Tourism’s Healing Ways in Japan Show the Flip Side to the Travel Backlash
Photo Credit: Okayama, Japan. Tourism is key to the revival of Japan’s marginal villages. Abercrombie & Kent
Skift Take
Tourism is key to the revival of Japan’s marginal villages, in the process unlocking not only precious living cultures and traditions but people’s sanities.
At a time of bigger tourism backlash, our report this week on how travel is saving Japan’s disappearing hamlets is a timely reminder of the power of this industry to do good.
Move aside overcrowding, climate change, unsustainable development, and other ills for which tourism has been accused of being the culprit.
Skift's Asia contributor Yixin Ng writes below about how tourism can save not only marginal villages in Japan but people's lives.
A developed Japan is seeing migration going the other way, meaning urban to rural, as overworked urbanites — sometimes to the point of death — long to return to their roots and live a less pressurized lifestyle. The rural areas need them as their population is dwindling and aging.
On the other side, the trend of tourists yearning for less crowded areas
