Tourist Creep: When A Once-Native Place Changes

Things change, and travelers don’t often like that.  We want our discoveries to stay the same.  We want the cute little undiscovered town to remain cute and undiscovered, not selling out to tourism.  We don’t want to return to find English menus and gift shops.  “It’s ruined,” we then wail.  We thought it was ours, and now other people have taken it.

It’s hard for a place to stay undiscovered.  More and more people in the world are middle class now and can afford to travel.  The very popular places like Bali and Barcelona are struggling with tourism in ways difficult to understand, and other places like Venice have almost ceased to be a living city anymore, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  The undiscovered places are being discovered by the slow creep of tourism, which some estimate is the world’s largest industry.  More and more people are making a living simply because you and I spend money traveling, and that changes things.

Furthermore too many travel bloggers are roaming about, occasionally discovering the undiscovered or, much more commonly, further writing about the already-discovered.  Before I travel nowadays, I do a web search for the place name plus “travel blog” and damn I almost never fail to uncover dozens of posts.

Lisbon, Portugal; Toledo, Spain; and Reykjavik, Iceland.  Three random cities of many I’ve visited lately that I had no idea were so amazingly touristy.  One walks through the central district seeing menus in four languages, numerous offering of guided tours around the area, shops selling tourist schlock.  I walked through all three gawking.  Yes, I know, we all know, that tourists visit there; it’s just the huge extent of their effect was shocking.

 

 

I first went to Japan in 2001.  I’ve been to other countries much more isolated and foreign, but nowhere else made me feel like an outsider like Japan.  I could function in the country, but the people and institutions clearly didn’t need the likes of me hanging around.  The Japanese have a bit of a reputation for not well accommodating outsiders, and some businesses will outright turn away non-Japanese.  That’s happened to me.

I went back to Tokyo in 2014 and hung out in two areas where I later wrote about, on this blog.  One is an atmospheric alley known as Omoide Yokocho, “Memory Lane”, but also better known as “Piss Alley” (it used to not have a bathroom).  It’s a tiny alley crammed full of tiny eating and drinking spots, mostly focusing on grilled skewers.  The second area, larger, is called Golden Gai, six narrow alleys crammed with over 100 drinking spots, all of them tiny.  The attraction of both places, besides their photogenic setting, was their exclusively.  They’re oh so Japanese.  Can you get in to a place?  Can you navigate the system?  Will they accept you?

 

In 2014, yes, I got in.  I ate and drank at Piss Alley; I drank in a few places in Golden Gai.  Every place I hit was a bit awkward; the Japanese didn’t know if I’d be a problem and I didn’t know if the experience would be good.  I stuck it out and it all worked fine, as things tend to do, and in a few places I had a blast.  I came home and later, years later, wrote stories of both places for this travel blog.

But they have changed.  A re-visit to both areas in 2019 showed that tourist creep has affected even here.  I first went to Piss Alley.  Used to be that you the tourist would walk along slowly and see if any stall looked inviting, or at least not too uninviting.  One had to judge whether the people would be accepting of you.

Utterly different now.  Perhaps half the places actively tried to wave me in.  English menus abounded, and I know this because the stalls had signs telling me they have English menus.  A few even advertised they take credit cards which at any place is a rarity in Japan.

 

Would a monster picture menu in English entice you inside?

 

I slid into one stall, filled with Japanese, and studied the English menu, ordering sake and some skewers.  On the back wall was a large poster-sized menu in Japanese and English, from which I ordered a few more items.  Unlike my previous visit, I didn’t get into a conversation with the Japanese salary-men next to me.  I ate my fish and left.

The Albatross bar is still one of the few outright bars, as opposed to food places, in Piss Alley, and it’s as good as ever.  I talked with a young Japanese couple from Yokohama who tried to convince me to visit there, but I broke their heart by saying, no, probably not this trip.  On my other side was an American from Texas working in Tokyo for a year, telling me how hard it is to be a vegetarian in Japan.  This bar hasn’t changed and I’m glad for it.

A return visit a few days later gave the same results.  The number of visitors is way up, along with the snapping of cameras along the narrow alley.  The line for the one bathroom area is now so long that “Piss Alley” may well become a more accurate description again.

 

Over in Golden Gai, tourists were thicker on the ground.  One very easy bar to conquer there is called Champion (also called “Coin Bar”), run by Filipinos.  It’s an easy entry into Golden Gai, but in three visits to the area, the place was so crowded I didn’t bother with it.

The rest of the area is packed with tiny, tiny (really) tiny bars, some up lawsuit-inducing 45-degree stairs to a second level.  You the visitor prowl among them, trying to guess which one might be interesting and which would be okay letting you in.  Most bars don’t have windows nor open doors, so it’s practically a crapshoot.  Prices are sometimes a mystery, and so many have a cover charge that can inflate for foreigners.  Not many people are about in the alleys, lending a mystery to the place as you wander through.

 

 

That was then.  Nowadays, some of that is still around, but not much.  Bars there now may have open doors or windows, and so many signs in English carefully explaining their prices, including cover charges (which are common in Japan).  Many signs will tell you they speak English, and Hi!  Welcome!  Come in, we love to talk!  Others advertise their lack of a cover charge.

It’s not that Golden Gai is at risk of becoming tourist-friendly.  That’s already happened; it’s past that stage now.  It’s at risk of being a tourist zone.  The alleys were full of foreigners checking out the bars.  During three evenings there, I went in at least six places, and in each, foreigners outnumbered Japanese.  In a few, there were no Japanese patrons.

 

Googling “travel blog Golden Gai” gives me 55,000 results.  “Travel blog Piss Alley” gives me 39,900.  Let’s assume most results are by association, but still, there must be at least a few thousand travel blog writeups on the places, plus all the guidebook and travel site mentions.  The places were not unknown in 2014, and now they’re squarely on the tourist trail, and it’s people like me who enabled that.

The system and the food are still largely Japanese, for now.  The small differences I saw are the increased range of food, a few offerings such as onion rings and french fries and more fried items in general.  More mixed drinks are available, in more creative ways.

In Golden Gai, many signs will tell you the place does not have a cover charge, enticing to a visitor.  I found that no cover means the average drink prices are more expensive.  If you’re staying in one place for a few rounds, it’s better to find a place with a low cover, ¥300-500, than one with no cover.  Plus, places with a cover usually give you a small snack for it.

In my previous blog post, I wrote about a bar called Miso Soup that seriously challenged me, but I stayed then and seriously enjoyed myself.  It was only me and one other customer.  On this visit, I didn’t even go in Miso Soup, as it was packed every time I saw it.

 

 

I won’t label these changes good or bad.  I’m glad the places are more accessible, but I did appreciate the initial challenge that now is almost entirely gone.  Getting into a place in Piss Alley or Golden Gai wasn’t the hardest of tasks, but still, it used to feel like a cultural accomplishment.  Now it’s hardly different from any other bar, and thus you the traveler are robbed of the feeling of being the insider once you conquer it.

 

British journalist Alan Brien coined the term “tourist angst” in the 1970s as “a gnawing suspicion that after all … you are still a tourist like every other tourist.”  Others (Graham Dann, 1999) have noted that travel writers have their own angst, knowing they have not only help to create tourist angst but they help create tourism and its unsustainability.

We travelers want others, greener than us, to have the same hard time we did at first.  Even at places like Disney World, where everyone is automatically a visitor, one can find some rivalry between the experienced visitors and the greener ones.  I’ve seen this on a cruise ship, of all places, where nightly at the dinner tables people quiz each other on their cruising experience.

Paul Fussell, writing long ago in Abroad (1980), claimed that only middle class travelers, and especially upper middle class, suffer from this tourist angst.  Working class people suffer no such cognitive dissonance; they don’t suffer from navel-gazing.  I will submit that less-experienced travelers are also unafflicted.  I’ve been in groups where a few members will suggest something and the more experienced travelers wince.  “We don’t do things like that,” their expressions read.

It’s not just that we want our destinations to stay the same; we also want us to change into locals that fit into the old place.

 

 

Piss Alley and Golden Gai have changed, but places like these are always changing.  It could be they were tourist-friendly back in 2014 and I was just too green to see that.  I just bought into the old romantic exclusiveness stories about them anyway, fool that I was.  The angst I have now is it’s hard for a tiny Japanese establishment to stay Japanese when filled nightly with a bunch of foreigners.  One other damnable quality about travelers is they don’t want to be around other travelers.

Piss Alley is less appealing to me now, but I had much fun in golden Gai on this recent visit, and I met loads of people.  Most of them were other travelers.  It’s easier now for tourists in Golden Gai, although a few bars had signs reading (in English) “This is not a sightseeing bar”.  Clearly, they do not like the current trend.

 

We shall see how these places fare on return trips.  In the meantime, pondering this makes me realize that my blog posts aren’t that special, and that I should concentrate on finding new places, or at least new takes on discovered places that don’t just repurpose what everyone else is saying.  Everyone writing about travel already knows damn well they’re a hypocrite for complaining about other tourists, but their effect, the changes, is real.