Kyoto Wants You Back, but It Has Some Polite Suggestions

In the months before March 2020, the food sellers in Kyoto’s Nishiki market often wished for an end to the seemingly endless stream of photo-hungry visitors from abroad who always seemed to be underfoot.

“We weren’t used to foreign tourists,” said Nobuyuki Hatsuda, who leads a business alliance promoting the shopping street in the city center, where vendors sell a dizzying array of traditional Japanese foods, carefully displayed and attractively packaged.

Nishiki has long been a working market, and the parade of visitors — rifling through the meticulously arranged merchandise, haggling with frazzled shopkeepers and blocking storefronts with their luggage — interfered with the flow of daily business, driving away locals who had long done their shopping on the street.

But then the pandemic hit. The tourists — along with their money — evaporated, and sellers had a change of heart, said Mr. Hatsuda, who sells kamaboko, a fish cake often formed into delicate pink and white loaves.

“We realized that we can’t choose our customers,” he said.Other than China, Japan had maintained the strictest border controls of any major economy. Since the start of 2021, fewer than 800,000 foreign visitors have set foot in the country. As other countries began welcoming tourists back in numbers close to their prepandemic highs, Japan let only a trickle of travelers in. The country eased restrictions on trips for business and study in the spring, but as of September, it was still limiting tourism to travelers on package tours who were willing to negotiate a labyrinth of red tape.

That will soon change, however. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said last week that the country would further ease border controls in October, eliminating a cap on daily entries and allowing tourists to travel independently. (Even after normal travel resumes, however, Chinese visitors, who accounted for more than 30 percent of inbound traffic in 2019, are unlikely to return in large numbers until Beijing relaxes its strict Covid Zero policy.)

As tourism slowly returns, Kyoto, like other famous tourist destinations worldwide, is grappling with how to accommodate the crowds without sacrificing quality of life for those who call the ancient capital home.

In the absence of a clear solution, Kyoto’s government is betting on a change of perspective: After years of promoting “omotenashi” — a Japanese word for meticulous hospitality — it’s trying to take more time for self-care.

“Kyoto…