Japan’s tourism boom has become the sort of problem that governments pretend to envy. The numbers are dazzling — and, more importantly, distorting. Official tourism statistics put international arrivals at roughly 36.9 million in 2024. By November 2025, the year-to-date total had already exceeded 39 million, breaking another record before the year ended.
Records make for easy headlines. They also make for lazy thinking. The useful New Year question is not how high the number climbs. It is what those numbers do to the places that host them — to their housing markets and labour pools, to their public services, to the thin, easily torn fabric of ordinary life.
For a place like Shimane, the boom throws an awkward light. What does it mean to be overlooked in an era when attention has become the scarcest resource, and where being discovered can feel suspiciously like being consumed?
The gap that matters is not only numerical
Shimane is not absent from Japan’s story. It sits close to the foundations.
At Izumo Taisha, one of the country’s oldest shrines, myth is not a decorative caption beneath a photograph. It behaves like a working map: narratives that still organise routes, seasons, reunions and restraint. In the tea rooms of Matsue, quiet is not emptiness but a practice — a trained austerity, an aesthetic that asks something of both host and guest. Tea is not a quaint pastime. It is civic schooling in sequence, attention and measure: a way of holding time without spilling it.
Even craft in Shimane tends to persuade most when it declines to audition. In workshops where wagashi artisans shape seasonal sweets with tools unchanged for generations, craft is not heritage theatre. It is infrastructure: the ordinary, reliable standard by which a place conducts itself. The point is not to impress the visitor, but to keep faith with the day.
Yet the accommodation statistics capture what many residents already feel. Official accommodation statistics show foreign guest nights of about 164.5 million nationwide in 2024. Tokyo alone recorded about 56.8 million. Shimane recorded 83,710.
The difference is not a matter of value judgment. It is a measure of visibility, access, and narrative power—of where the world is being routed and where it is not. In tourism, as in finance, capital flows to what is legible. Places that cannot explain themselves are priced as optional.
Revitalisation fails when it mistakes jobs for life
Japan is again debating how to strengthen regional areas and slow the one-way pull of Tokyo. The national mood is shifting from nostalgia to realism. The language of policy is increasingly framed as long-term statecraft rather than seasonal campaign.
That shift is necessary. It is also insufficient.
Any revitalisation agenda that believes jobs alone will do the work is a programme designed to disappoint. People do not move, return or stay simply for employment. They stay for a life that feels inhabitable — for a rhythm that does not exhaust them, for services that function, for streets that feel safe, for schools that hold. Incentives may attract a headline. Standards attract a workforce.
This is the point at which tourism policy and population policy cease to be separate silos and become the same question posed in two dialects. If a town can welcome a long-stay worker, it can usually welcome a traveller with care. If it can support families, it can support inns, cafés and small producers. If it can offer meaning at the level of daily life, it is also better positioned to resist becoming a theme-park version of itself — a place rearranged for the visitor’s convenience, and hollowed out for the resident’s inconvenience.
The usual political temptation is to treat tourism as a substitute for everything else: a plug-in industry that arrives, spends, and goes home. That is how revival becomes dependency. A region that chases visitors without rebuilding the civic conditions that make life workable risks becoming a tourism colony: rich in footfall, poor in agency.
Shimane’s advantage is coherence — and distance helps
In a country that sells proximity, Shimane’s distance from the main circuits is often treated as a handicap. It can also be a form of protection.
Distance protects coherence. It keeps tradition from becoming purely performative. It gives new ideas room to take hold without turning into noise. It preserves what travellers increasingly claim to want — and what they rarely find at scale: continuity.
Shimane is not a hidden gem
The travel industry likes to market hidden gems. Shimane is not a gem. A gem is found, displayed and priced. Shimane is a protocol — a lived one — understood less by counting sights than by learning how its parts relate.
Myth and geography. Tea and governance. Craft and daily trust. Water and light. Food and restraint. Silence and design.
These are not slogans. They are operating principles. They shape the arrangement of a room and the composition of a meal, the feel of a street at dusk, the way a host holds time for a guest. Visitors who arrive expecting spectacle may leave puzzled. Visitors who come for measure — for a place that has decided what it will not rush — may leave changed.
What to build in 2026
As the boom continues, the reflex is to chase volume. Shimane should resist that reflex. The goal is not to imitate Tokyo, Osaka or Kyoto. The goal is to become legible on Shimane’s own terms — to travellers seeking depth rather than spectacle — at a pace that preserves meaning rather than eroding it.
The question is not whether volume can generate revenue — it can. The question is whether revenue can be generated without dissolving the conditions that make the place worth visiting. Shimane argues that fewer, better-structured visitors can support more stable employment than seasonal surges.
That requires investment in infrastructure, but not only roads and signage. It requires narrative infrastructure: the capacity to explain the region without turning it into a brochure.
This is partly a matter of language, but not in the narrow sense of translation. It is language as hospitality: the art of setting expectations, guiding attention and holding a visitor inside the region’s rhythm. A shared English standard that can communicate what Shimane is — and, just as importantly, what it is not. Local partners who can describe why quiet matters here; why tea functions as a civic technology; why craft is a living standard; why myth still routes behaviour for people who do not share the belief.
It also requires operational design, not merely crowd control. Shimane will not win by becoming busier. It will win by becoming better sequenced.
Routes that are reservation-managed rather than congested. Experiences built around transitions and etiquette rather than checklists. A tourism model that rewards the repeat visitor who has already completed the Golden Route and now wants what is harder to find: continuity, competence, and a culture that has not been rearranged for their camera.
Reservation-managed does not necessarily imply exclusionary. When implemented well, it protects residents’ access and dignity as much as visitors’ experience—through transparent rules, local-priority windows for residents and essential users, and pricing that does not turn etiquette into a luxury good.
Shimane does not need to shout. It needs to be findable.
Findable, in practice, means searchable: a small set of English pages that rank for intent-rich queries; a consistent vocabulary across partners; and proof of quality that travels by citation rather than virality.
Implementation will not happen by metaphor
A strategy this restrained still requires machinery. It needs a convening body with authority: the prefecture and key municipalities, a small set of transport and accommodation operators, and a DMO-style secretariat with a mandate to publish targets and results.
The point is not to centralise control, but to make standards enforceable and accountability visible.
The first year does not require grand spending. It requires disciplined sequencing: a quarter to align language and inventory, two quarters to pilot reservation-managed routes and publish baseline metrics, and a final quarter to review and revise before scaling.
Budget follows clarity. Without it, money mostly buys noise.
If the bet fails — if coherence rises but local incomes do not — the answer should not be to flood the place with volume. It should be to widen the economic base that benefits from each visit: longer stays through two-centre itineraries, off-season programming that supports stable jobs, and exportable demand for local producers through commerce that does not require crowds.
Measure what matters
If a place can be explained by numbers alone, it is not yet understood. Still, numbers can be helpful when treated as diagnostics rather than trophies.
In 2026, Shimane should measure not only arrivals but coherence: repeat rate and length of stay; seasonality that becomes gentler over time; guest satisfaction that tracks not thrills but calm; resident sentiment that confirms daily life is improving rather than being displaced; workforce stability in hospitality and transport; the capacity to welcome newcomers without erasing local texture.
A region that can hold these measures will not become a tourism colony. It will remain a living culture — with visitors as participants rather than extractors.
Japan will likely continue to set tourism records. The more difficult task is to ensure that the pressure produces a better life for places outside the primary circuits, rather than a faster version of the same concentration.
Shimane is not requesting rescue by the boom. It is asking to be read correctly.
This New Year, we argue for a simple principle.
Do not chase noise. Build measure.
— The Deities Editorial Board
Sources note for publication
Official tourism statistics, including JNTO reporting on inbound arrivals, and Japan Tourism Agency accommodation statistics, including prefectural foreign guest nights.
The Deities is an editorial voice from Shimane Prefecture, traditionally known as Kamigami no Kuni — the “Land of Gods” — where Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine has served for centuries as the annual gathering place of Japan’s deities. Our editorial board explores how ancient protocols continue to shape contemporary life.