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This is painful,” Maggie James told me as we took a stroll through Gion, the famous geisha district in Kyoto. It was a warm April night, and James, a high-end local fixer for jet-setters visiting the city, was giving me a tour of the neighborhood, which had become emblematic of the plague afflicting Kyoto and, increasingly, much of the world: too many tourists. Gion’s quiet streets lined with lanterns and low-slung wooden machiya townhouses were now filled with foreigners preening in polyester kimonos they had paid $20 to rent for the day. “None of them are Japanese,” James said, pointing to a group of men in elaborate getups. “These guys are wearing full-on shogun shit.” We walked past a spice shop that James and her friends used to frequent until the owners started selling “Samurai Spice” to foreigners.
As we turned onto Hanamikoji Street, Gion’s main drag, I let out an audible whoa at the heaving crowd — an overflowing river of people. “It’s such a beautiful street, but now it looks like Disneyland,” James said. I had been in Kyoto for only a few days, but I was surprised at how many of my fellow world travelers seemed to treat Kyoto like an amusement park. In Gion, tourists had developed a habit of opening the sliding doors into unmarked machiya on the presumption that anything inside was meant for their entertainment, only to end up walking into someone’s living room. “It’s on the news,” James said. “Little old people are like, ‘I was just sitting watching TV and the door opened, and these people walked in and started speaking English and I had no idea what to say.’”
It wasn’t safe on the streets, either. A limber European man came racing past us, phone raised, in pursuit of an actual geisha in a kimono and traditional makeup who was shuffling her way to work. Geisha-hunting tourists have become so aggressive the city even tried sending notifications to smartphones that came within a kilometer of Gion asking people not to harass the geisha. “When my friends who are tourists come to visit, they’re like, ‘Maggie, we came to see Japan. What the hell is this?’” James said.
We live in the age of overtourism: too many people with too much money and too few places to go. The number of international tourists increased by 60 percent in the decade before COVID, which gave the world’s most popular destinations a momentary breather before pent-up lockdown energy unleashed a rapacious travel boom. There are now more than 1.4 billion international travelers every year, a number that is growing as more of the rising middle classes in China and India begin to see the world. The only country expected to see a decline in tourism this year, owing to the antagonism of its leadership toward foreigners, is the United States.
That means one less destination on the relatively small list of places people want to go. By one estimate, 80 percent of tourists visit just 10 percent of the world. Many small paradises like Tulum and Positano and Bali were overrun long ago, but now even the world’s great cities are struggling to manage the influx. Venice, which welcomes more tourists every day than it has residents, has banned large cruise ships. Workers at the Louvre in June shut down the museum for a day in protest of the mobs clamoring to see the Mona Lisa. Amsterdam has banned construction of new hotels. Florence banned new Airbnbs. The fight has been most intense in Barcelona, where activists marched through the city last year spraying tourists with water guns and carrying signs that read TOURISTS GO HOME and YOU ARE NOT WELCOME. This spring, activists from across Europe met in Barcelona to plot even more aggressive actions for the summer. “Peaceful means have been exhausted,” one protester in the Canary Islands said.
It took a while for the traveling masses to descend on Japan. It was expensive, hard to get to, and challenging to navigate for non–Japanese speakers. In all of 2011, only 6 million international visitors came to Japan, about as many as New York City welcomes every month; in 2024, almost 37 million traveled to Japan, and this year’s arrivals are already 25 percent higher than at this time last year. A few trends converged to make the country a hot destination: The algorithm populated feeds with appealing images of minimalist onsen and lavish omakase meals; technology made it easy to parachute in and get around; and, perhaps most of all, the yen nose-dived, making a visit much more affordable. The punch line of a viral cartoon titled “What a Millennial Midlife Crisis Looks Like” is a woman telling her partner, “Let’s go to Japan!”
The classic Japan itinerary is a trilogy: Tokyo for sushi and high-rises, Osaka for nightlife, and Kyoto for a trip back in time. The city was spared from U.S. bombs during World War II because Secretary of War Henry Stimson had been there and wanted to preserve the temples and shrines, which date to Kyoto’s founding in 794 as Japan’s imperial capital. (Kyoto has more temples than Rome has churches.) It is now a modern city with enough of the Old World to attract tourists looking for genuine culture in a universe drowning in slop — or looking to create some slop of their own. The manicured rock gardens, angular pagodas, and winding streets overhung with cherry blossoms evolved organically from refuges of peace and tranquillity into coveted backdrops for Reels and TikToks. The food in Kyoto is both exotic and familiar, delicious and cheap. All kinds of people were coming: My midwestern uncle, who once gave me a book about reforming the U.S. tax code for my birthday, visited Kyoto a few weeks before me, and shortly after I arrived, Blackbird Spyplane, the insistently hip fashion newsletter, published a guide to seeing Kyoto without getting too bummed out by its “vibe-harshingly gridlocked zones.”
Everyone is searching for something in Kyoto: the “real Japan,” a moment of Zen, the perfect shot. What they find amid the rising tide of tourists is something else — a modern conundrum with no obvious solutions. Tokyo and Osaka are big enough to soak up tourists in the same way New York and London can, but Kyoto is hemmed in by mountains, which keeps the city from expanding. (There are 1.4 million people living in Kyoto today, as many as there were in 1975.) It also makes the glut impossible to ignore. Including domestic travelers, roughly 150,000 people visit Kyoto every day, many of them disembarking from the Shinkansen bullet train, which cuts through the mountains at 200 mph. Last year, more tourists visited Kyoto than Barcelona, Amsterdam, or even Paris.
“Do we want to go through hell again?” James asked after we made it to the end of Hanamikoji Street. James had offered to be my guide for a week in Kyoto — a Virgil to explain what I was seeing as I went deeper into tourism hell. My hope was to figure out if it is possible to be a good tourist, or even to have a good time, in a place that has become overrun. I told her to get on with her night, took a deep breath, and descended again.
Claire Serie/Hans Lucas/Redux
It’s a bit disorienting just how easy it is to take a trip to Japan. In addition to flights out of JFK and LAX, you can now fly direct from Houston, Minneapolis, and Denver. Before leaving, I got so many recommendations from the internet and from friends (an annotated Google Map, a five-page PDF, a spreadsheet with multiple tabs) I didn’t even think about picking up a Lonely Planet guide. My partner and I made our way through the interminable immigration line at Narita Airport near Tokyo, just ahead of five Irish children in Pokémon T-shirts, and rode the Shinkansen to Kyoto behind an American 20-something wearing a Ja Morant jersey and reading a copy of NFL coach Bill Walsh’s memoir while his seatmate watched an NBA playoff game on his phone. I had downloaded Duolingo, but gone are the days when Sofia Coppola could make a movie about worldly travelers who find Japan impenetrable: Google Translate has made it impossible to ever really be lost in translation. I approached a queue outside Kyoto Station marked FOREIGN FRIENDLY taxi, only to be told by an attendant in a purple kimono that I could simply join the regular line. Every driver in Kyoto now knows at least enough English to ask to see the map on your phone.
My first stop was Yasaka Shrine, a Shinto complex from the seventh century. I was arriving just after peak cherry-blossom season, when the crowds in Kyoto are thickest, but the shrine was still plenty packed. I spotted a group of six women in their 20s, all dressed in rental kimonos, who turned out to be three Australians and three Canadians who had just met. “We offered to take a photo of them, and now we’re BFFs,” one of the Australians told me. She and her friends had just come from two days at Universal Studios in Osaka; the Canadians had been at Tokyo Disneyland. When I asked both groups what brought them to Kyoto, the answer was instant: “Literally, TikTok.” As one of the Australians put it, gesturing to a row of paper lanterns swaying in the breeze beneath a pagoda, “When you think of Japan, this is the stuff.”
The Canadians had only a day in Kyoto and were trying to pack 1,200 years of history into approximately 12 hours. “You’ve got to do all the TikTok stuff,” one of them said. They had already tracked down a viral matcha tiramisu and were about to call an Uber for the half-hour drive across town to Arashiyama, a spectacular forest of supertall, skinny bamboo stalks. After that, another Uber to Nara, an hour south, which is famous for the wild deer that mingle with people in the streets, before the group hustled back to Kyoto Station for a train to their hotel in Osaka. It was already midafternoon, and I didn’t see how they could possibly fit everything in. “Well, ChatGPT says we can,” one said. Their faith in machine learning was undiminished by the fact that it had sent them to an abandoned Hello Kitty café.
At the shrine’s main gate, I met Chieko Tanaka, who had founded an organization in response to the travel boom called Touristship when she was a student at Kyoto University. The group’s name is a play on other kinds of ships — friendship, sportsmanship — and Tanaka sets up stands several times a month at crowded tourist sites to administer pop quizzes to visitors on how to behave better. (She published a book on the topic with a title that roughly translates to “Why Not Become a Person Liked by the Places You Visit?”) Tanaka pointed to a stone basin meant for pilgrims to purify their hands; tourists so often used it as a water fountain that the shrine had to put up signs in multiple languages warning against the practice. “There’s a lot of signs,” Tanaka said. “Too many signs.”
There were a lot of signs in Kyoto. Signs not to harass geisha. Signs to stay out of private alleyways. One sign at a shrine asked tourists not to light fires, fly drones, or walk the grounds in “costumes that are inappropriate for worship.” Another in Gion read, in English, PLEASE BE QUIET — THERE ARE ELDERLY PEOPLE. Tanaka had come to believe that tourists fit into three broad categories: 20 percent read the signs and follow the rules, 20 percent read the signs and disobey them anyway, and everyone else simply doesn’t read the signs at all.
Photo: Christian Muller/Alamy
The next day, I walked across the Kamo River and down Pontocho Alley, one of Kyoto’s many narrow lanes, where it could sometimes be difficult to navigate around families pushing double-wide strollers. I emerged onto Kiyamachi Street to find a burbling creek and a line 40 people long in front of a machiya built sometime in the 1800s. It was a Monday morning, and I couldn’t figure out what they were waiting for until a man in a robe slid open the front door at 10 a.m. to hang a curtain identifying this as a café run by Le Labo, the perfume company. “It’s a historic building, so it’s different,” the first person in line told me. This is the brand’s third café, after locations in Williamsburg and Shanghai, and the only place in the world where you can buy Osmanthus 19, Le Labo’s Kyoto-specific scent.
Kyoto is often described as the most Japanese of the country’s major cities, but it is also now thoroughly international. While I was in town, Patti Smith was playing a concert. There is a Four Seasons, a Ritz-Carlton, an Aman, a Banyan Tree, and a Six Senses. Who needs omotenashi — the credo of Japanese hospitality — when my midrange hotel’s lobby had a copy of Jonathan Tisch’s book Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough: Reinventing the Customer Experience? The international influence has made what was once a traditional, almost mythical city into one that all kinds of foreigners can traverse in comfort — “Easy-mode Asia,” as one Dutch tourist described it to me. Certain restaurants remain difficult for foreigners to book, but I was able to go online and reserve a seat at the sushi counter where Steve Jobs said he once had the best fatty tuna of his life. When I arrived, I saw Jobs’s autograph on the wall above the benediction “All good things” — a lament that the meal had to end. Right below it, there was a more recent inscription from Marc Benioff, the co-founder of Salesforce: “All great things.”
The conversion of machiya into Le Labos and Blue Bottles was reshaping Kyoto’s streetscape. “I get calls from brands all the time that say, ‘We have this great idea to take an old Japanese machiya’ — uh, all of you had the same idea,” Maggie James told me when we met up later that afternoon. She and others I spoke to about the souped-up machiya weren’t necessarily angry; in many cases, the alternative was a wrecking ball to make way for a hotel. James also isn’t a hidebound traditionalist. She was born to an American father and a Japanese mother, and after a decade in Tokyo running a jewelry company and throwing parties, followed by a decade in New York managing the career of her husband, Takeru Kobayashi, the legendary Japanese competitive eater and Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest champion, she moved to Kyoto in 2019 to help the Ace Hotel open its first location in Asia. “When I arrived, I was like, Oh my God, am I in China or Japan?” James told me of all the newly wealthy tourists from Beijing and Shanghai who were pouring into the country. (China and Korea send the most tourists to Japan; the U.S. sends the most from outside Asia.) James eventually left the Ace and started working as a “cultural engineer,” as she put it, helping international fashion brands collaborate with local craftsmen. “They all want a story where they’re working with an old Japanese slipper-maker,” she said.
That work naturally led to a side hustle as a travel consigliere — the models and creatives she worked with all wanted help seeing Kyoto beyond the crowds. She had a man in Tokyo whom she referred to as her “agent”: a former VP at Goldman Sachs who now worked as a point person in Japan for many of the world’s wealthiest people. “He’s known as the VIP doormat of Tokyo,” James said. She became his woman on the ground in Kyoto, and the travel business was now good enough that she turned down a request from a high-end fashion brand to work on a runway show at a temple because she was already booked to help an A-list actor get around town.
James said her clients are sometimes the kinds of people who “can’t take a ‘no,’” which could be a challenge in a rule-bound city. In 2023, she scored a difficult dinner reservation for an American tech executive who, it turned out, had already made seven other reservations that night so they could decide at the last minute between sushi or Wagyu while leaving James to apologize to the spurned restaurants the next morning. She recently worked with a wealthy client who booked seven suites at the Aman for their six children and two nannies at around $75,000 a night. She liked the family well enough, but the demands could be tricky. “They’ll say to me, ‘We want to eat the highest-end Japanese food, but we have ten people, and we’re vegetarians, and we’re also kosher — but two of us eat meat — and these are the fishes we can have,’” she said. Just that morning, a Burning Man enthusiast had called looking for help throwing a party for 30 people who would be flying in on private jets. “They want me to bring in a lighting team and geisha floating from the sky — naked girls in kimonos with blinking lasers and shit,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
James and I were walking through Nishiki Market, a long, narrow 400-year-old arcade with more than a hundred shops that has been romantically called “Kyoto’s kitchen” — a place to grab a quick bite for lunch or groceries on the way home. “Nishiki Market is not made for tourists,” James said. “It’s a local market — and then the dumb stores started changing their signs to be in English right after COVID.” During the pandemic, the market was quiet enough that James could ride her bike through it, and every local I met in Kyoto had a certain nostalgia for that period too, which felt like a return to the city’s quieter past. That feeling was gone. Before meeting at the market, I had checked the Kyoto Travel Congestion Forecast, a city website that projects how crowded Kyoto’s top attractions are likely to be on a color-coded scale that operates like a traffic light. The forecast was yellow, not the dreaded red, but we could hardly move between stalls. “I’ve never seen it this crowded,” James said.
The tourists had also changed the market itself: fewer grocers, more matcha dispensaries. “Usually, his stand is popular,” James said, pointing to a man standing somberly at the back of a stall that sells fermented vegetables. “Instead, he’s seeing thousands of people walk by and no one is even interested.” Locals had started shopping elsewhere, and some of the shopkeepers who catered to them had packed up and left. “It split into two groups,” James said. “One is like, ‘Please, everyone just go home.’ The other type is like, ‘We’re just gonna suck it up and make a ton of money.’” Many of the stalls that remained now had men in kimonos out front selling shots of sake for 100 yen. I stopped in my tracks when I spotted a ghost: City Bakery, the New York institution that closed in 2019, had been resurrected halfway around the world with an outpost selling its famous pretzel croissant in the middle of Kyoto’s kitchen.
No one had much advice for avoiding the crowds at Kyoto’s most popular sites. A Dutch tourist told me he had hoped a rainy day would limit the horde that descends on Kiyomizu-dera, a popular temple at the end of a shopping district with two Studio Ghibli stores and the world’s only Starbucks with tatami seating. Instead, he spent the day dodging umbrellas. The only practical tip I got was to go early, so the next morning I got up to plan a trip to Fushimi Inari, a shrine in the hills south of the city that has some 10,000 orange torii gates lined up in long tunnels that make for an Instagram fever dream. The Kyoto Travel Congestion Forecast looked okay — light green — but I was beginning to lose confidence in its powers. By the time I arrived, just after 8 a.m., the place was packed.
For a thousand years, Fushimi Inari had been a place for contemplation, but that experience was no longer really possible. At the entrance to the first tunnel of gates, I stopped to count how many visitors were passing through: 55 people in 60 seconds. The flow of traffic slowed only whenever someone tried to stage-manage a photo to make it appear as if they had the torii gates to themselves. A South Asian woman in Gucci sunglasses and Nike slides posing in front of the gates accused her boyfriend of a slow trigger finger — “You have to be quick!” — when he missed a brief break in traffic. A few moments later, a Russian-speaking tourist stepped into the middle of the tunnel and shouted, in English, “Wait a second, please!” A traffic jam of people started to form as she positioned herself for a photo. I was already ahead of her, and when she held her phone up and saw me in the background of her selfie, she turned around and delivered a firm command: “Not you — you go!”
Things became slightly more peaceful higher up. The air was clean and cool, the leaves rustled, the birds sang. But the drumbeat of Hokas hitting the path and the cacophony of languages being spoken — everything, it seemed, but Japanese — never completely subsided. By the time I got back down to the bottom to get an updated mid-morning census (83 people in 60 seconds), I started to wonder why anyone was coming here at all. Julia Maeda, who runs a high-end travel company in Japan (she recently helped plan a honeymoon for a billionaire’s daughter), said she sometimes struggles with clients who treat a trip to Kyoto like a safari. “You want to bag the big five,” she said. “You want to see the lion and the elephant, and you want to go to the Golden Pavilion and Fushimi Inari,” as well as Arashiyama, Kiyomizu-dera, and Nijo Castle. Maeda often asks clients if they’re “strong enough” to come home from Japan and tell their friends they bagged only one or two. “A lot of people are not strong enough,” she said. “They want the selfies.”
On my way out of Fushimi Inari, I spotted a café called Pico that was selling yuzu-ginger hot chocolates and matcha lattes. “My daughter named it after me, to my embarrassment,” Pico Iyer, the writer, told me when we spoke on Zoom the next day. Iyer has lived in the area for over three decades and has been taken aback by the deluge. “In Japan, the theme parks were there to create a mock America, while true Japan was sacrosanct,” Iyer said. “To have parts of Kyoto itself turned into a theme park is quite disturbing.” Iyer told me that a decade ago, he might host two or three foreigners in the fall; this past November, five people, including two writers from the New York Times, reached out to see if they could visit him on a single Saturday. His daughter, he said, was now doing “a fantastic business.”
For all the angst locals feel about overtourism, there was no visible movement percolating to shut down the Shinkansen. “In Europe, I think there would be protests,” Yusuke Ishiguro, a professor specializing in tourism management at Hokkaido University, recently told a national newspaper. If humans weren’t going to fight back, who would? Iyer lives in Nara, where ChatGPT sent the Canadians in pursuit of the deer that have peacefully congregated with humans for centuries. But that dynamic has recently shifted. Tourists were holding out treats, then whisking them away at the last moment to snap a photo, or making sudden movements with selfie sticks. “The deer have never had to face this,” Iyer said. “For the first time in 1,300 years, there have been violent incidents.” This past September, 35 people were injured in deer attacks in Nara — a sevenfold increase over the year before.
Iyer recommended that I talk to Alex Kerr, an American writer and preservationist who has lived since 1977 in a 200-year-old home he renovated in Kameoka, a mountain town northwest of Kyoto. The area isn’t on any tourism radar, but apparently a Taiwanese influencer had posted about the spectacular maple trees in Kerr’s yard and at a shrine down the road. “We’re at the end of the world,” Kerr told me when we met at his home. “And there must be 20 or 30 Taiwanese people a day coming to this house and several hundred a day coming to the shrine.”
Kerr has spent much of his career writing about protecting old Japan; his most recent book is called Kanko Bokokuron (“Destroying the Nation With Tourism”). But like almost everyone else I spoke with, Kerr wasn’t opposed to tourists. Resistance was futile. He simply believed the flood needed to be better managed. “Ever since America won the war and democratized Japan, there has been this idea of equality and that everything should be open to all — the idea of limiting anything is anathema,” Kerr said. He argued that more sites should charge entry fees, as the shrine down the road had started doing, and institute reservation systems to limit how many people could visit each day. If that meant some people couldn’t go, so be it. “There’s this ingrained attitude that it would be unfair, but when we’ve reached overcapacity, which we have, then you have a new world,” Kerr said. “We’re beyond the limits.”
The locals I met in Kyoto generally seemed resigned to the reality that mass tourism is now a part of their lives. Some were trying to make the best of it. When I visited Naomi Ota, who runs a 200-year-old teahouse and helps put on an annual geisha festival, she told me through an interpreter that the festival had started selling tickets online, which enabled more foreigners to attend what had previously been a largely Japanese event. When I asked how performing for foreigners is different, she started clapping rapidly and said the audience is louder. Later that day, James took me to a shop in Gion that has sold traditional slippers for kimonos for a hundred years. “This store is really a national treasure to me,” she said. Seiji Naito, who runs the place, told me the number of foreigners coming in had increased tenfold in the past decade. When he asked an American how they had found his store, the shopper said they’d asked Google where to find the sandals to take home. “Algorithm is on my side,” Naito said with a smile, miming a fisherman reeling in a catch.
Maggie James doesn’t take guests to the most crowded spots in town. She recently tried to warn a Hollywood actor against visiting the Arashiyama bamboo forest. “He writes to tell me, ‘We just arrived in Arashiyama,’ and two seconds later he’s like, ‘We left,’” James said. If her visitors insist on bagging one of the big five, she’ll get them a guide and meet up later to take them somewhere they couldn’t get into otherwise. “Everyone calls me ‘the B-side,’” James said. “I know all the secret doors.”
I thought I was entering such a door when I checked in for a night at Hiiragiya, one of the most famous of the country’s traditional inns, or ryokan*.* The hotel has been owned by the Nishimura family since it opened in 1818 and offers a no-shoes, yukata-on, full-service experience centered on a multicourse kaiseki meal served in your room by a personal attendant. Hiiragiya used to be hard to get into, especially for foreigners. “My God! Nobody gets in there except prime ministers, movie stars, and millionaires,” a friend told the Times correspondent Harold Schonberg in 1982. But then Anthony Bourdain taped an episode of No Reservations at Hiiragiya, the modern traveler’s ultimate Bat-Signal, and a stay at a ryokan is now part of most generic Japan itineraries.
When I told James I had booked a room at Hiiragiya, she was nervous. The Hollywood actor had stayed there and came away admitting the dinner was too much for him. “That meal can be very challenging for non-Japanese,” she said. She laughed when I said uni (sea urchin) was an acquired taste for me. “That’s cute,” she said. “Uni is not even scary.” Her concern was that if I sent my food back uneaten, I might offend the chef.
When I met up with James the next day, I had to admit defeat. I had enjoyed some of the 11 courses, like the grilled sweetfish, but there were a few dishes I couldn’t finish. James was worked up because just that morning, a friend had sent her an article about the trouble ryokan were having with foreign travelers, who now occupied 90 percent of the rooms in some inns. The kaiseki meals were going uneaten — one ryokan owner showed the reporter photos of a breakfast with visible teeth marks in each abandoned dish — and a few ryokan were giving up the meals altogether. “So we, as Japanese, don’t get to eat that beautiful food anymore because other people don’t like it?” James said. “That’s what’s going to happen.”
We were sitting in a hip diner one of her friends had opened a year ago; so far, he said, tourists weren’t crowding the place. “The negative Nancy in me is like, Just wait a year,” James said. She had brought along her husband, the famous Kobayashi, who followed James back to Kyoto after his retirement from the competitive-eating circuit. His presence made my failure to handle the meal at Hiiragiya even more humbling, but he was actually more open to the idea that ryokan may need to adapt. “It’s a business,” he said in English, switching back to Japanese to explain more before his wife jumped back in.
“I hate that word — shouganai,” James said. Translation: “Change is inevitable.”
Kobayashi said to just look around at the restaurant we were sitting in: a fun, modern take on a retro diner serving Japanese twists on food from elsewhere. I was eating a delicious patty melt. In fact, Kobayashi was launching a new business that was a blend of cultures: Japan’s first all-beef hot dog, which he was calling the Kobi Dog, made with Wagyu. “I knew I shouldn’t have asked you to come,” James said. “You’re too positive.”
It was tempting to think that by stopping for an etiquette lesson from Touristship, avoiding the crowds, and ordering something local instead of a pretzel croissant, a responsible tourist could visit a city like Kyoto without being part of the problem. But my ryokan experience contributed to a creeping unease. The highlight of my trip had been a pair of dinners with James at two izakayas I never would have found without her — the B-side. One was in an area described to me as the “Brooklyn of Kyoto.” (We killed time beforehand at a bar across the street with a coin-operated -natural-wine dispenser.) James pointed out a famous Japanese actress at the other end of the L-shaped counter, which bent around an open kitchen where the cool young chef took breaks from cooking to swap out vinyl on the record player while delivering a buffet of remarkable small plates: clams and bamboo in a miso soup; sashimi and duck; a squid roll so tasty we ordered seconds. A few of the dishes required explanation and an adventurous palate, but most were good enough to do the talking themselves. Bourdain would have loved it.
But as we ate, a steady stream of foreign tourists walked in the door, and the kitchen staff greeted them with their arms crossed into an X — no more room. “They try not to let tourists in ever since someone TikToked them,” James said. The izakayas we went to didn’t hate foreigners — one of them had a Japanese cover of Eric Clapton playing on the stereo and a photo of Al Pacino as Scarface in the bathroom — but they hadn’t opened these small, cozy restaurants to serve people they would never see again. James had handled the ordering as well as all the chitchat with the chef that makes eating at a place like this so enjoyable. Meanwhile, my partner and I took up a quarter of the eight seats at the counter without being able to contribute much beyond an appreciative thumbs-up. The Blackbird Spyplane guide to Kyoto had recommended a solution: Pull out your translation app to talk up the izakaya chef and “ask king himself what he’s especially stoked about cooking that night.” But talking through an app may not be as fun as you think for the person whose country you’re visiting. James told me about another friend who owns a cocktail bar in Kyoto that was TikToked. She had recently stopped by and found him in tears. The only reason he opened the bar, he said, was so locals and friends like her would come. Now, all he had were customers he couldn’t talk to.
I wasn’t sure how to spend my last day. A few people told me I had to see the Golden Pavilion, but the message from the Kyoto Travel Congestion Forecast was unmistakable: red. I had already bagged three of the big five, with the scars to prove it.
Instead, I went searching for a moment of Zen. A tour guide I met had recommended a hike north of the city that required two trains and a bus — enough to keep most of the crowds away. When we got to the trailhead, it wasn’t exactly empty, thanks in part to a nearby restaurant that had gone viral because the chef sends soba noodles sliding down a watery bamboo chute for diners to pluck out with chopsticks. But the wait was an hour, so we got moving up the mountain. The hike was dreamy: moss-covered tree trunks, maple leaves glinting in the sun, and only a few pattering Hokas. There was an impressive shrine at the top and even a cherry tree that was still blooming late in the season. At the other end of the hike, we stopped at an onsen for a bath in an outdoor hot spring, followed by karaage and a Sapporo on tatami mats. It took me all week and three modes of transportation, but I finally found a perfect Kyoto day.
Then again, the rest hadn’t been so bad. In fact, I loved Kyoto. There isn’t much better than a lively, walkable city with cheap, delicious food, even if you have to claw through a mob to see it. (Among the joys of vacation: feeling superior to the ill-mannered tourists around you.) Even James had to admit that all the people in cheap kimonos had smiles on their faces. “I feel guilty judging people,” she said. “They look so fucking happy.” This is perhaps modern travel’s paramount problem. No matter how big the crowds get, everyone comes home telling their friends how wonderful it was.
The locals I met often swore me to secrecy when they told me about their favorite spots. But the effort seemed pointless, the last defenses of a world that was already gone. A sake guide took me to a bar with no listing on Google Maps — but it was only a block from Nishiki Market. Iyer told me about a quiet little village north of Kyoto — but I had already been tipped off to it by someone from Michigan. When James gave one of her Hollywood clients a list of places to go, she made him promise to keep it to himself. “I was like, ‘If you show this to your celebrity friends, I’ll be so angry — this list is worth a million dollars,’” she said. We were just leaving a tiny coffee counter she and Kobayashi like, hidden at the end of an alley, a place too special to even put on the list. As we walked away and turned onto the street, two Europeans passed us going in the other direction, looked down the alley, and wandered in.
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