In Kyoto and other heavily visited cities, some residents grumble about being priced out of hotel rooms or crowded out of buses and restaurants. Do you think this is a valid complaint?

Tourist areas have always been like that. It's not new. It's just part of the deal of living there.

All urban public transport in Japan is crowded, especially during the commutes, when tourists largely avoid it.

If you already live somewhere, why would you want to stay in a hotel room there?

Yes but it depends where they are directing their complaints.

This trend is international. It is happening in all heavily visited cities around the world.

In my experience, most residents living in these areas tend to take the "tourist attractions" for granted as these sites are a constant part of their everyday environment. It may be up to the municipalities to come up with alternative commuting options for the locals during high seasons.

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Kind of 'wash me but don't make me wet' complaints. They want a lot of tourists, sell big marges to them and making very good profits and also ensuring jobs as well as unusually big income for the city and citizens, right? Well, that has a little price. And btw crowded public transport can be avoided by more frequent busses or trains, and especially you can't tell me that you need hotel rooms for own purposes when you live there, or are they all homeless? Of course not.

It’s incredibly valid. Traveling to any of the tourist cities is an insane price jump for people getting paid in yen. Seeing hotels that would go for 5000 yen pre-pandemic on random weekends, not holidays, are now well 2-2.5x the price or more. It’s quite jarring trying to go to Tokyo for a quick trip or else where

The border being shut during Covid sucked big time, but one silver lining was that it made domestic travel so much easier. I was able to visit places that I just can't visit now since the cost of hotels, etc have gone so high (and its become hard to book even if you have the money).

That's nothing new. The weekend in Vancouver when Taylor Swift is here hotels are all booked some at 10 time's the normal price.

Kyoto needs more government lodging houses with basic amenities and lower prices.

When visiting Kyoto you can stay in Osaka or Kobe.

When visiting Kyoto you can stay in Osaka or Kobe.

That is kind of true, but staying in one of those cities adds a fair bit of commuting to the daily itinerary for someone who just wants to see the sites in Kyoto. Its a decent work-around if you can't get a place in Kyoto, but being able to stay in Kyoto (if that is your main destination) is probably better if one can swing it.

Mind you, the crowds in Kyoto these days are such a turn off I think people might have a better time in Kobe or Osaka (provided they aren't travelling specifically to see old temples). I first visited Kyoto about 25 years ago and it was quite enjoyable without the insane crowds of tourists back then. I visited again for the first time since 2011 last year and was shocked by how hard it was to do anything without getting squished by a huge pile of tourists trying to do exactly the same thing. Between that and watching these videos of tourists misbehaving (stalking maiko to invasively take their pictures, etc) I can kind of understand where the local resentment is coming from. Which is a shame.

The train tickets from Kobe and Osaka to Kyoto are cheap and the trains quick. There are other staying places like Lake Biwa.

Yeah I know, I used to live in the area and would take the JR Kobe line to Kyoto quite often. For me I just kind of prefer to stay in the city I'm visiting so I can dump luggage in the hotel and then casually stroll around, returning to the hotel to dump stuff or put my feet up for a rest whenever I want. Staying out in Osaka or Kobe is far enough away that you wouldn't be able to do that (though I agree that its cheap and quick enough to be a feasible alternative if one can't get a place in Kyoto).

In which heavily visited Japanese cities aside from Kyoto are people grumbling?

Do Tokyo people moan about extra crowding on the subway? Are Hiroshima people worried about the price of hotel rooms? Do Sapporo people grumble about difficulty in getting a restaurant reservation? etc. etc.

The irony is that Kyoto is associated with Buddhism and should be able to rise above material trifles like crowded buses. Issues with transportation in Kyoto should of course be directed to the Kyoto bus companies and mayor, not reporters on national TV fishing for a quote. This a local government issue, not a national one.

Tourism has been in Kyoto for hundreds of years. If you equate it to London, Paris, Rome, or similar, it is not especially expensive. The current complaints are in response to the recent very sudden upturn in a DIFFERENT kind of tourism that nobody was really ready for. The difference is that the tourists are predominantly foreign.

As other posters have mentioned, you don't need to stay in Kyoto itself because it is very well connected. If you can't keep up with the current costs, then find something else to do.

Restating the question, they may “grumble” about it, but they’re not out on full anti-tourist protest on the street….

It is a “valid” point that the price has hiked and public transportation has gotten more congested with the increased demand. For some residents, these changes may indeed bring certain inconveniences.

Bus travel in Japan is a painful experience. They drive unbelievably slow and use buses too small and inadequate for the routes they operate. Kyoto's buses are the absolute worst example. Articulated buses could help but the dinosaurs in charge are too stubborn to consider it.

Though Japan cannot actually manufacture an articlated bus, those in Fukuoka/Makuhari are Benzes or Scania s.

residents grumble about being priced out of hotel rooms or crowded out of buses and restaurants. 

Complaints are in order, but not towards the pricing of hotels. You put that blame on the Gov't and city planners, also the banning of AirBNB.

Also the lack of promotion for "non-famous" areas for travelers to go to. Also a lack of an affordable rail pass. A lot of those problems were self inflicted by the morons in power.

As for Public transportation, yes, there is a legitimate gripe. But that also leads the blame to city officials, not tourists. They are the ones that are supposed to plan out the tourism and hire more drivers, offer more buses and trains.

Restaurants, no. Just avoid such places and go elsewhere. There are hundreds of options. I never understood people waiting in line for hours for some udon, no,

Yield management by hotels and airlines should be forbidden. Government must impose set prices for the same product on any day. Not 20.000 yen on Tuesday and 50.000 yen on Wednesday because of higher bookings.

No. Japan is now a poor country with a collapsed currency. It is not the tourists' fault.

If Japan cities prefectures really are seriously committed to building any future for J tourism hospitality industry, sector to thrive, worth USD 24.79 billion in 2024.

Then smart management of that sector is essential, with the investment to match.

To constantly focus on loud hailing, creating physical barriers, a clear anti tourist/foreigner message, will inevitably have severely negative consequences.

"...some residents..." Ah, yes. That amorphous group, "some" people", "some" might say...often used to personally advance a perspective YOU want advanced.

This is 80% manufactured by the media to have something to talk about on slow news days. Do you really think "tourist attractions" have never been busy before? LOL. Have Japanese never heard of a "tourist trap" or noticed that prices are much higher there due simply to supply and demand? If you can't tell that the media creates "issues" by going out and reporting exclusively only perspectives that validate their preferred conclusions, rather than fairly reporting what a fair sample of people have to say, you've been asleep for a few years at least.

Anyone who saw how the "Mt. Fuji conbini" story was morphed by the Japanese media from "tourists" being troublesome to "foreigners" being the almost sole culprits, knows what I mean. Press would ignore the 150 Japanese youths present for whom the fad was primarily important, to zero in on the dozen obvious "foreigners" as being representative of every evil deed ALL there seemed to be doing.

If you already live somewhere, why would you want to stay in a hotel room there?

some residents grumble about being priced out of hotel rooms or crowded out of buses and restaurants

This does not say, local residents, it's meaning is residents of Japan. When they say tourist they don't include Japanese visiting Kyoto.

Just be sure the question is being used to help justify imposing a special foreigner tax.

I agree, why would residents of Kyoto grumble about being priced out of hotels? Surely they already live there?

This whole complaining about tourism thing is really starting to get boring. Either accept that people want to come to see Japan and deal with it, or shut up shop and bring back sakoku. Don't moan on and on about the economy and then kill a cash cow just because you're inconvenienced a tiny bit. I went to London recently and it was very very busy, but the locals were so friendly and no one complains about tourists. Change is coming, so just accept it.

Tourism is great to some extent, but when it starts to degrade the quality of life of the citizens that live in the cities something should be done about it. The cities should cater more to their residents rather than the money that it brings in from tourism.

Yes, but the same is true elsewhere, isn't it?

I've heard people from Hawaii complain about the same thing. For example, I heard one Hawaiian say that it's more difficult to buy homes in Hawaii because they're so expensive.

I think it's valid, although I don't know why they need hotels if they live there... well...

In any case, another valid thing is that Kyoto is often on the verge of bankruptcy and these tourists are literally saving the city.

Yes absolutely. Due to over tourism the hotel prices are at least triple for what they used to be 5 years ago. Also almost no availability.

A simple solution would be to ban all hotels rooms to be bought by tourism agencies, provide way more busses dedicated to tourist attractions only, therefore reducing the crowdness on the local commuting busses, and also ban the Chinese or Taiwanese group tour busses who are flooding the streets and making a lot of traffic near the tourist attractions.

I know those methods are not popular, but the tourists will adapt.