Why this Japanese Festival was REALLY Cancelled - Fujiyoshida Cherry Blossoms

00:00:01 John Daub: Welcome to Tokyo. I wanted to talk today about a canceled festival that has been going on for only 10 years. There's not exactly a lot of history behind this Cherry Blossom Festival, but it's been hitting the news because anytime any kind of over tourism situation arises, anything that might let a tourist down, this becomes big news in the media. And I thought this is a great time to kind of bring this back down to earth because it's not exactly what we all expect. And you're going to be surprised when you hear this because this canceled festival, it's kind of still going on.

00:00:37 John Daub: So the truth has been exposed. I guess that's one way to look at it. But really, this is about a town called Fuji Yoshida. A lot of you probably know this because it was a retro town. It's got this really famous view. This really famous view. This one right here, going through the town. I'm going to show this to you in a second. How you doing? I see all of our viewers from Guam are here as well. Half a day to everybody on the island. So the festival was canceled.

00:01:07 John Daub: In the news, in the international media, in English, everyone has seen it as Japan canceled Cherry Blossom Festival. First of all, Japan didn't do anything. It was Fuji Yoshida, one city in thousands of cities that are across Japan. Okay. It's like not as big of a deal as people think it is. This is the place in question. It's called Arakurayama Sengen Park. I just say Sengen Park. Actually, it's at Fuji Yoshida. It's very famous because it's got this pagoda in it. This pagoda. This park was made famous because of Lonely Planet.

00:01:39 John Daub: I think it was like back in the early 2000s, it was on the cover of Lonely Planet with the beautiful pagoda. And a lot of people said, well, this is such a stunning shot. I want to go here. It's not exactly such a wonderful—it's a nice place. But I'm going to show you what it's really like. It's not like worth going out of your way to go to this place because you can see Mount Fuji and cherry blossoms in so many places. Other than going here, it's a little bit out of the way. But they started to make this festival only 10 years ago, even though the pagoda has been there since the 1960s.

00:02:15 John Daub: And this isn't some ancient pagoda with hundreds of years of history. This pagoda was built in the 1960s. So it's kind of a new park here. But about 10 years ago, they started to make this festival. Fuji Yoshida is a city that has been famous because of Instagram. There's lots of—Kawaguchiko might be more famous. It's a city next to it. Let me show you on the map so you know what I'm talking about here. So this is exactly where we're talking about. This is Fuji Yoshida.

00:02:46 John Daub: I'll bring it on this Google map now. You can see Mount Fuji on the left side there. This is why it's such a popular tourist attraction, because Mount Fuji is just right there. In the center of your screen is Fuji Yoshida. That lake on the top is Kawaguchiko. Lake Kawaguchi, which is also one of my favorite spots to go. It's a real chill place. But that urban area sprawl is Fuji Yoshida. It's not a very big city. I think it's like population—what is it, like 50, 60,000 people? It's really shrinking.

00:03:16 John Daub: This is Arakurayama Sengen Park on the top of the mountain here, you can see the pagoda. There's like—it feels like a thousand steps to get up to it. But there's a parking lot at the bottom. The roads are narrow. You can see it crisscrosses the stairways. There's a lot of stairs to get to the top. It's become a tourist attraction. That's new. If you'd gone there about 20 years ago, I don't think there'd be much of anybody there. It's just because—I believe it's just because the Lonely Planet put it on the cover. I think that's it.

00:03:49 John Daub: There's a—the parking lot. I see it on the bottom right on the right of the hill. Now it's not very big. Not a lot of cars can come in here. But because it's exploded as a tourist attraction, I want you to keep this image in your head. This is not a big city. This is not Tokyo. They don't have a big parking lot to accommodate all of the people. So I think that's really important. Instagram made this little town really famous with this. Okay. In the editing—all right, let's try this again here.

00:04:21 John Daub: I'm gonna bring the video up. Hopefully it works. There you go. This is the street that made Fuji Yoshida famous. This is a retro town. It hasn't changed a lot. I hope it never does. But you kind of just saw right there. There's these orange rent-a-cops, policemen that are hired by the city to—they're local residents actually hired by the city. Most of them are retirees to make sure that everything goes really smoothly. You can see the cars. There's a lot of traffic here. And it was—it's a very dangerous—

00:04:51 John Daub: When Instagram made this place go super popular, it got really busy with tourists and it's dangerous. You could see the kid on the right side there now starting to make her way down the sidewalk. I'm going to talk about it in a second because that's one of the biggest issues why this—this festival was quote unquote canceled. But you could see Fuji Yoshida's done an amazing job to make sure that everybody is safe with—usually two, sometimes three guards there.

00:05:21 John Daub: This is the Arakurayama Sengen Park. Everything is pretty new. That viewing platform in the last 10 years or so. So they've really put a lot of work into this because they know tourists want to come there. Over what is it, like 20,000 a day or something? That's a lot. All right. There's Mount Fuji and you can see why. You've got the old modern structure of the pagoda and Mount Fuji, which is a natural beauty. Those trees on the base there, they're all sakura trees. So it's one of the top 100—

00:05:52 John Daub: Not the best, but it's one of the top 100. That means there's 99 other places to go to. Fujiyoshida has done an amazing job to accommodate over tourism. But this year they're not ready and this makes a lot of sense for them to cancel. I dug into this. It's going to be surprising to you why this—this festival was really canceled. They just had issues with over tourism for a very long time. So let's get to the point of it right here.

00:06:23 John Daub: So according to the news, I'm going to pull up a couple of things. What went wrong here? Over the last several years, the festival grew extremely popular. This particular one that's been canceled, especially on social media, turning into one of Japan's most photographed hanami spots. Hanami is cherry blossom viewing. But the success created big problems. Massive crowds. 10,000 visitors a day is a lot for that little place I showed you on the map. Just—it's really not big there and the stairways are kind of narrow. Residents were just getting really, really frustrated with 10,000 visitors a day, which it can accommodate.

00:06:58 John Daub: The parking lot I think is a spot for maybe 50 cars. The residents just got frustrated if they lived there. And you can understand why. A lot of littering. And there were reports of defecation, people pooing in people's yards. So I mean, maybe it's little kids that just had to go and not—they couldn't wait, perhaps. There are restrooms at the park. Safety issues. Parents said children walking to school were being pushed aside by crowds. The sidewalks in these rural areas are already very narrow.

00:07:29 John Daub: If you've got crowds of people that aren't moving for the locals, oh my goodness. I mean, the kids got right away here. And the traffic operations and the sanitation problems, they just couldn't handle it. The roads are narrow. Roads were clogged. People—I hadn't been there for about two, three years when the pandemic was still going on. That's one of the reasons why tourism had just restarted when I went about two years ago. But now it's just crazy. It's too little—the infrastructure is too tight to get this stuff going.

00:08:01 John Daub: The newspaper had some issues here and I wanted to get into it. This comes from TBS, which is Tokyo Broadcasting News. In addition to the traffic congestion, tourists are opening private home doors without permission. This happened to use the restrooms. They didn't know they're looking for restrooms. Excuse me, can we use your restroom? That's somebody's house. So you're trespassing and littering. A lot of cigarette butts. Sanitation and human rights issues. This is pretty—some serious stuff.

00:08:32 John Daub: It sounds pretty serious. There have been confirmed cases of tourists pooping on private yards and causing commotion when residents tried to warn them off. That's—yeah, that's a human rights issue right there. Impact on children. Again, the overflowing sidewalks have been an issue. And the city just—they're not—I don't want you to get the idea. Like when you read this in the foreign news, it makes it look like the city doesn't want tourists. I went to Fuji Yoshida and I talked with the city officials at their tourism office two years ago.

00:09:05 John Daub: I called them up. I said, I'm coming, I'm going to film something. I talked with some people and an official from the city came. They understand that over tourism issues, but they're also trying to find ways to balance it out better than most cities are, especially around Mount Fuji. I think Fuji Yoshida is doing such an amazing job compared to Kawaguchiko, which you guys remember. Kawaguchiko is famous for the Lawsons. This is my video here. That I took. I don't know if the sound is here—

00:09:36 John Daub: Just people standing on the Lawson sign. A lot of people. This was early in the morning to getting pictures of Mount Fuji, doing everything that they could to get the shot here. See here. I went back later on and I saw that they had put this sign in there. They've had like so many different ways to try to fight this. Do not run out onto the roadway. So you see, they put it like a smaller brown fence. They had a larger black fence there earlier. They—they put it in Thai and Chinese. They did a poll on what language people are talking here.

00:10:09 John Daub: There's a reason why they put it in the Thai. Because there was a—hold on a second. There was a Thai tourist not too long ago that was just making a lot of commotion. Check this one out. Here he is on top of his car. This really upset a lot of locals here. First of all, you can see how many tourists are here on this day. Mount Fuji is out there and there's a dude on the top of his car just dancing like this, trying to get stuff for TikTok. Come on. That's just so inappropriate. I mean, I get why people are doing it, but I don't know what happened to manners.

00:10:43 John Daub: It's just become a place where you get on full display, where tourists not having any manners at all. So this is just a sample of what was happening in Fuji Yoshida, in the town right next to it. You don't have to apologize for Thai people. This is like 0.001% of the people, right? This is like of the tourists who come here, there's always going to be—look, the lady just walked across the road. Did you see that? And she smiled. She just didn't know. How do you not know? There's signs everywhere.

00:11:14 John Daub: She walked by there. I might have said something. I might not have. I'm sometimes trying to avoid conflict like Japanese do here. But I was in shock. I'm filming this and I said, that couldn't have been more perfect of an example. There are people standing on the thing. This is when they were constructing the fence two years ago. That shocked me. The lady just kind of walked right by there. There's a guard there. He doesn't do much of anything. So he doesn't even tell the people not to do anything.

00:11:44 John Daub: He's just kind of—oh, there. He did wave people around. This is the second wall. They lowered it because the buses were hitting the first one. So now they have it marked better. The traffic light is there. People are crossing at the traffic light, which is what you're supposed to do. It's safe for everybody. Cars—it's just so narrow and cars are going by fast. So he's waving people off. But it's just not enough space for the amount of people, the tourists that are coming. It's just a local, a Japanese local road.

00:12:16 John Daub: And that's what I think. The wall looks like this now. I'm not sure if they have a wall at all. I go back every like six months to go and check out this story because it's just fascinating to me. But Kawaguchiko has not done a great job, especially with the messaging. It made it seem like they don't want tourists. Fuji Yoshida does want tourists. There's a letter here from the mayor. This is very encouraging. I want to—I want to read this to you. This is the news here that none of the foreign media is telling you.

00:12:48 John Daub: Okay, I'm going to try and get the mic over here. Comment from the Fuji Yoshida—This is the one that the none of the news is telling you. Comments from Fuji Yoshida City Mayor Shigeru Horiuchi: "For Yoshida City Mount Fuji is not just a tourist attraction. It is our very way of life. However, I feel a strong sense of crisis about the reality that behind the beautiful scenery, the quiet lives of our citizens are being threatened."

00:13:21 John Daub: "First and foremost, we must protect the living environment and dignity of our citizens. To that end, we have decided to take down the Cherry Blossom Festival which has been held for 10 years. This is a transition. It's not like they're canceling it forever. It's just this year that will enable Fujiyoshida City to be reborn as a truly sustainable, high quality tourist city. So that they're looking for ways to—they're not ready for it. Going forward, we will establish appropriate systems and aim to create an environment where residents' lives and tourists can exist—"

00:13:52 John Daub: "Building a city where our citizens can take pride and wholeheartedly welcome back people from all over the world." Does that sound like a city that doesn't want tourists to come here? Horiuchi-san, the mayor. This is what this is what nobody is showing you. This is what nobody is showing you when it comes to Japan. Canceled the Cherry Blossom Festival because of over tourism. It's not because that they don't want you to go there. It's just because they're not ready for it. They haven't found the solutions that work yet, they're doing trial and error.

00:14:26 John Daub: And here's the rub, all right, here's the tour buses are too much. The tour buses are way too much. I think what they need to do. And there is a place not far from that intersection, Fuji Yoshida, where tour buses can go. They need to have shuttle buses, little micro buses to take the people there that just run every five minutes, taking people from the buses to the other place. They need shuttle buses, drop them off, go back around. The city's gotta run this. That means they need money.

00:14:56 John Daub: They only have like 50,000 residents in the city. All right. I think the population of Fujiyoshida is like 50,000. And a lot of them are senior citizens. They're not collecting a lot in tax money. All right. It's going to be probably Yamanashi that has to step up and provide the funds for a bus. This is not cheap stuff. Okay. You get to pay two bus drivers full time salaries, buses, transportation. They can make it fully electric, but that's not free either. So they can do some stuff to get it.

00:15:27 John Daub: I think it's about a five kilometer—a lot of people walk there actually. But it's about a five kilometer walk from the center of Fuji Yoshida to Arakurayama Park. Arakurayama Sengen Park. They need to have that because the buses just can't go there. The traffic is awful. I drove there. It was awful, I have to admit. And finding a parking spot—if you don't go early, you just queued up to get a parking spot. There's like 50 of them. There's just no space. It wasn't set up for that.

00:15:57 John Daub: So the bus system needs to improve. And I do think that though they're trying really, really hard. And I don't know about Kyoto. Like I got mixed feelings with Kyoto. I have a love-hate relationship. It does feel like they don't want tourists sometimes. But I think in the case of Fuji Yoshida, it's a city with a declining population. They don't even have enough people to help with the tourism infrastructure there. So they have a lot of volunteers, other people coming from other cities to help them out.

00:16:29 John Daub: Fuji Yoshida is doing an amazing job though. That retro street has turned into—they put in guest houses, hotels, youth hostels. There is an absolute turnaround in Fuji Yoshida. It's a city like I might want to live in. It really is a beautiful city right on the base of Mount Fuji. But I do think that they are trying their very best and it is not from a lack of effort. Okay. The mayor is different in Fuji Yoshida than in Fuji—in Kawaguchiko. I thought the mayor in Kawaguchiko—

00:16:59 John Daub: I tried to get in touch with. Just see from the approach here. All right. You can see from the approach. I contacted Kawaguchiko City hall and the tourism office multiple times. When they said before they decided to build the wall and then after they built the wall and with all of the PR problems that they had during building the wall, they never—they had CNN, BBC and they said that I was not news. Even though all of this problem was a result of social media, they wouldn't have any YouTubers or any local media that wasn't on TV—

00:17:31 John Daub: Come. This is Kawaguchiko's stance. This is like old school Showa thinking. Fuji Yoshida, on the other hand, very accommodating. We contacted the city hall. They sent people from the staff there. Super friendly. They gave me more information on Fuji Yoshida. They wanted me to have a really good time. I just felt a completely different vibe. Based on the mayor, based on the leadership. You get this—like in Japan, there are some cities that have mayors that don't know what the heck they're doing.

00:18:02 John Daub: And there's some cities that have a better balance between the everyday reality of needing tourism to help revitalize the city and finding that balance with the local residents' everyday lives. And I think Fuji Yoshida is doing such an amazing job of it and I have to commend them. I have to say Mr. Shigeru Horiuchi is doing an amazing job. This statement says a lot and it just doesn't get covered in the media at all. I just was shocked about that. But the defecation is a real thing. Like some people are actually pooping like that's a problem.

00:18:36 John Daub: So they need to reassess this. However, as I said, here's the rub. The park's still open. You can still go. It's not like the festival's canceled, but the park is open. You can go. And it's open till 10pm I think. What are the hours of the park? I have it here. I don't think there—you don't need tickets. I think it's free to get in there. The parking cost me something. But yeah, there's a hundred car park. There's a hundred spots for parking your car there.

00:19:06 John Daub: All right. That's not free. But there's a toilet, there's an AED. There's a couple of shops around the area. But the festival they used to have—they used to light it up. They would have events, they would have some food stands there. They canceled all that. But the park's still open, so you can still go. So what they're doing is adding in security. They've hired more people for this year, but they've officially canceled the festival. So there's—

00:19:38 John Daub: Even though the festival's there, the cherry blossoms are still gonna bloom, right? You're still gonna get that. You're still gonna get the cherry blossom image of this. So I mean, it's like what has really changed? They canceled the festival. I think that here's an image. I can pull it up here just for a second here. That's still gonna be there. All right. But they canceled the festival, which has only been around for 10 years. There's no history behind it. So can you go? Yeah. Should you go? There's—there's 99 other spots that are better. All right. You can see cherry blossoms all over—

00:20:10 John Daub: Kawaguchiko is probably the best place. They have thousands of parking spots. It accommodates bus tours. The lake is so beautiful. It's just a perfect spot. So I want to say that this is a highly blown out of proportion in the media, but you guys know better. Just take it and take it in stride and if you have any questions, leave in the comments below. I don't have to harp on about this, but it is a beautiful spot and Fuji Yoshida does want you to go there as a tourist. But just keep that in mind.

00:20:41 John Daub: They're doing their best and things are going to change and hopefully for the better. Thanks, guys. I'll see you in another livestream soon. I'm heading to another cherry blossom spot and I'll take you with me live. Matane.