Name: Are Kyoto Locals Sick of "Tourists"?
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T14:57:17.000Z
Duration: 16 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

There aren't many Japanese people here, so I want to see this.

And things like vandalism and litter becoming commonplace throughout the city.

Kyoto's infrastructure simply can't keep up.

And once-sacred sites have changed into mere tourist playgrounds.

But with all of this, are foreign visitors still welcome?

With news and social media highlighting every misbehaving tourist and some Kyoto streets even completely banning non-locals from entering, the situation could look pretty helpless from the outside.

It's estimated that well over 20,000 of these buses flood the streets of Kyoto annually, offloading hordes of tourists that plug up the city's narrow streets in waves.

These human traffic jams make physical movement through the city a near impossibility for not only people, but vehicles as well.

It's just too many people packed into one space.

They can't move around their own city, even if they do manage to get on one of the very crowded city buses.

With herds of people comes a herd mentality, which when you get right down to it is basically just people turning off their brain.

These guys were frustrated, and the longer we talked, the more they shared.

But it got so heavy that I actually had to cut most of their interview.

I approached them after I saw them go off on a tourist for smoking outside of one of the designated smoking areas, a major stress point for many Kyoto locals lately.

Now these two gentlemen clean public toilets for a living, and with one of the worst jobs you can imagine, you will see the worst of humanity.

And so I went in search of a more balanced take, but it didn't quite go as planned.

During the pandemic when Kyoto completely emptied out, I came out to meet some of the locals and hear their thoughts, and I met the sweetest old lady right here.

I've come back several times to see if I could find her with no success.

But there's a gentleman up here, I'm going to ask him if he knows anything about her.

And the more people you get crammed into one area, the more issues you're bound to run into.

Incredibly popular tourist spots like Fushimi Inari Shrine are really starting to suffer from this overcrowding and the problems that come along with it.

Years ago, I met a woman who has spent her entire life living on Fushimi Inari Mountain and became good friends with her and her son.

The thing I'm most concerned about is, this is a shrine, right?

So you can sit in front of the shrine, eat food, that sort of thing.

So this is a tourist spot, but it's also a shrine.

Yeah, I don't really sit in front of the shrine.

They've been coming here since around 5 in the morning.

They say the mountains and the birds are really nice.

They've been coming here since 5 in the morning.

That's why I can't say anything bad about them.

Young people and people like that still come here to eat.

Now, you might not believe this, but Japan is not a naturally clean country.

If you take a peek at this photo from 1968, litter and garbage used to be a serious problem in Japan.

Things didn't start to change until just before the 1964 Olympics, and even then, areas like Tokyo were described as a polluted mess few people wanted to visit.

In fact, it took over a decade of government-driven mass cleanups, education, and public campaigns to address the issue and create the pristine and clean image that Japan has today.

Now, garbage bins do exist, but admittedly, they are few and far between, and even locals think that the city should be doing more to increase them.

Kyoto City should have put garbage bins here.

But instead of increasing public services, the city is much more focused on trying to manage tourism numbers by making Kyoto more expensive to visit, doing things like hiking the existing hotel taxes to as much as 10,000 yen per person per night, or even introducing expensive tiered pricing for foreign visitors, an approach that many feel isn't addressing the key issues.

But with coming out to Kyoto right now being so expensive, and with just learning Japanese being a stress point for so many people, I wanted to take a quick second to thank Migaku for backing this video and making it possible.

Many of you have actually said that you already use Migaku, but if you're new to it, it's basically a multi-language learning tool or platform.

Of course, it has all those usual things like an app and flashcards and all those normal things that you would want in a language learning system, but it's got one tool that over the past couple years I have become almost dependent on.

It's this browser extension that connects directly to my Migaku account and allows me to learn from things like subtitles on TV shows and anime or even text-based blogs and news sites, and I can create flashcards directly from there that link right into the app in my Migaku account.

Like, I use a lot of Japanese blogs for things like finding abandoned or hidden spaces.

For example, when we found the hermit living out in the bear-infested village.

And every single time that I come across a word or phrase that I don't know, Migaku gives me a quick rundown and allows me to save it to my flashcards to practice and review later.

In fact, I can do the same thing with my study materials or a Cessna manual, even a menu.

And this is exactly why I wanted to share it, because it fits naturally into my life and doesn't feel like I have this extra task.

Migaku has also offered a very big discount on the lifetime plan, so I will put all that information down below.

Huge thanks to Migaku for supporting us in this, and back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Part of these issues stems from the fact that Japan has a lot of cultural norms that just aren't as common overseas.

Things like standing to the side of an escalator, or not eating while walking, or even something as simple as not harassing Japanese locals on a train while repeatedly screaming Hiroshima Nagasaki.

But all that aside, even small things like physically touching a sakura or cherry blossom tree can be seen as very taboo in Japan.

And yet it's something we see all over the place in places like Kyoto.

And while this does have the potential to offend or upset some people, many Japanese locals jump at the opportunity to teach something about Japan or Japanese culture and give it a little more thought.

If it's written all over the place, you can't touch it, you can't touch it, you can't touch it, but if it's written in a place you don't know where it is, you don't look at it.

You can't just hang it on your nose, right?

Because the culture is so different, people in Asian countries can just follow the sakura or cherry blossoms and take them home.

Ten years ago, in Kyoto, a person who was teaching at a temple would put momiji leaves on a plate in front of the restaurant.

And because of that, it became a problem to bring the momiji leaves from the temple.

The priest of a Japanese temple would tell the person up there to bring the leaves, and he would bring the leaves with the branches, and he would apologize.

In the end, it's not about the culture, it's about the manners.

In fact, when you get deep enough into any of these conversations, most people actually have an incredibly balanced view.