Before March 2020, food vendors at Kyoto’s Nishiki Market were often less than welcoming to the seemingly endless stream of foreign tourists who kept snapping photos and always seemed to be in the way.

“We’re not used to foreign tourists,” said Nobuyuki Hatsuda, who heads a business association promoting this centrally located shopping street where merchants sell a dizzying array of traditional Japanese foods, carefully displayed and attractively packaged.

It was originally a prosperous market, but the constant stream of tourists messed up the carefully displayed goods, bargained with the overwhelmed shop owners, and blocked the entrances of the shops with their luggage. This disrupted the daily operations of Jin Market and drove away the locals who had been shopping on this street for a long time.

But the coronavirus pandemic soon hit, and tourists disappeared along with their money, said Mr. Hatsuda, who sells kamaboko, a pink and white semicircular fish cake. The merchants also changed their minds.

“We realized we can’t pick and choose our customers,” he said. Japan had previously maintained extremely strict border controls among major economies, second only to China. Fewer than 800,000 foreign tourists have set foot in the country since the start of 2021. As other countries began welcoming visitors, with numbers approaching pre-pandemic highs, Japan allowed only a trickle of them. The country eased restrictions on business travel and students this spring, but until September the government was still allowing entry only to package tour tourists willing to deal with complicated red tape.

That could soon change, though. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said last week that Japan will further relax border controls in October, removing daily caps on arrivals and allowing tourists to travel freely. (Even after normal travel resumes, however, Chinese tourists, who accounted for more than 30% of Japan’s inbound traffic in 2019, are unlikely to return in large numbers unless Beijing relaxes its strict COVID-19 “zero clearance” policy.)

As tourism slowly recovers, Kyoto, like other famous tourist destinations in the world, is struggling to solve a problem – how to accommodate the influx of tourists without affecting the quality of life of local residents in this ancient capital?

With no clear solution in sight, the Kyoto government is betting on a change of perspective: after years of promoting omotenashi — the Japanese word for meticulous hospitality — it is now trying to focus more attention on itself.

“Kyoto is not a tourist city, but a city that values ​​tourism,” Mayor Daisaku Kadokawa said in a recent interview at city hall, wearing the formal kimono that has become a hallmark of his nearly 15-year tenure.

Rising popularity

Kyoto is home to several globally recognized companies, such as Nintendo and Kyocera, and has produced more Nobel laureates in science than any other city in Japan. But even before the pandemic, the city had come to rely on the large numbers of tourists who crowd its streets with noise and noise.

About 10 million foreign tourists visited Japan in 2013, according to government data, and that number more than tripled before the pandemic began. Nearly a third of those visitors went to Kyoto, where one in five people work in the tourism industry. Taxes from the industry account for nearly 13% of the city’s revenue.

But residents quickly grew tired of what they called “tourist pollution.” The aisles of city buses were crammed with suitcases. Overzealous tourists harassed working maiko (apprentice geisha) and demanded photos with them. Lost tourists broke into residents’ homes while searching for their Airbnbs.

Social media, in particular, has shaped the city’s tourism industry. And not for the better.

Masuto Kawaguchi, a private English-speaking tour guide in Kyoto, said that before the pandemic, his clients’ trips were almost entirely dictated by Instagram. People got off trains at Kyoto Station and rushed to two or three top photo spots — the bamboo forests of Arashiyama, the thousand torii gates that stretch up the hills behind Fushimi Inari Taisha and the golden pavilions of Kinkaku-ji Temple — snarling traffic and filling up areas near those sites.

In an effort to curb some of the worst problems, Kyoto in 2018 cracked down on investors who snapped up traditional Japanese homes in residential areas and then converted them into Airbnb rentals.

Damage from the pandemic

In the spring of 2020, Japan closed its borders. Foreign money stopped pouring in, and Kyoto, which had long struggled with financial problems, found itself on the brink of bankruptcy.

Mayor Kadokawa said the city was feeling the pain of losing tourists, and that the coronavirus and the deficit were “a double whammy.”

When the pandemic began, “people were saying, ‘Isn’t it nice that we’re back to the old Kyoto?’ ” said Satonori Tsuchihashi, director of tourism policy for the city of Kyoto.

But as economic losses mount, residents “have realised the importance of tourism”.

Many businesses have not recovered. Before the pandemic, it was nearly impossible to get a table at one of the restaurants in Pontocho, an atmospheric alley in central Kyoto that runs parallel to the Kamogawa River. But on a recent weekend evening, “For Rent” signs hung in dark storefront windows, and many terraces overlooking the river were empty.

The government, which has no legal option to impose hard limits on tourists, hopes to dilute traffic so it is less concentrated at one time and place. Travel agencies are also discussing how to improve issues that have upset residents, such as avoiding overcrowding on buses. But so far, the initiatives have been mostly soft measures, such as trying to educate tourists on Kyoto’s traditional “morals” and hoping for the best.

In that spirit, Nishiki Market has decided that it will work to encourage visitors rather than admonish them, replacing lists of “don’ts” with “dos.” At the market’s entrance, visitors will scan a large QR code and be rewarded with a list of suggestions on how to enjoy their visit to Nishiki Market, which they will be rewarded with free Wi-Fi.

Kyoto is awaiting the inevitable return of those tourists with a mixture of eagerness and apprehension, said Tsuyoshi Otsuki, a division manager at Japan’s tourism giant JTB.

“We hope the increase in the number of tourists is gradual and that we have a soft landing,” Otsuki said.