"Kyoto’s famously polite residents began to express their displeasure with uncharacteristic bluntness."

"In Nishiki, signs popped up among the [market] stalls admonishing tourists not to eat while walking, a pet peeve in Japan. Neighborhood shoppers, tired of the crowding and commotion, began going to supermarkets, and some long-established sellers closed. Even Buddhist monks lost their cool. In autumn and spring, when the streets became clogged with tourists gawping at pyrotechnic bursts of maple leaves and cherry blossoms, 'people couldn’t even leave their houses. The city was barely livable,' said Kojo Nagasawa, the secretary general of the Kyoto Buddhist Federation.... At the beginning of the pandemic, 'people in the city were saying, "We’ve returned to the old Kyoto, isn’t that great?"' said Toshinori Tsuchihashi, the director of the city’s tourism department. But, as the economic damage mounted, residents 'have come to recognize tourism’s importance.'... With no legal options for instituting hard limits on visitors.... the initiatives mostly consist of soft measures like trying to educate visitors in Kyoto’s traditional 'morals' and hoping for the best. In that spirit, Nishiki market has decided it will try to encourage tourists instead of admonishing them, exchanging its list of 'don’ts' for a list of 'pleases.'..."

From "Kyoto Wants You Back, but It Has Some Polite Suggestions/The city, one of Japan’s most-visited before the pandemic, desperately needs tourism’s money, but it would like to avoid the excesses of Instagram-driven itineraries" (NYT).