This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

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.

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........

© Daily Intelligencer