The High Price of Hospitality

The Social Cost of Mass Tourism: Exhaustion, Burnout, and Fatigue

Foreign tourism became a pillar of economic policy under former PM Abe Shinzo.

As Japan gears up for the Osaka-Kansai Expo of 2025, the nation’s recovery narrative is increasingly tethered to its record-breaking inbound tourism figures. Government ministries and media outlets celebrate each statistical milestone as evidence of post-pandemic revival, framing tourism as a frictionless engine of economic growth and global engagement. But beneath this self-congratulatory rhetoric lies a more ambivalent reality. The state’s aggressive pursuit of foreign visitor spending has exposed deep structural vulnerabilities in Japan’s labor market, infrastructure, and regional economies. Mass tourism, once framed as a lifeline for depopulating towns and sluggish urban centers, now appears as both symptom and amplifier of economic fragility. Workers in hospitality and retail bear the brunt of this policy shift, managing ever-larger crowds under worsening conditions with little prospect of wage growth or career mobility.

Local residents in places like Kyoto and Shirakawa-go, meanwhile, must navigate the dissonance of living in spaces increasingly reconfigured for outside consumption. Even environmental initiatives touted as solutions to overtourism often serve to obscure more urgent questions about class disparity, social inclusion, and the long-term viability of Japan’s tourism-centric growth model. This essay argues that the tourism boom—far from being an unqualified success—is emblematic of the broader contradictions of Abenomics: a policy program that promised structural reform but delivered spectacle, stratification, and a creeping sense of exhaustion.

The High Price of Hospitality

In the summer of 2024, a Kyoto city bus crawled through the narrow streets of Arashiyama, so packed with tourists that its timetable had collapsed. Commuters abandoned their routes, drivers clocked overtime without bonus pay, and temp workers at souvenir stands pushed through ten-hour shifts under record-breaking heat. That same week, Japan’s Prime Minister announced another surge in inbound tourism figures—“a testament to Japan’s global appeal,” he beamed. For many residents, it felt like a slow-motion crisis.

As Japan prepares for the Osaka-Kansai Expo of 2025, government agencies and travel marketers trumpet the recovery of inbound tourism as a national success story. At the center of this promotional surge is the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), whose glossy “Enjoy My Japan” campaign encourages foreign travelers to explore off-the-beaten-path locales in search of “authentic” experiences. But behind this curated narrative lies a more calculated imperative: extracting foreign currency under the guise of cultural invitation.

The problem is not tourism itself. It is the state’s overreliance on it—as a quick-fix solution to deeper economic malaise—and its refusal to acknowledge the social costs borne by those who must live with the consequences. From Tokyo to Shirakawa-go, a growing number of residents are sounding the alarm: overtourism has morphed from a seasonal nuisance into a structural burden. And while the government hails each record-breaking month as evidence of success, workers on the ground experience it as exhaustion, congestion, and economic inequity.

Abenomics positioned tourism as one of its most visible achievements. Now, three years after Abe Shinzo’s death and political canonization, the consequences of that gamble are coming into focus.

The Promise and Peril of Abenomics

From the outset of his second term in 2012, Abe Shinzo framed inbound tourism as a key pillar of national economic revitalization. Under the banner of “Abenomics,” his administration deployed a three-pronged strategy—monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, and structural reform—to jolt Japan out of its long stagnation. But where other reforms stalled, tourism flourished. Visa requirements were relaxed, particularly for travelers from China and Southeast Asia. The yen depreciated, making Japan a more affordable destination. International airports expanded capacity, and domestic infrastructure projects were accelerated to accommodate a projected influx.

The numbers tell a dramatic story: from just over 8 million foreign visitors in 2012, Japan welcomed nearly 32 million by 2019. The target was 40 million by the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, and 60 million by 2030. Campaigns by the JNTO and other state-backed entities showcased not only cherry blossoms and sushi, but also high-end retail, luxury ryokan, and “hidden gems” in rural prefectures desperate for outside investment. The hope was that this surge in foreign tourism would stimulate consumption, rejuvenate depopulating regions, and restore Japan’s image as a dynamic global player.

And for a time, it appeared to work. Tourism revenues spiked. Department stores in Ginza catered to Chinese tour groups with dedicated duty-free floors. Small towns near UNESCO sites began to rebrand themselves as cultural destinations. Analysts cited tourism as one of Abenomics’ few unambiguous wins.

But this success was always fragile—contingent on global mobility, exchange rate volatility, and speculative optimism. When the COVID-19 pandemic brought international travel to a halt in 2020, the illusion cracked. Cities like Kyoto, whose downtown economies had become almost entirely dependent on foreign tourists, were thrown into crisis. Small businesses collapsed. Bus drivers, guides, and hotel clerks were furloughed or dismissed. The tourism economy, so heavily promoted as a source of stability, proved among the most vulnerable to external shock.

In hindsight, Abenomics’ tourism gamble exemplified the contradictions of its larger vision: an economy propped up by spectacle rather than structural reform. It produced short-term foreign currency inflows but did little to address Japan’s underlying labor market precarity, generational wage stagnation, or wealth disparity. Like the growth figures it celebrated, its benefits were unevenly distributed—and easily reversed.

Labor, Exhaustion, and the Invisible Cost of Growth

While the tourism sector flourished on balance sheets and in government briefings, the conditions on the ground told a more sobering story. The surge in visitors created unprecedented demand for hospitality and service labor—hotel clerks, retail assistants, cleaners, drivers, waitstaff—but offered little in return to the workers whose effort sustained it. Wages in these sectors remained stagnant. Jobs proliferated, but most were precarious: short-term contracts, long hours, minimal training, and few prospects for advancement.

By 2024, the effects were unmistakable. In Tokyo, hotel staff rotated through twelve-hour shifts with no overtime compensation. In Kyoto, part-time workers at souvenir stalls juggled crowds with no air conditioning during the peak summer heat. In tourist hotspots across Japan, burnout became endemic. Local governments scrambled to manage the visible fallout—congested transport, overburdened infrastructure—but largely ignored the invisible toll on workers who absorbed the pressure of each record-breaking tourist season.

This labor imbalance reveals the structural asymmetry of Japan’s tourism economy. Those who benefit most—real estate developers, luxury hoteliers, and publicly traded conglomerates—remain insulated from the volatility and exhaustion that define everyday experience at the bottom of the service pyramid. Meanwhile, the young, the precariously employed, and the so-called “lost generation”—those who came of age during Japan’s employment ice age—continue to face stagnant pay and dim career prospects. A modest wage bump for this cohort in 2024, after decades of stagnation, was widely touted as a policy success. In reality, it did little to alleviate the long-term erosion of economic security among Japan’s working poor.

The contradictions run deeper still. The very population that tourism is supposed to revitalize—rural youth, underemployed graduates, small-scale entrepreneurs—is routinely sidelined in the distribution of its benefits. Without long-term investments in training, labor protections, and upward mobility, the industry offers only a cycle of attrition: recruit, overwork, burn out, replace.

This is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Globally, tourism often rests on invisible labor and extractive economics. But in Japan—where the service ethic is elevated to cultural doctrine, and where complaints are discouraged in the name of harmony—the cost is harder to see, and easier to normalize.

The Strain of Overtourism – Infrastructure, Heritage, and Everyday Life

In Kyoto, the signs are everywhere: buses that no longer run on time, local markets crowded with cameras and carry-ons, children who cannot find seats on their daily commute. In Arashiyama and Gion, residents navigate around visitors who treat residential streets like open-air museums. “We’ve become actors in a performance we didn’t audition for,” a Kyoto resident told NHK last autumn. What was once a seasonal inconvenience has become a structural condition: overtourism is no longer the exception—it is the norm.

Over the past decade, Japan’s major heritage zones have experienced chronic congestion, and the social strain is beginning to register in policy discourse. The Japan Tourism Agency has responded with a three-pronged strategy—regional dispersion, congestion mitigation, and community-based development—but the pace and scope of reform remain limited. The underlying imperative remains growth: more visitors, more spending, more visibility.

This logic has generated unintended consequences across the country. In Mount Fuji’s famed Fifth Station, foot traffic has so severely eroded trails and natural habitats that local officials have warned the site could lose its UNESCO World Heritage status. In Shirakawa-go, overwhelmed by tour buses, the local government introduced higher parking fees to deter day-trippers. Kawagoe has begun experimenting with pedestrian-only zones in its historic quarter, while municipalities in Hokkaidō have debated tourist taxes to offset the cost of infrastructure maintenance.

Even so, these efforts function more as triage than structural remedy. They respond to the visible symptoms—crowds, noise, litter—but not the underlying problem: a tourism model that commodifies place without safeguarding its social fabric. In many cases, the cultural environments promoted as “authentic Japan” are gradually undermined by the very exposure that sustains them.

Crucially, the impact of overtourism is not confined to aesthetics or convenience. It alters the rhythms of everyday life—access to transport, food supply, housing markets. In the summer of 2024, a combination of extreme heat, increased tourist demand, and disrupted distribution chains led to rice shortages in several prefectures. Supermarket shelves in tourist-heavy areas were left empty for days. For locals, this was not a fringe event but a harbinger of how fragile the balance between global consumption and domestic provision has become.

The question, then, is not whether Japan can continue to attract tourists. It is whether the country can continue to do so without sacrificing the very conditions that make life viable for those who live in its most visited places.

Greenwashing the Crisis – Environmentalism as Deflection

In recent years, “sustainable tourism” has become a favored talking point for Japanese policymakers. Proposals to reduce carbon footprints, implement tourist taxes, and develop “green” accommodations populate white papers and promotional materials. From Hokkaidō to Yamanashi, municipal governments frame these measures as signs of ethical modernization—proof that Japan’s tourism industry can adapt to environmental imperatives.

But beneath this virtuous language lies a pattern of rhetorical deflection. The ecological strain of mass tourism is real—jet travel, hotel energy use, and increased waste all exact a toll. Yet the overwhelming emphasis on environmental sustainability often functions as a diversion from more politically uncomfortable truths: exploitative labor conditions, wealth stratification, and the quiet commodification of local life.

In Biei, Hokkaidō, where lavender fields and patchwork farms have become Instagram destinations, authorities have introduced parking restrictions, expanded restrooms, and proposed a tourist levy. In Fuji-Kawaguchiko, a screen installed to obstruct a popular photo spot temporarily reduced traffic—until Typhoon Ampil forced its removal, prompting a return to overcrowding. These are not misguided efforts; they address real logistical problems. But they do little to rectify the deeper economic asymmetries that power the tourism industry.

Too often, sustainability becomes a slogan, not a standard. It grants moral cover to an industry still built on underpaid labor, volatile seasonal contracts, and the extraction of local charm for global consumption. Green initiatives become part of a branding strategy rather than a redistributive one—designed more to ease the conscience of the traveler than to improve the lives of the worker.

In this context, “greenwashing” is not merely a marketing gimmick. It is a structural alibi. It allows corporations, local governments, and national agencies to reframe tourism as a virtuous act of exchange, rather than a process that—unless reimagined—reproduces many of the same inequalities that afflict Japan’s broader economy.

What would truly sustainable tourism look like? Not simply compostable hotel slippers or carbon offset schemes, but a system that prioritizes worker compensation, equitable revenue distribution, and community-led development. Until then, the environmental turn in tourism discourse risks masking the very crises it claims to confront. A similar kind of deflection operates in Japan’s approach to labor: while tourism’s green credentials are polished for global audiences, the system’s increasing reliance on foreign workers remains poorly supported, exposing another axis of structural dependency rarely acknowledged in official discourse.

Foreign Labor, Social Integration, and the Fractures of Demographic Change

As Japan’s population shrinks and ages, the government has increasingly turned to foreign labor to fill critical gaps in sectors like food service, elder care, and tourism. Foreign students, technical interns, and short-term contract workers have become vital to keeping convenience stores open, restaurants staffed, and regional economies afloat. But while these workers are essential to the functioning of Japan’s service sector, their integration into Japanese society has lagged behind the speed of their recruitment.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the education system. In fiscal year 2023, a record 58,000 children of foreign nationality required Japanese-language support in public schools—a number that continues to rise. Local governments, many already stretched thin, scramble to provide adequate language instruction and cultural mediation. In towns like Oizumi, Gunma Prefecture—home to a long-established Brazilian community—Portuguese-speaking staff and guidance programs offer some relief. But newer migrant communities from Vietnam, Nepal, and elsewhere face more fragmented support, particularly in areas without institutional memory or linguistic infrastructure.

These gaps in education ripple outward. Children who cannot fully access the curriculum struggle to advance to higher education or secure stable employment. Language isolation deepens social exclusion. Without proactive, centralized support for multilingual education and cross-cultural inclusion, these children—and their families—are left to navigate a system that was not designed for them.

The labor market presents parallel challenges. In 2022, for the first time, over 50 percent of foreign students found jobs in Japan after graduation. This milestone reflects a growing effort among companies to court international talent. But the job-hunting process remains opaque and culturally specific: bulk hiring, early application cycles, and rigid expectations around etiquette and conformity create high barriers to entry. Universities have begun to offer workshops and matching events—like the one in Osaka in August 2024 that brought together 255 students and 44 companies—but these initiatives are patchwork, not systemic.

Beneath the surface of this demographic adjustment lies a familiar pattern: Japan’s reliance on foreign labor is instrumental, not integrative. Migrants are welcomed when they serve an economic function but are left unsupported when it comes to long-term inclusion. The same logic that treats local communities as backdrops for tourist consumption often treats foreign workers as disposable labor inputs—necessary but marginal, visible but voiceless.

If Japan is to build a sustainable future—economically and socially—it must move beyond this transactional model. Integration is not a matter of charity or cultural tolerance. It is an economic imperative, a social contract, and a test of whether the country’s response to demographic change will reproduce inequality or attempt to redress it.

Toward a New Model – Redefining Sustainability Beyond Growth

The current debate over Japan’s tourism future often revolves around metrics: How many visitors can be accommodated without degrading the experience? What regions can absorb overflow from Kyoto and Tokyo? How can we “optimize” visitor flows to maximize spending while minimizing friction? These are the questions of an industry still beholden to growth logic—one that measures success in volume, not in equity or resilience.

But if Japan is to avoid repeating the extractive cycles that have marked its recent past, the tourism industry must be reimagined beyond visitor counts and environmental impact assessments. A sustainable tourism economy cannot exist without economic sustainability—which means fair wages, labor protections, and career mobility for the workers who make tourism possible. It also requires social sustainability—language education for migrants, infrastructural investment for residents, and policies that prevent the hollowing out of local communities in the name of global visibility.

This is not simply a matter of moral principle; it is a matter of structural viability. The current model is brittle. It depends on cheap labor, docile communities, and uninterrupted access to global capital and mobility. Each of these is subject to disruption—by pandemics, climate events, or economic shocks. Without reform, the tourism economy will continue to operate as a short-term engine with long-term costs, producing cycles of burnout and backlash that erode public trust and undermine its own foundations.

The way forward requires more than just better management. It requires a redefinition of what tourism is for, and whom it should serve. Should it exist to inflate GDP figures and foreign investor confidence? Or can it become a platform for revitalizing local economies, fostering intercultural dialogue, and restoring dignity to undervalued labor?

Japan’s postwar economic miracle was built not merely on exports and manufacturing, but on the careful cultivation of human capital and social cohesion. If the country wishes to sustain its tourism boom—without undermining its own social fabric—it must return to those principles. That means decentering growth as an end in itself and prioritizing the long-neglected question of distribution: who benefits, who pays, and who gets to decide. These questions bring us back to the political logic that first elevated tourism as a national cure-all—a logic shaped, and now memorialized, by the legacy of Abenomics.

Reckoning with the Legacy of Abenomics

A decade after its debut, Abenomics remains a study in contradiction: bold in vision, modest in impact, and deeply uneven in consequence. While its monetary and fiscal tools drew international attention, its most visible domestic legacy was the transformation of tourism into a central pillar of economic policy. This shift was politically expedient and temporarily effective. It brought foreign currency into the country, created new employment, and helped reposition Japan in the global imagination. But it also institutionalized a dependency on volatile consumer flows and codified a model of growth that rewarded capital far more than labor.

The rise of mass tourism under Abenomics has deepened existing inequalities, strained public infrastructure, and left frontline workers overburdened and underpaid. At the same time, its social and environmental costs have been minimized or reframed—obscured by greenwashed rhetoric, nationalist marketing, and the enduring mythology of Japan as a gracious, inexhaustible host.

The consequence is a tourism economy that is neither structurally stable nor socially equitable. It depends on a form of economic theater: an endless performance of hospitality under increasingly unsustainable conditions. And like many of Abe’s reforms, it has left Japan more vulnerable to external shocks, not less.

To acknowledge this legacy is not to dismiss the value of tourism, nor to diminish the work of those who have sustained it. It is to confront the fact that tourism—like any economic sector—is a political construct. It can serve the few or the many. It can reinforce inequality or challenge it. It can reproduce precarity or offer stability. But it cannot do all of these at once.

As Japan looks ahead to the Osaka-Kansai Expo and beyond, it must decide what kind of tourism future it wants. One measured by the sheer volume of arrivals, or one grounded in dignity, distribution, and sustainability—not only for visitors, but for those who welcome them.

References

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