen X or younger; we grew up on its manga, its anime, its music, its foods. For a lot of folks, going to Japan now feels less like a trip abroad than a trip home. (Which, in conjunction with ongoing political chaos abroad, is why we are also seeing a surge of interest among foreigners in acquiring cheap land/homes here.)

The increasing number of foreign faces is the product of a powerful resonance between pop culture and tourism. The government knows this, too. It helps explain why the LDP, after many attempts to restrict anime and manga over the years, is now embracing content as a pillar of of the economy for the 2030s. You don’t have to be a genius of strategic planning to see to that tourism is locked in orbit with pop culture, and that the pair operate as a money-making dynamo for the country. The equation is simple: so long as Japanese content continues to grow in popularity, so will interest in Japan as a destination. It’s easy to understand why the government is invested in nourishing both trends, even as citizens grow increasingly ambivalent about the increase in inbounds. Given the nation’s demographics, lawmakers do not have many other options.

Regardless of how one personally feels about it, the tourism boom is also an interesting experiment. It gives concrete form to the ethereal concept of soft power. It lets us explore questions: How far can cultural charisma really take a nation? Can a country sustain its image as a leader in youth culture even as its population grows old? And more to the point, can Japan keep packing in visitors in without sacrificing its cultural sites and angering its citizens? The answer to all of these questions is, nobody knows. And so an ageing Japan, long written off as irrelevant, finds itself at the cutting edge once again. All we can do is watch and see what happens. If there’s any consolation, there’s plenty of people around to watch with.