The geisha neighborhood forbids paparazzi tourists

Neighbors of the Gion district, located in the Japanese city of Kyoto and famous for its geisha, are trying to ban foreign tourists from some of its streets because of the excessive influx of visitors and the inconvenience they cause to its residents.

Dating back to the Sengoku period (15th-16th centuries) and the birthplace of the country’s most revered geisha (women trained in traditional Japanese entertainment arts), this district of Kyoto is one of the most visited areas of the former Japanese capital, in turn one of the main tourist destinations of the Japanese archipelago.

Increasing influx of foreign visitors to Japanwhich is already approaching pre-pandemic levels – when the country almost completely closed its borders – is creating various problems in a city that lives mainly on tourism, but is not ready to accept and manage so many visitors.

One of these inconveniences is what Gion residents call geisha ‘paparazzi’ or ‘maiko’ (geisha apprentices), i.e. tourists who chase these women, enter private roads or get too close to homes, institutions or other private spaces with the aim of photographing or recording them.

“Before Covid, there was a lot of tourism in the area and a lot of ‘paparazzi’ of this kind were seen. So we asked that behavior like taking photos in private spaces be avoided,” Isokazu Ota, head of the Gion South District Council.

“After covid come back to there are a lot of people and what we were looking for seems to have been forgottenor,” says the representative of this association, which gathers around 300 families and businesses in the neighborhood.

For this reason, they decided to place posters in streets begging visitors not to enter the narrow, private streets starting in April, messages that will be written in English, Japanese and possibly Chinese, Ota said.

“We can’t tell them not to walk around or take pictures public streets in the neighborhoodbut we want to ask them to respect private spaces,” he added.

When asked if this type of discomfort is caused only foreign visitors, not JapaneseOta said that “there may also be domestic tourists” who fall for this type of behavior, although he added that they “generally tend to ask for permission before taking photos.”

A representative of the neighboring group also pointed out that the south of Gion “doesn’t have much tourist revenue,” since unlike other busy areas of Kyoto, there aren’t an abundance of shops, gift and souvenir shops, or restaurants.

“We don’t want to attract so much tourism here, so if they behave like that, it’s a nuisance,” he emphasized.

The Kyoto City Council also took action in in recent years in order to avoid unwanted behavior of touristsincluding posting signs on their streets – including Gion – asking visitors not to take photos of geishas or to smoke in the street or throw cigarettes on the ground, under threat of fines.

Kyoto, a city of 1.4 million people, received 43.6 million tourists in 2022, a strong recovery after years of pandemics, though still below the 53.25 million visitors recorded in 2019.