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Japanese travelers losing interest in Kyoto, top sightseeing spots slip behind Nara at peak season

Casey Baseel Aug 6, 2025
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Kyoto may be the historical heart of traditional Japanese culture, but current conditions are making it a less attractive placer for locals to visit.

Aside from maybe Tokyo, there’s no other city with more of a “must-visit” reputation than Kyoto for travelers to Japan, who flock to the country’s former capital to tour its historic temples, beautiful gardens, and otherwise get a glimpse of Japanese traditional culture. For a growing number of Japanese travelers vacationing in their home country, however, Kyoto is becoming a city they feel like they can leave off their itinerary.

Tokyo-based data/research organization Blogwatcher recently released the results of its analysis of travel patterns during Japan’s 2025 Golden Week holiday season, which straddled the end of April and beginning of May. Examining mobile phone location data, Blogwatcher determined that there were significant drop-offs in the number of Japanese visitors to five of Kyoto’s most famous sightseeing spots compared to just two years prior. Japanese visitors to Fushimi Inari Shrine plummeted by 40.4 percent compared to 2023, and both Kiyomizudera Temple and Kinkakuij/the Golden Pavillion’s numbers of Japanese visitors fell by roughly 25 percent. Shimogamo Shrine and Byodoiin Temple both had slight upticks in Japanese visitors in 2024, but reversed course in 2025 and had approximately 10 percent fewer domestic visitors than they’d had at Golden Week in 2023.

▼ Byodoin’s Phoenix Hall is so famous that it’s even depicted on the 10-yen coin.

It’s not hard to imagine what’s discouraging Japanese travelers from visiting Kyoto. The weak yen continues to make Japan more affordable for foreign travelers to visit than it’s been in a generation, and with so many of them including Kyoto in their Japan travel plans, the city’s attractions are crowded and its hotels expensive. The Kyoto Tourism Association’s data shows that through the first five months of this year, the average price per night for a stay in a Kyoto hotel is around 50 percent more than it was just two years ago. Those cost increases are relatively easy for inbound foreign visitors to soak up as they leverage the favorable exchange rate, but for Japanese travelers, who are already getting hit in the wallet by rapidly increasing consumer prices without equivalent wage increases, the idea of paying inflated prices to go someplace clogged with tourists is no doubt feeling like a less enjoyable way to spend their diminished disposable income.

However, as Kyoto is looking like a less attractive destination for Japanese travelers, they’re becoming more drawn to Nara. Blogwatcher tracks domestic visitor numbers for 33 of Kyoto Prefecture’s top temples, shrines, and historical tourism sites, and 37 in Nara Prefecture. During Golden Week in 2023, Japanese travelers showed an overwhelming preference for Kyoto, with its top sights receiving nearly 70 percent more Japanese visitors than Nara’s. In 2025, though, more Japanese travelers visited Nara’s major sights than Kyoto’s.

Japanese visitors to major temples, shrine, and historic sites during Golden Week
● Kyoto 2023: 746,000
● Nara 2023: 446,00

● Kyoto 2025: 559,000
● Nara 2025: 561,00

It could be argued that Japan is still in the middle of the initial wave of its inbound tourism boom. Residual pent-up international travel demand and the weak yen are doing a lot to make the country a trendy and affordable choice for visitors from abroad, but it’s still not entirely clear whether their intense interest is going to be permanent. As a result, it’s likewise too early to say whether huge crowds and high prices have turned Japanese people off to the idea of traveling to Kyoto entirely, or if they’re simply putting their Kyoto plans on the back burner for the time being. After all, if the shrines and temples you’re going to see are already centuries old, holding back for a year or two to see if the tourism congestion has settled down doesn’t seem like all that long of a wait. For the time being, though, it really does look like Japan’s travelers aren’t nearly as excited about the idea of visiting Kyoto as they were just a short while ago.

Source: TBS Cross Dig with Bloomberg via Golden Times
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert image: Pakutaso
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