Photo/Illutration Foreign tourists look over expensive knives on display at a Kyoto outlet of Jikko Co. (Fuka Takei)

KYOTO--Japanese on sightseeing trips seem to be avoiding key landmarks in this historic city due to the hordes of foreign visitors that residents also gripe about.

City authorities sought to assess the situation with a study of visitors during the autumn season when leaves change color.

This turned up a roughly 30 percent increase in foreign tourists over the same period of 2023, but a 15 percent decrease among Japanese visitors. The study was done by analyzing GPS smartphone data between Nov. 1 and Dec. 15.

City officials said the result suggested that Japanese were increasingly going to less crowded parts of the city than in the past, citing an uptick of between 10 to 50 percent among Japanese visitors to those areas.

But the study only contrasted year-on-year trends and the city government did not release visitor numbers.

For that reason, the increases in Japanese visitors to the less crowded areas may not have been enough to cover the declines in the more popular and crowded areas.

Other data shows an increasing dependence on foreign tourists.

A study by the city tourism association found that foreign tourists in April 2024 accounted for 70.1 percent of occupancy at major hotels in Kyoto, the first time the figure has exceeded 70 percent. The figure continued to exceed 50 percent in the following months.

“While the eagerness of Japanese tourists to visit Kyoto may not have declined, it appears that more Japanese have given up trying to find a hotel room in the central part of the city,” said an official with the tourism association.

Another statistic shows that foreign visitors are contributing more to the Kyoto economy.

A study by the city government found that tourists from overseas spent on average 37,437 yen ($250) in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. But in 2023 that figure had nearly doubled to 71,661 yen.

Over the same period, average spending by Japanese tourists went up from 20,267 yen to 23,809 yen, an increase of just 17 percent.

Increasingly, pricey hotels and souvenir shops are targeting foreign visitors who are finding Japan to be a comparatively cheap destination with the weaker yen against the dollar.

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