How do you bring tourists back to a place still recovering from a disaster without turning the disaster itself into a tourist attraction? And once they arrive, how do you make sure their presence benefits communities that have already endured enormous disruption?

In Noto, Ishikawa Prefecture, the answer, unexpectedly, involves Pikachu.

Vast empty spaces stretch across Wakura Onsen, a small hot-spring town on Japan’s western coast. Heavy machinery works to clear and rebuild the streets, while piles of rubble remain beside uneven pedestrian walkways. The town’s largest and most famous hot-spring hotel remains cordoned off behind a fence, protecting pedestrians from roof tiles that hang precariously above. Just a few meters away, however, hundreds of people line up outside a tiny public hot spring now decorated with colorful Pokemon figures — an unusually large crowd for Wakura in recent years.

Wakura Onsen was among the municipalities severely affected by the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake and the torrential rains that struck the region later that year. The magnitude 7.6 earthquake and subsequent flooding caused widespread destruction across the peninsula, including the complete destruction of thousands of buildings and hundreds of deaths, many of them classified as disaster-related.

In the immediate aftermath, extensive damage to roads and widespread landslides made large parts of the peninsula difficult to access. Ishikawa Prefecture Gov. Hiroshi Hase consequently urged people, including volunteers, to refrain from entering the region. According to Kiyotaka Miyata of the Wakura Onsen Creative Reconstruction Town Development Promotion Council, the governor’s message had an unintended and lasting impact on the region’s tourism industry.

“Since the governor said people should not come to Noto, many people refrained from visiting until recently,” he said during an interview.

The situation changed dramatically this July, when small, colorful creatures from the Pokemon franchise began appearing at popular tourist destinations across the region, including........

© The Japan Times