← New Books Network
New Books Network
Tourism and a Kyoto in Flux: A Conversation with Dr. Chiara Rita Napolitano
00:28:58
Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the new books network.
- [00:07]
B
This is the nordic asia podcast.
- [00:14]
A
Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Sivre Olsson and I'm a PhD student at the center for east and Southeast Asian Studies at Lund University. In today's episode, I'm continuing my talk from last episode with Dr. Chiara Rita Napolitano, a JSPS fellow at Kyoto University. Last time we talked about her current research on traditional Japanese houses, Machia or Nagaya and seikatsubunka, or the culture of everyday life and how this is tied into cleaning practices. Today's episode will focus on the effects of tourism, or rather overtourism, on traditional houses in Kyoto. In recent years, overtourism has become subject to massive debate, both in the context of Japan nationally, but perhaps even more so in the context of Kyoto. Chiara, how does over tourism or tourism even affect areas in Kyoto with a lot of machi and nagaya? And how do you look at tourism through the lens of your research?
- [01:12]
C
Sure. I would like to say first of all that I have researched this topic for my dissertation PhD study and I plan to start again now that some time has passed so that I can actually see the change that that have happened in the past three or four years. Regarding the impact of over tourism on the built environment. I think that again, it depends on the lens that you are putting on. You can see changes on the architecture, you can see changes in the relations between people living in the city, but also relations between people from different Asian countries or between tourists and local people. In my research, I have found that a lot of machiya and nagaya have been repurposed in the last years to be used to be employed as lodging facilities for tourists. And this has impacted a lot the culture of everyday life and have also had a lot of a strong impact on the relation between, between the built environment and the society. Because you know the landscape. The built environment is something in which to which you can relate to. Usually if you live in a place, you find yourself, you find your history, you find your community and your. Your identity in the built environment, in the landscape. The landscape is somehow staging your life, your history, both as an individual and as a member of society. When the built environment changes so drastically and so abruptly, this kind of sense of belonging gets disrupted as well. So in the case of machi and Nagaya, they have been used as lodging for tourists because they, they can provide an authentic Japanese experience. So to say, since they are built in traditional materials, they still retain the Special organization of ancient houses. And therefore, tourist agents can actually sell not only the lodging itself, so the possibility to stay one night in a place, but they can sell the experience through some experience packages. And therefore, sometimes if you go to specific machiya like Tondaya here in Nishijin, you can also have a tea ceremony or a kimono dressing. Every kind of experience that really stress the idea of Japanese traditional culture and Japanese authenticity. It's like a play in which everything tangles together to build this image of tradition. And of course, as we know, tradition is half reality, but half invention.
- [04:27]
B
Yes, I love when you said authenticity. Authenticity is what is authentic.
- [04:32]
C
Yes, in my opinion, I've been asked this question before. Authenticity is an asset. So basically, authenticity is something that can be valued and can be sold. I don't really delve into the idea of authenticity from an ontological point of view, what is authenticity? Because that's more philosophy than absolutely. And also because I don't think that really working on that direction really benefits the discourse in this case, especially if we're talking about overtourism, we have to believe that authenticity is an asset that can be sold to really improve the value of an experience, of a package in this case. So maciya and nagaya, as I said, are really valued for that. And they also solve a problem for tourist agents, because Kyoto has really strict regulation regarding building new houses and new complex. Not every part of Kyoto, the Hikashiyama area, is under strict regulation, but the area, for instance, south from Kyoto Station is a little more flexible. In fact, it's ugly, in my opinion. Not ugly, I will say ugly, but it's. It's far more confused, so to say, from a landscape point of view. But yes, in this part of Kyoto, regulations are really strict. So if you cannot build a hotel anew, you can make use of the property. There is. There are still there. So many akiya, or empty houses, have been converted into lodging and facilities for tourists. And this also means another sense of detachment from. From the built environment for people living here. Another problem is, for instance, enterprises that are based not in Japan, but are based in, for instance, China or Taiwan or Singapore, that buy those units, those machiya, and convert them into lodgings and rent them out to people from their communities. So sometimes you would have advertisements that are just in Chinese or just in Vietnamese, foreign languages. And in this sense, the money and the conduct of money does not pass from Japan at all. There is no benefits for Japanese people and Japanese society at all because they are rented by foreign people. They are Bought by foreign people, they are used by foreign people. And Japanese society does not benefit at all from their usage.
- [07:25]
B
Well, I suppose that having tourists come is one benefit though, right? I mean, spending money, if they spend.
- [07:32]
C
Money, if they spend money, if they spend money. But for instance, if they rent, and the only people that benefit from that rent are people from the other Asian countries or European American countries, what is the benefit for local people? Just to buy food at company, maybe, but also that is not so much as a return as one could guess. And the price that you have to pay for that is that suddenly a piece of your landscape that belonged to your community now is something else. It's totally something else. And you, as I say, that reflection, that way of connecting with your space, with your landsc, is not there anymore because it becomes a foreign space in every sense. Of course, I'm not saying that tourism is bad, not at all. I think that tourism can be a resource. But everywhere in the world right now we see this phenomena where tourists just consume the place where they go and do not really engage with the community in a local base. They want to have this experience, authentic experience that are not authentic at all. Because you can guess that not all Japanese people perform a tea ceremony daily or wear kimono daily and so on, but they are presented like that, the tourist. So it's basically a stage, a performance, and it does not benefit anything at all.
- [09:15]
B
It's a stage, it's a performance of everyday life once when, while the neighbors are still living well, a different everyday life. But it's that weird mixture of tourism space and residential space.
- [09:30]
C
And also from the architectural point of view, these houses have to change in order to welcome tourists that are used to different housing environments. So for instance, they have to put air conditioning, which is of course, that would be put in place also if a Japanese person were to live in these houses, especially in winter, is so cold that you cannot live without some heating system. But also the notion of privacy, as we said before, has really changed in the past. So tourists, especially tourists coming from abroad, they require different sound insulation and thermal insulation. They want to be apart from the street as much as possible. That want this division to be, this separation to be really strict and clear. While in traditional housing in Japan, in traditional Machia, the relationship with the street was far more penetrative, like you could. It was more like a membrane, not really division, a strict division, not like a wall, but more like. Like a space you could go beyond. And of course we can see that with the costume of just entering in the house, because the. The really private space, the really not entering space was the one in the rear part of the house, but the one that was in the Genkan, in the entrance was still somehow a semi public space. While of course, tourists and people coming from abroad, they want a rigid separation. This means that the architecture also changes. And for instance, if we have different level of palm mentation inside the house, with the doma, the earthen pavement and wood, and then tatami, you have different kind of pavement inside the house, different kind of flooring. And all of these flooring somehow train your special sensibility. They train your sensibility to touch with the smoothness of the wood and the roughness of the tatami and the cold of the doma. And if you have to change the house to suit the modern taste and the tourist taste, you have just one level, basically. And all this special sensibility, all this special delicacy, and all this training to the sense of. Of touch, the sense of smell, the sense of sound, everything just gets lost. There is some always something that gets lost when. When things change, which is not in itself a bad thing, I think. Like, I don't believe in keeping these houses crystallized and musialized in the past, because otherwise they stop being houses, right? They became museums. And this is the approach that some other cities in Japan have taken. Like for instance, in Kawagoe, which is close to Tokyo, is one hour by train from Tokyo in Saitama Prefecture. Kawagoe has chosen to use a lot of the machiya that are preserved there as facilities for tourists. They have preserved the facade, they have preserved the interior spaces, but very few people actually live there now. So it's also a point of choice. You cannot stop change from happening. Otherwise these houses just become museums. And it's another way of them to die, basically.
- [13:31]
B
But I mean, it's because you're talking sort of both about the architectural part and then the lifestyle part of it. And if you're going to. If you focus completely on the preservation of the architectural part, that will not fit into the lifestyle part, because lifestyle is always going to be changing depending on.
- [13:52]
C
Right.
- [13:53]
B
With the times, right? Yes. But it's so interesting to see this tourism living dynamic, since we know that there is less popularity with these types of old houses. Right? And there are a lot of houses that are empty. So what is. How do people think around the area? Have you talked to people? What do they do? They think that it's worse or better if these houses are used for tourism purposes.
- [14:29]
C
That is a very Good question. Actually, I talked with a lot of people when I was a PhD student, and I talked to both people from administration. So what was the opinion of the government, so to say. And I talk with people living in community. So it depends on the person you ask usually. But from what I have gained, municipality in Kyoto really encouraged the change, the development of lodging facilities in Akiya in empty houses, because they wanted to. They found it as a way, as you say, to resolve the problem of empty houses. Empty houses are not just a problem from an aesthetic point of view. It's. It's also problem from. For safety, because they are wooden houses often. And if a fire were to spread, basically you would have a very great barbecue in a couple of minutes. And this happened a lot in Kyoto history, urban history. So there are some parts of Kyoto that have been destroyed just one century ago.
- [15:41]
A
So.
- [15:43]
C
This is something that really scares the Japanese people a lot. Fires. So Akiya are a problem. And the municipality of Kyoto really encouraged the transformation of Akiya into Mi Pako and lodging. And we have some act up until 2017 that encouraged and really also offered some kind of financial aid to owners who wanted to renovate their machiya to put them into the tourist market. This up until 2017, as I said, because that is the period when the Minpaku act was enacted. The Minpaku act is a law that basically was enacted at a national level. But Kyoto also adopted the stricted limitations that were inside the law. And so right now, if you want to have a lodging. Yes, this is my neighbor that is playing the shakuhachi. As I said, very poor sound insulation. So if you want to have a lodging facility, you have to have a manager living in the premises or in no more than 10 minutes by walk, in order to be able to mediate between the tourists, the guests and the community. So up until now, from the municipality point of view, the problem of Ikea can still be solved somehow. Maybe not solved, but improved through the conversion into lodging facilities. If you ask people residing in communities in Igashiyama area, for instance, the situation is quite different. Actually, I talked with a lot of people residing in Rukuhara. Yokuhara is a school district in Higashiyama, and it's quite close to the Kiyomizu Dera, the Temple of Pure Water and other Meisho or must see place in Kyoto, like the Sanju Sangendo, the Yasaka Ninja and so on. So originally Rokuhara was a residential area with quite a lot of Machiavelli. But starting from 2013, the tourism agents started to penetrate the housing market in Rokuhara because the part in Sannenzaka and Inenzaka, the streets across the Kiyomizu Dera, were already saturated. So they started to rent or buy houses in Rokuhara to convert them into Mimpaku. And it's created a lot of issues for the community there. There are some of the complaints that have to do with everyday life, like complaints regarding sound pollution, environmental pollution, garbage everywhere in the streets. Every. Like most of the claims that you can find in other part of the world as well. Like, I'm from Italy, so in Venice you have something similar, in Naples you have something similar, and so on. Another problem, though, is the fact that the. The rent for many people living there increased, and also the value, the price of the land has increased. And so a lot of people, families that were living there for years and decades, could not afford anymore to live in the school district and had to move away. Other people decided to move because they didn't feel like the area was safe anymore or as safe as in the past. So this impacted the everyday life of people residing there in a very bad way. And also, when I asked to go back to your question, if the IKEA problem had been solved, at least they told me no, because they would buy houses from people living there, not empty houses. So in that case, because it was easier to renovate houses that were already inhabited, you didn't have to build a new building. In the case of Akiya, many houses that have been abandoned for many years have tilted also because these are natural materials, so the basement would rot if not maintained properly. And so the house is tilted on one side. So you have to basically start from the base of the very foundation of the house. And it's a lot cheaper to just buy a house that was already inhabited. And they told me that they didn't see really any improvement in the situation of Akiya at all. So if this is. If the tourist is really a solution to the problem of vacant houses, I don't know. I can say that other parts of Japan, like Onomichi, close to Hiroshima, is now encouraging tourism for this reason, because they think that by renovating Akiya and using them as lodging, the number can decrease. So maybe this solution has proved right in other cases. But I don't know about Kyoto, because Kyoto has always had a large number of tourists. So it's not like you need to bring other tourists here to encourage housing or to avoid, to. To keep the city from dying like it Happens in different parts of Japan, especially rural parts.
- [21:56]
B
Well, it seems also that if that was the official policy or hope that akiya would be used for mimpaku or lodgings, then there perhaps should have been more stricter rules that they should actually be empty houses once they are.
- [22:14]
C
Exactly, exactly. And if that doesn't happen, you know, also there is another, another problem that has to do with the morphology of Kyoto. Kyoto underwent that terrible, terrible period, 10 years period during the Onin War in the 17th century. And in that moment the geography morphology of the city changed because it had a conformation that was built following the city of Shanhan in China. So really a chessboard like structure, very regular and very clear. At least that was the intent. But after the destruction of the Onin War, basically the streets were built in a new manner in order to protect the community. So the street, the alleys were rebuilt with the houses very close and with streets that were very, very narrow in order to avoid large crowds of people to stream into those alleys. And also to avoid samurai from piercing through the streets and basically destroying the houses and the community. And sometimes you would have also what are called as fukuro roji. Roji is a word that basically can be translated as alleyways. And they are streets that are less than three meters large. And in this street you would have some row houses and sometimes large spot, empty spot on the inside, like a quarter. I don't know. The word is. I don't know. Court. Thank you. When there was a wall, a well and maybe a fountain that all the people living in those houses could use, sometimes a garden, sometimes things like that. So this was done in order to avoid violent people, to just gain easy access to the houses. Of course this now represents an issue from a safety point of view because like emergency trucks cannot pass through these. And this is why also many machia that are found in these small streets are non rebuildable properties. So once they have been destroyed, they cannot be built again because they do not respect safety standards right now. But also, when you put a mimpaku in this kind of environment, it disrupt the entire economy of the place. Because you would have people residing there from generations that were used to a sort of non spoken regulations, not spoken regulations for their everyday practices. For for instance, who collects the garbage, where to put them, who cleans what part of the fukurology and so on and so forth.
- [25:48]
B
Even the example from before with the sweeping, you know, your own and then just a little bit.
- [25:55]
C
Exactly, exactly. The kadoki practice. And so on so many people living there, they were like, I wouldn't say relatives, but they knew each other for ages. And you put tourists there that maybe don't even speak Japanese. And they don't know how to collect garbage properly. They don't know the noise policy in those areas. They don't know how to ask for help if there is an emergency. So they don't know the emergency drills. So these environments are like a bubble, you know, and it takes very little to burst the bubble. They are especially vulnerable. So once you start putting a mimpaku in roji like that, other people will feel even pressured to live as well, because they don't. They cannot find the environment, the protection that they had before. And moreover, if, if, if the mimpaku, as I said before, ifako opens there, usually the land price go up. So it's very difficult. The issue of tourism impacts the life of people in many, many ways, especially people residing in this kind of bubble like environment. And sometimes, from my research, I have also found that people residing in the roji, in Rokuhara, they had made an informal pact amongst themselves not to rent or to sell to tourism agents. So this is like grassrooted response to the challenges of overtourism, which I found very fascinating.
- [27:49]
B
Yeah, definitely. It's very clear that it's being visualized as a sort of threat to the everyday life of people living there.
- [28:02]
A
Thank you so much, Chiara, for coming on the podcast again. And this has been a very enlightening conversation and otherwise. Thank you so, so much.
- [28:10]
C
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [28:12]
A
For links to Kiara's research as well as her LinkedIn profile, please check out the blurb of this episode. My name is Julia Olson and I have been talking to Dr. Chiara Rita Napolitano about her research on Machiya and Nagaya in Kyoto. And today we talked about the issue of over tourism. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.
- [28:39]
B
You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast.