08. Travel — Kyoto's Crowd and the Untold Trip

Overrated · Bucket-list overtourism (Kyoto)

Mainstream travel media treats visiting a handful of iconic landmarks as the measure of a good trip. Fodor's "No List" named Kyoto and Tokyo in 2025, and bucket-list culture keeps pointing there anyway. The Yomiuri Shimbun surveyed 5,500 Kyoto residents in fall 2023 on tourism-related disruption to daily life. About 90% of respondents said bus and train congestion caused by tourism frustrated them. Kyoto, population 1.4 million, drew 10.88 million foreign visitors in 2024. That is roughly 150,000 visitors a day, concentrated in a handful of districts such as Higashiyama and Arashiyama.

Underrated · Domestic tourism

International arrivals are what headline travel journalism counts as "tourism." The World Travel & Tourism Council's 2025 Economic Impact Research measured global domestic versus international visitor spending for 2024. In 2024, domestic visitors spent $5.3 trillion worldwide against $1.87 trillion by international visitors. Domestic spending is roughly 74% of all global tourism spending. WTTC projects domestic spending growing to $7.7 trillion by 2035, against $2.9 trillion international.

The gap

A foreign stamp in a passport photographs and posts well; a weekend trip to the next province does not. Crowding in Higashiyama shows up in every travel photo; the trillions spent by domestic travellers show up only in a spreadsheet. The concentration in Kyoto and the scale of domestic spending are both real; only one of them gets discussed as "tourism." Kyoto's proposed fix — accommodation-tax rises from March 2026 and dispersal toward lesser-known districts such as Enmachi — treats the visible concentration as the problem worth solving; no comparable policy debate exists for spending nobody notices.

Example: A tourist counts a flight to Kyoto as the trip that mattered, while the far larger sum spent by people driving to the next city over never enters the conversation about what travel is.

Verdict. Landmark concentration is a photograph mistaken for the whole picture; domestic travel is the picture nobody photographs.

Overturned if: a future WTTC report finds international spending overtaking domestic spending, or Kyoto's dispersal measures cut the 90% disruption figure in a repeat resident survey.

Sources. 2025 · Alina Joan Ito, "Visiting Kyoto in an Age of Overtourism" (reporting Yomiuri Shimbun, fall 2023 survey) — Tokyo Weekender · 2025 · WTTC, "Global Travel & Tourism is Strong Despite Economic Headwinds" — WTTC