This year’s Golden Week brought fine weather and large crowds to Tokyo. I decided to revisit Asakusa—one of Tokyo’s iconic tourist spots alongside Tsukiji—for the first time in about a year.
As expected, Asakusa was packed not only with foreign visitors but also with Japanese sightseers. Restaurants were lined with long queues and full houses, and you would repeatedly bump into groups of foreign tourists—hardly the setting for an enjoyable visit.
Since I‘ve already been to Asakusa, I chose to explore Yoshiwara, the setting of this year’s Taiga drama “National historical drama” and the popular anime whose film adaptation became an unprecedented hit.
I assumed that the drama’s viewers and anime fans alike would fill the area with foreign tourists. Yet at Edo Shin-Yoshiwara Koshodo—a facility modeled after the Kōshodō opened by Juzaburō Tsutaya in front of New Yoshiwara’s Great Gate—and at Yoshiwara Shrine, I saw only a dozen or so Japanese visitors who appeared to be Taiga viewers, and just one pair of foreign women. It was a letdown.
Foreign tourists flock to so-called “sacred sites” featured in hit anime. The most famous is the level crossing at Kamakura High School-mae Station on the Enoden line, immortalized by a popular basketball anime. Once used almost exclusively by local residents and students, the station now sees not only young Asians but also their parents boarding and alighting there. In fiscal year 2023, it ranked sixth in ridership among Enoden’s 15 stations.
By contrast, at Yoshiwara—yet another globally popular anime setting—you hardly see any foreign tourists. Interviews with local merchants revealed that most foreign visitors around Yoshiwara stay long-term in budget lodgings and are not there for Yoshiwara sightseeing.
So why do foreign tourists avoid this “sacred site” despite its fame? It may be because it fails to stand out on social media—that is, it does not evoke the anime’s world.
Unfortunately, today’s Yoshiwara offers no setting that recalls the Oiran procession. Nearby Namidabashi—the site of a famed boxing manga—is preserved only in the names of an intersection and a bus stop, without any atmosphere of the manga’s world. Along the ward road (Dote-dori), a statue of the manga’s protagonist stands on the sidewalk, but I encountered only one Japanese couple there.
Across Japan, communities are turning anime and Taiga drama locations into tourist “pilgrimage” spots to revitalize their towns. Yet to draw foreign tourists, a location must offer an immersive, photo-worthy experience that lets visitors step into the world of the show.
Reprinted from Real Estate Management Journal Co., Ltd. “Weekly Real Estate Management” (with permission)
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