A sika deer crosses a red light. This is one of the first scenes one experiences when visiting Nara, where the Japanese Emperor lived 1300 years ago. It’s a cloudy spring day in the former capital. Young green surrounds the Tōdai-ji temple complex. There is not much going on in the park. And you’re not sure if the wild deer are enjoying the rest or if they’re missing something. Considered sacred by Shinto belief for centuries, they have lost their fear of humans and are happy to be fed the flour and rice bran biscuits sold by the Nara Deer Conservation Foundation in the park. But there are not many tourists who could buy cookies. A deer is standing in front of the stand at the National Museum and seems to be looking longingly at the offer.
It has become a rare privilege to travel around Japan. The pandemic is to blame, as restricting entry is a pillar of the coronavirus defense for Japan’s government. She has been pursuing this strategy with great consistency since April 2020. Now that the vaccine protection and the less aggressive mutant omicron of the lung disease Covid-19 have taken the greatest fear, the situation has eased. Most countries in Asia and the Pacific have opened their borders. Japan’s government has allowed 10,000 travelers per day since April. But still no tourists. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently emphasized this personally. “An exact timetable has not yet been decided,” he said. It sounded as if he wanted to reassure his compatriots: Don’t worry, foreign vacationers won’t be coming back anytime soon.
A country that no foreigner visits anymore: Japan has done that before
Is Japan comfortable with not being able to visit? Perhaps even better than in the pre-pandemic years after 2012, when then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe touted tourism as a new source of income and failed to attract enough visitors to the country?
You can only find out if you set out on your own. Best on the classic tourist route with the Shinkansen from Tokyo via Kyoto and Osaka to Hiroshima. Nara is on the edge of the route. The local train takes about 45 minutes from Kyoto’s main station. Nara looks like a mixture of open-air museum and zoo. Just seeing the deer graze on the median between cars is an experience that can probably only be had in Japan.
Masato Kosaka, head of the tourism promotion section at the Nara Prefectural Tourism Bureau, puts numbers on the table. “The number of tourists and consumption by visitors in 2020 was only half of 2019,” he says. There have been almost no foreign tourists since 2020, of course.
Masato Kosaka, head of tourism in Nara, wishes the foreign tourists back.
(Photo: Thomas Hahn)
Nara is a prime example of Japan’s tourism development. Nara City, the capital of the prefecture, still had 267,000 holiday guests from abroad in 2012. In 2019 it was 3.3 million. And the boom should continue. Nothing will come of it, which Masato Kosaka finds bad, not only for economic reasons. Before the pandemic, only 7 percent of tourists were foreigners. In terms of revenue, it is therefore more important for Nara to bring back the Japanese travelers. But tourism is not just about money. “Visiting here makes foreigners understand Japan better,” says Kosaka. Naras Park, the museum, the temples, the deer – all of this tells the story of the island state beyond clichés and prejudices. With the help of influencers, Nara is therefore trying to draw attention to itself on social networks and runs school exchange programs online. The world should not forget Nara.
What will become of a country that no stranger can look at anymore? Japan has had this situation before. In the Edo period from 1603 to 1868, the ruling Tokugawa shoguns almost completely sealed off the country to protect their power from outside influences. Hardly anyone was allowed in, hardly anyone out. The Edo period was the longest period of peace in Japan’s history. As Americans forced Japan out of their isolation, life became more advanced but also more complicated. And this need for undisturbed national harmony lives on to a certain extent to this day. Without foreign tourists there would be less dirt, noise and bad manners – you often hear that on the trip. Also in Nara.
Yukako Oka from Nara is convinced that the city’s famous deer can do very well without tourists.
(Photo: Thomas Hahn)
Yukako Oka, a native of Nara, is standing in the park by Nogaku Hall. A couple of sika deer sniff her because she has rice biscuits in her burlap bag. Yukako Oka is here every week, and before the pandemic, she was aware that times were stressful for the animals. The rice biscuit vendors enjoyed high sales, and the tourists fed so many biscuits that the deer got diarrhea. Worse still, the tourists gave the deer things they weren’t supposed to eat, including paper and trash. And because some came too close to the animals, there were accidents. For Yukako Oka it is therefore clear: “This situation with few tourists is good for the sika deer.”
Nevertheless, peace has disadvantages. Before the pandemic, Kyoto Central Station always seemed like a meeting point for travelers from all over the world curious about Japan’s way of life. Now you mainly see Japanese people here who don’t have time. The streets around the large Kiyomizu-dera Temple are quiet. And Maryu Sugita feels she’s missing something important.
Only familiar sounds – something is missing
She is a china painter. Their small family business is located in the Higashiyama district amidst souvenir shops and kimono rentals. The fact that the foreign tourists are gone doesn’t really harm her. “Most of my customers are Japanese.” And, of course, she too was annoyed by the symptoms of overtourism, which plagued Kyoto like no other city in Japan. “Sometimes I couldn’t drive to my house because it was so crowded.” But this emptiness is not natural either. Maryu Sugita only hears familiar sounds, hardly any new perspectives. For her as a porcelain painter, this is a problem. “I bring outside influences into my work. If you just pull that off the internet, the influence is kind of muted. It’s sad for art.” Maryu Sugita wants her living Kyoto back.
Pensioner Hiromi Sugiyama also has his doubts. He leans his bike against the stone wall of Osaka’s moat. Behind him the green roofs of the main tower rise into the evening sky. Before the pandemic, he found the tourist crowd borderline. “But I also had the thought that this crowd could not only come to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, but also to other cities.” So people could have learned more about Japan. Will the chance come back? The 2025 World Expo will take place in Osaka. “We’ll see what the result of the entry freeze is, how many people come,” says Hiromi Sugiyama. He sounds skeptical.
No guests in Hiroshima. The message of peace stays in the country, right now
The next day, rain pelts the square in front of the Genbaku Museum in Hiroshima’s Peace Park, which commemorates the American atomic bombing of 1945. A school class walks in rank and file into the museum. Hardly anyone else is there, but the legacy of this place is valuable right now, when the threatening nuclear power Russia is waging war in Ukraine. Nothing to do. The message of peace must remain in the country. After all, Kiyoshi Kamachi is from the municipal foundation Hiroshima Convention & Visitors Bureau optimistic. “Hiroshima will not be forgotten,” he believes. “People’s will to come to Hiroshima has not waned.”
But if the will is disappointed for too long, people may eventually forget that you can travel to Japan. Japan’s welcoming culture is hard to gauge right now – but in the third year of the pandemic, the country is clearly in no hurry to welcome guests again.
There are many seats available on the Shinkansen to Tokyo. And not a single international tour group is out and about at the Imperial Palace in the capital. That’s what the three friends Natsumi, Alisa and Shizuka from Saitama are there for. They are sitting on a step by the pine meadow.
Natsumi, Alisa and Shizuka (from left) in Tokyo: Japan seems a bit lonely without tourists.
(Photo: Thomas Hahn)
Natsumi and Alisa wanted to take Shizuka to the train, and because there was time, they came to the palace from the main train station. Japan seems “a bit lonely” to them without tourists, but now they can sit here without stress. And Shizuka is using the pandemic to get to know her homeland better. She’s been to Kyoto “because it’s empty.” Now she is going to Ise, where one of the most important shrines in Japan is located. “I actually wanted to go overseas, but that’s difficult.” So replacement program. “I want to visit places I’ve never been, even though they’re in Japan.” She uses her privilege to travel through a closed country.