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Bamboo trees vandalized near Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari shrine, foreign graffiti prevalent

Casey Baseel Jan 10, 2026
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Shinto shrine in Kyoto has become globally famous for its beauty, but inconsiderate visitors are ruining the view for everyone but themselves.

Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari Taisha, or Fushimi Inari Shrine, is one of the most distinctly beautiful places in all of Japan. Walking paths wind up and around the mountain that the shrine’s main building sits at the base of, with tunnels of torii gates and dense bamboo forests making for an unforgettable visual experience.

It’s hard to imagine anyone visiting Fushimi Inari and not coming away with a deeper appreciation for Japanese culture and aesthetics, but apparently such people do, sadly, exist, as evidenced by the increasing number of bamboo trees in the area that people have carved their names and initials into.

As shown in the video above, a very large amount of the graffiti appears to be from foreign tourists, judging from the non-Japanese names and script. Many vandals have also etched heart marks or dates into the trees, the latter apparently to mark the day on which they were there.

The vandalism has been especially bad near Fushimi Kandara, a sub-shrine located part-way up the mountain. Akira Nakamura, a local resident who owns a plot of land adjacent to the walking path that’s been in his family for generations, says that more than 100 trees have been damaged. Aside from the visual blight, the carving can damage the trees themselves, causing them to wither, decay, and even topple depending on how harmful the involved cutting and scraping is.

This isn’t the only Kyoto landmark where selfish visitors have damaged the local plant life for their own amusement. On the opposite side of the city from Fushimi Inari is Kyoto’s Arashiyama district, famous for its bamboo groves. Last year, some 350 Arashiyama trees were carved into.

In addition to turning the area’s natural beauty into eyesores, carving into the trees creates a danger of tempting others to do so as well, since some weak-willed or inconsiderate people might think, hey, if there are already 350 trees that have been carved into, it’s not a big deal if I do one too, right? To prevent that sort of psychology from being triggered, the local authorities resorted to such countermeasures as putting green tape over the carvings, as seen at the point in the video queued up here:

…and, in drastic cases, cutting down swaths of trees entirely, leaving fewer targets within arm’s reach of the walking paths.

Neither of these is an ideal solution, though, as they both involve diminishing the lush, dense natural environment that makes Arashiyama and the Fushimi Inari walking paths so captivatingly unforgettable. What’s more, in the case of Fushimi Inari, large-scale countermeasures are difficult to coordinate, as the bamboo vandalism that’s occurring is spread across small plots of land owned by different people.

It should be pointed out that not all of the carvings are coming from foreign tourists, as reporters have found Japanese-language vandalism as well. That said, the video shows that there is, without question, a whole lot of foreign graffiti, and with Kyoto already being seen by many in Japan as the clearest example of a place that’s experiencing negative aspects of becoming a trendy international tourism destination, this is all one more reason to make sure to be on your best behavior if you’re visiting the city.

Source: Nitele News via Livedoor News via Jin, Sankei Shimbun via Itai News
Top image: Pakutaso
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