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A picturesque Japanese city is placing up an enormous mesh barrier to dam a well-liked selfie spot close to Mount Fuji.
Fujikawaguchiko, on the foot of the Yoshida Path to Mount Fuji, has grow to be overrun with international vacationers attempting to get the right photograph of Japan’s most well-known mountain.
Particularly, they’re standing in entrance of Lawson’s, an outpost of the massive Japanese comfort retailer chain, to get a shot of the distinction between the busy neon-lit store and the peaceable mountain behind it.
And now the city has had sufficient and is placing up the mesh barrier to dam the view, an area official instructed CNN.
The official, who didn’t wish to give her identify, mentioned that there have been ongoing issues with vacationers leaving trash and never following visitors guidelines. Regardless of indicators and safety guards being posted to warn them, the scenario has endured.
“It’s regrettable that we needed to take such measures,” the official mentioned.
The web, which measures eight ft (2.5 meters) excessive and 66 ft throughout (20 meters), shall be erected early subsequent week.
The city of Fujikawaguchiko is in Yamanashi prefecture, to the north of Fuji and about 62 miles (100 kilometers) west of Tokyo.
The crowds plaguing the small city are half of a bigger downside affecting Japan.
Japan has been experiencing overtourism points since reopening post-pandemic in late 2022. March 2024 was the nation’s all-time greatest tourism month ever, with greater than three million international vacationers getting into the nation.
A lot of them head straight to Mount Fuji, an icon of Japan and a UNESCO World Heritage web site, leaving rubbish and inflicting erosion alongside the way in which.
“Overtourism – and all the following penalties like garbage, rising CO2 emissions and reckless hikers – is the most important downside dealing with Mount Fuji,” Masatake Izumi, a Yamanashi prefectural authorities official, told CNN Travel final 12 months.
Some locals had even nicknamed the three,776-meter (12,388-foot) mountain, known as Fuji-san in Japanese, “trash mountain.”
In an effort to mitigate the overcrowding, Yamanashi’s prefectural authorities introduced several new policies for tourists, together with a 4,000-person day by day restrict for hikers and a compulsory charge of two,000 yen ($13) apiece. Beforehand, the charge had been non-obligatory.
Placing up a barrier to dam would-be photographers additionally has precedent elsewhere on this planet: The Austrian city of Hallstatt, which was mentioned to have impressed the look of the megahit Disney film “Frozen.”
Hallstatt – which has about 800 everlasting residents and has as many as 10,000 vacationers a day in peak season – erected a wooden fence in Could 2023 as a deterrent towards selfie-takers.