Kyoto After the Tourists Go Home
At dusk in the eastern hills, the city exhales. A walk through Higashiyama in the hour when the shutters come down and the lanterns come on.
By six in the evening the tour buses have gone wherever tour buses go, and the stone lanes of Higashiyama begin their nightly change of ownership. Shopkeepers stack away postcard racks. A cat crosses Sannenzaka with the confidence of a landlord. The pagoda at Yasaka, photographed forty thousand times since breakfast, stands unwatched at last.
This is the hour Kyoto residents will tell you about, if you ask them when they love their city. Not dawn, which belongs to the monks and the joggers, but the blue hour — when the day-trippers have funnelled back towards the station and the machiya townhouses lean over streets that have suddenly remembered they are streets and not sets.
The economy of dusk
Overtourism is a blunt word for a subtle problem. Kyoto does not suffer from too many people so much as from too many people at the same eleven places at the same four hours. The city's response has been quietly redistributive: later museum openings, evening temple gardens lit for local families, incentives for inns to serve dinner at home rather than sending guests out to queue.
“We are not trying to close the city,” a tourism official told me over barley tea. “We are trying to lend it out more carefully.”
The lending is working, unevenly. On a Tuesday in June I had the Philosopher's Path nearly to myself at seven in the evening, sharing it with two students rehearsing a play and an elderly man walking a dog in a raincoat, though it was not raining and seemed unlikely to.
What remains when the crowd leaves
A city that is heavily photographed risks becoming a photograph: flattened, cropped, always at its best angle. The evening restores Kyoto's third dimension. Kitchens exhale dashi through lattice screens. Somewhere behind a wall, water moves. You stop composing shots and start noticing weather.
The tourists will be back at nine tomorrow, and the city will meet them politely, as it has for centuries. But it keeps the dusk for itself, and if you stay through it, quietly, it will keep it for you too.
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