Comment by tkgally
16 hours ago
Only anecdotal, but I’ve noticed recently what seems to be a gap in the social-media-driven concentration of tourists in Japan: traditional museums.
I have lived in Japan since 1983, and my sisters and their husbands recently spent three weeks in Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, and Tokyo. It was the first visit here for three of them. They’re all in their early 70s and don’t use social media much, so they got most of their ideas for places to go from web searches, which led them to travel blogs and to sites like Tripadvisor.
I tried to steer them away from the areas that I knew would be overcrowded, but with mixed success. I warned them in particular that Kyoto would be packed, but they insisted on taking a day trip there from Osaka anyway. It turned out to be the most unpleasant part of their trip because of the crowds.
As their trip progressed, they focused more on avoiding the crowds, and they gradually started adding more museums to their itinerary. I took them to the Osaka Museum of Housing and Living and the Tokyo National Museum, and on their own they visited the Osaka Museum of History, Yushukan Museum at the Yasukuni Shrine, JCII Camera Museum, and several others. None of them were crowded, and they seemed to enjoy them all.
I was particularly surprised at how empty the Tokyo National Museum was, as forty years ago it was a standard destination for foreign visitors. It still has a great collection, but very few of the thousands of tourists wandering around nearby Ueno that day chose to go there.
Personally (and ironically), I wouldn't usually think of museums if I'm looking for something non-touristy. Walking through a museum, reading and looking at things that've been laid out in a specific order for me to consume, just feels like reading a website. Unless it's a unique exhibit, there's little interactivity, and while things can certainly be learned, I often wonder if I couldn't have learned them just as well from a book.
That's not to say I'll never go to a museum; I stumbled into a small science and technology museum near the imperial palace gardens, for example. But the bigger a museum is and the more lists it's on, the more I'd assume it's touristy. The Tokyo National Museum being "a standard destination for foreign visitors" is exactly why I'd shy away from it. (Why the general public would follow that trend for museums but not for other tourist destinations, I don't know.)