When a Chilean woman posted a video on Instagram of herself doing chin-ups on a sacred torii gate at a Japanese shrine, the backlash was almost immediate. For many in Japan this was just the latest example of tourism gone wrong – of foreign visitors with no interest in understanding the local culture using their country as a playground.
International tourism to Japan has exploded in recent years, and while the official figure for 2024 is yet to be released it is now certain to be a new record in excess of the 31.9 million who visited in 2019 before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
