I find that a bit funny given that in the last 15 years or so Japan has officially done a lot to attract tourists. Wanting to become a tourist destination, branding themselves as a place for holidays. I’ve seen so many “Visit Japan” campaigns, usually sponsored by the Japanese government, in the last decade or so. I get that it sucks for the people living in those cities and good for them that their city council does something to help, it still feels weird after years and years of campaigns to attract more tourists to Japan.
I think they should keep up the tourism campaigns, but they need to focus them on areas other than Kansai and Tokyo.
There’s so many great place all over Japan, but of course most flights are into Kansai or Narita airport, so naturally people are going to look for attractions and accommodation nearby. There are many international airports, but they are of course only available from closer east Asian Countries, but that does make up the bulk of the tourist population (half of all tourists are from China, Korea or Taiwan), so advertising those cities heavily would be a good start - “Come to Miyajima, we don’t speak Mandarin, but we’ve got 50 varieties of mandarins!”
A big issue in my view is the increase in cost of the JR rail pass and the price of and difficulty to navigate shinkansen in general. A cool campaign would be a free/cheap train ticket from Tokyo to the north, or Osaka to the west included with your international plane ticket.
Also, I believe Chinese driving licenses aren’t valid in Japan, because of the IDP requirement - if the biggest tourist demographic could hire cars and go off the beaten track, that might distribute the crowds a bit.
I highly recommend visiting Kyoto despite these news. The city is absolutely beautiful and well worth the tourist tax. I hadn’t experience any prejudice there as a tourist and the local generally like foreigners.
You can also avoid the tax with a day trip as Kyoto is right next to Osaka which is quite cheap.
The overtourism issue is mostly entirely a skill issue as it’s free income that can be controlled through tourist taxes like this one. So this tax is fundamentally a good thing.
The overwhelming crush of tourists was the only thing I didn’t like about my trip to Kyoto. Yes, I’m aware that I was part of the problem. This doesn’t seem like it’s really cracking down on over-tourism so much as generating a bit of extra revenue to help defray some of the public impacts of over-tourism. It seems pretty reasonable to me, as it’s directed towards the higher-end tourists rather than pricing out tourists of relatively modest means. But I do wish there was an actual solution to the problem of immense throngs of people flocking to popular tourist destinations. Maybe if a few other cities could put up some 600-year-old golden pagodas, we could spread them out a bit.
You know the saying, 600 years ago was the best time to build more golden pagodas if you wanted them today, but the next best time is today if you want 600 year old golden pagodas in 600 years.
I will support any policy that fights over tourism.
You should never feel like a foreigner in your own hometown, a tourist should never cause displacement of locals
Do you want rich, entitled, assholes everywhere? That’s how you get rich, entitled, assholes.
But this tax only affects top hotels
Shitty headline writing strikes again.
“900%” is both a sensationalist way of describing it, and also even applicable to the overwhelming majority of visitors.
Yeah, it’s a hotel tax and scales with the price of the hotel. The top end (for hotel over $665 a night) is a 10% tax.
also I’ll throw in that because the yen is so weak vs the dollar at the moment (hence the overtourism), $665 a night is in of itself understating the kind of place we’re talking about. ¥100,000 in 2012 was $1,300. Minimum wage is ¥1,000/hour.
I just had a quick search on a bookings site, and 80 out of the 103 five-star hotels in Kyoto are under that threshold, and of those, 40 are under $350. If you’re being hit by the top rate then the place you’re staying in is bougie as f.
Also also, my reading of it is that it isn’t a 10% tax, it’s a stepped tax equal to 10% of the bottom of its bracket, i.e. it’s ¥10,000 regardless of whether your room was ¥100,000 or ¥300,000.
OP’s “Tourists in Kyoto will soon face a 900% increase in a tax” summary would be more accurately stated as “Tourists staying in one of Kyoto’s 23 most expensive hotels, will face a 9 percentage point increase in tax”.
10%, that’s a large difference than 900%. This is one of the times I came to the comments to see if the article is worth reading, now I guess I have to to figure out the fuck they meant
It was 1%. 1% to 10% is in fact a 900% increase, it just sounds a lot scarier than it actually is.
Yeah, it was definitely a get readers attention scare tactic. 10% tax on hotels is nothing.
It’s like saying “We had to raise our taxes to match that of Florida districts due to federal cuts by Trump”
Sensationalism, but some may be more true than others
You could read the article.
Sir/ma’am I’m from reddit, change is hard and scary
No shit, what else would I have meant?
All that’s gonna do is get you the biggest D bag tourists
Read the article, the 900% increase is only for the most expensive rooms.
Yep the biggest douches in the USA have lots of money.
It’ll keep out most of the weebs though
They work better as revenue generators than as actual deterrents to tourism.
Places that experience over-tourism generally need tax revenue to fix issues like lack of affordable housing, or raising pay for municipal workers that provide services that arent important to tourists and only matter to locals
If they wanted to simply deter tourism then they could just close hotels, ban air bnbs, etc. The point is to still have tourism but check its growth against the strangulation effect it has on local life
They don’t actually want to deter it, they want to pay for its harmful impacts.
They just want to cash in more. Let’s face it, the city likes tourist revenue and felt like they could get more.
And good for them to do it. Tourism causes a lot of negative externalities; this tax helps mitigate some of those externalities.
