Ever since it happened two weeks ago, Joshua Sherlock and his wife Mayumi have been afraid to go outside. Until he disconnected it, strangers were ringing his phone and abusing him. Unknown people turned up and prowled around their apartment block in the Japanese city of Kyoto. One anonymous Twitter/X user posted a call for it to be burnt down.
There were emails denouncing Sherlock as a “white pig” and “foreign shit” and telling him to “go home”. Someone even ordered a removal van to collect the family’s belongings. The couple took their six-year old daughter out of school. Mayumi suffered panic attacks and has to take medication for anxiety.
“I’m constantly looking through the curtains,” says Sherlock, 32, who is originally from Birmingham. “I haven’t slept for two weeks. I’m afraid I’ll be attacked by a lynch mob of extreme right-wing people. I love Kyoto, it’s my home, but now I don’t feel safe.” The whole painful and bizarre episode has exposed a rarely seen side of Japan, and of Kyoto, the ancient capital city, famous for its temples, shrines, geisha and exquisite, tranquil gardens.
It began with the ringing of a bell. Sherlock runs walking tours for foreign visitors to Kyoto — a thriving business in a country where inbound tourism is booming like never before. On the evening of May 23, he was with a small group in Yasaka Jinja, a Shinto shrine in the heart of the city. As he had many times before, he showed his four elderly clients how to offer prayers at the shrine, a ritual of bowing, clapping and ringing a bell attached to a thick rope.
They were approached by a Japanese woman who complained that one of the tourists, a British woman, had behaved disrespectfully by shaking the bell too vigorously. Sherlock says that both he and the British visitor apologised. The Japanese woman, who has identified herself only as Fujino, insists that he rudely brushed her off. Either way, heated words were exchanged before Sherlock and his group left the shrine.
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The following day, Fujino posted a video of part of the exchange, which within hours had been viewed more than a million times. Since then she has tweeted unrelentingly about the incident, appeared on an online television programme and appealed to her followers to “help” her.
It is they who hunted out his home address and phone number and posted them online, retweeted by “Fujino”. After sinister Japanese callers rang asking him to give them a private tour, Sherlock has given up his tourist guide business. His wife, who ran a gallery selling kimonos and souvenirs, has been too anxious to work. The incident is the latest in a simmering cauldron of resentment about foreign tourism in Japan.
From one point of view, it is a remarkable success story. In 2000 Japan had 4.7 million foreign tourists a year. The government of the former prime minister Shinzo Abe set an ambitious goal of 20 million foreign visitors a year by 2020, and achieved it five years ahead of schedule.
After a pandemic slump, the foreign tourists are back in force: the Japan Travel Bureau, a travel agency, estimates that there will be more than 33 million foreign visitors this year, an all-time record, fuelled partly by the weak yen, which makes Japan remarkably cheap for those spending foreign currency.
The speed and volume of the surge has brought prosperity to tourist businesses large and small, including the one run by Sherlock; as many as 30 visitors a day were paying 6,000 yen (£30) each for his walking tours. But the sheer number of visitors has overwhelmed many places.
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The city of Fujikawaguchiko recently erected a black barrier to block a popular view of Mount Fuji, because of “nuisance” caused to locals by the crowds of tourists milling around taking photographs. Despite being 12,389ft high, even the peak of Mount Fuji itself has become congested — a 2,000 yen (£10) entrance fee is being levied. Nowhere, however, has been swamped by a larger tourism tsunami than Kyoto, a city known even within Japan for its conservative attitudes and high standards of decorum.
The mysterious Fujino, who refuses to give a full name, describes the effects on the city she knows. She appears to be in her thirties, wears a beautiful green kimono and has the serene and upright carriage of a miko, or female shrine attendant, which she used to be. She talks of busy city buses crammed with tourist suitcases — and tourists who take photographs of kimonoed ladies such as her without asking.
The famous geisha — or maiko, as they are known in Kyoto — often complain of being stalked by tourists with cameras, and there is undoubtedly a bit more litter on the ground where foreign tourists congregate. The accumulation of minor nuisances is generating pressure which is beginning to explode in small incidents, of which the incident in the Yasaka shrine is just the most extreme.
“The abundance of foreign tourists has become a kind of routine thing in my daily life,” says Fujino. “I see them in the supermarket, in the convenience stores.” She admits to telling off foreign tourists before — and that when she began filming Sherlock and his group they were leaving the shrine. But she expresses no regret for the consequences that her posts have had for him and his family. One of her tweets carries the hashtags #kyototourism and #GetOutOfJAPAN.
“She wasn’t looking for an apology,” says Sherlock, whose lawyer is preparing to sue Fujino for defamation and interference with business. “She was very menacing. It seemed to me from the beginning that she was looking for some trouble. Something so trivial has had such an effect on our lives. It’s shown me a dark underbelly of Japanese society — there are so many wonderful, lovely, kind Japanese people. But unfortunately these extremist people do exist.”
