On two recent occasions, a foreign tourist entered Shoji Matsumoto’s barber shop, through a front door that creaks loudly when opened more than halfway, wanting a haircut.
One was Italian and the other British. Mr. Matsumoto, who is 75 years old and does not speak any of their languages, did not know what to say to them. He picked up his scissors and began to cut, hoping that his decades of experience would carry him through the stacked meetings.
Tourists, spurred in part by a weak yen that makes more of their money go to Japan, have been pouring into the country since it eased coronavirus-related entry restrictions in 2022. Some officials, including Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, have expressed concerns about overtourism. March saw more than three million international arrivals, a monthly record and a jump of more than 10% compared to March 2019.
Almost two-thirds of international visitors tend to be from South Korea, Taiwan and China. Last year, spending by foreign tourists made up about 9 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product.
Popular sites in cities like Kyoto, Japan’s ancient imperial capital, feel increasingly unmanageable. Visitors are flocking to previously untouristy places, such as small towns near Mount Fuji or the shopping district of Kyoto where Mr. Matsumoto cuts hair.
“In the past, it was normal to see tourists in certain places,” Mr. Matsumoto said from a low chair in his barbershop on a recent Saturday. “But now, they’re spreading to random and unexpected places.”
This influx is testing the patience of a generally polite society.
In Kyoto and other heavily visited cities, some residents grumble about the price of hotel rooms or crowded buses and restaurants. Others say that tourists sometimes disrespect local customs by, for example, chasing geishas to photograph them or eating while walking, behavior considered rude in Japan.
One day last month, it took Hiroshi Ban six hours – twice as long as usual – to visit Kyoto’s Heian Jingu shrine. Mr Ban, 65, attributed the delay in part to tourists holding up buses by counting coins for the fare.
“Every day is like a carnival here,” said Mr Ban, an event organizer. “We cannot enjoy our daily life in peace.”
Even those who directly benefit from tourism revenue worry that it may be unsustainable.
Hisashi Kobayashi, a taxi driver in Kyoto, said work was so good that taking a day off was like losing easy money. But many tourism-related industries were struggling to keep up with demand as they recovered from pandemic-era labor shortages, he said.
“When Japanese people come here, they feel like they are in a foreign country because there are so many tourists,” added Mr Kobayashi, 56, as his taxi approached a traffic jam near a popular temple. “It’s not Kyoto anymore.”
Some rural locations are feeling the pressure for the first time. One is Fuji City, about 200 miles by road east of Kyoto in Shizuoka Prefecture.
After a bridge with a direct view of Mount Fuji started trending on social media late last year, Shizuoka’s tourism department said on Instagram that it was a good spot for “beautiful, dreamy photos.” It was not told that the bridge was in a residential area with no visitor parking spaces, public toilets or rubbish bins.
Many visitors littered, parked on streets and in some cases avoided traffic to take photos from the bridge’s median strip, residents said in interviews.
During a public holiday last month, about 300 tourists arrived every day for four days, standing in a queue for photos that curled up the road, said Mitsuo Kato, 86, who lives next to the bridge.
“They just park here,” Mr. Kato said outside his home on a recent Sunday, as groups of South Korean tourists busily snapped pictures of clouds obscuring Mount Fuji. “So we had to put up signs.”
Officials across Japan are responding to the tourism boom with varying degrees of effectiveness.
In Fuji City, authorities built a makeshift parking lot for six cars and began building a larger one that would hold 15 cars and include a bathroom, said Motohiro Sano, a local tourism official.
In a neighboring prefecture, Yamanashi, officials in the city of Fujikawaguchiko erected a billboard-sized screen last month to prevent tourists from taking photos of the Lawson convenience store whose blue awning sits below the mountain and became a staple of social media posts. The screen is now dotted with holes large enough to fit a phone camera lens, local media reported.
In Shibuya, a heavily visited area of ​​Tokyo, officials have announced plans to ban outdoor drinking at night in a bid to curb bad behavior by young people and tourists.
And in Kyoto, where signs at train stations ask visitors to “mind your manners,” the government began operating special buses for tourists this month.
In the city’s Nishiki market, where some residents complained of finding grease stains on their clothes after squeezing through throngs of snacking tourists, Yoshino Yamaoka gestured at two signs hanging outside her eel barbecue restaurant.
They both said in English, “You don’t eat while walking.” One had a larger font and its text was underlined in red.
“People weren’t following it, so I put it in a stricter tone,” Ms. Yamaoka, 63, said of the bolder mark. But she wondered if her new approach was too strict.
“The business depends on the tourists,” he said.
To beat the crowds on a recent weekend, some tourists visited popular Kyoto sites at sunrise or waited 40 minutes to eat at a popular salon at 11 p.m. Some complained about the congestion they had helped create.
“It’s a disaster,” said Paul Oostveen, 70, a tourist from the Netherlands, after leaving Kiyomizu-dera temple, a popular attraction.
From his empty barber shop, Mr. Matsumoto said he had successfully cut the hair of his two foreign customers and would not turn away others from walking through his door.
But he was worried about providing good quality service to customers he couldn’t understand, he said, and would rather non-Japanese speakers go elsewhere.
Although tourism is good for the nation, he added over the drone of a radio: “There’s a part of me that’s not completely satisfied.”
