Such measures have become more important as visitor numbers have soared in recent years, according to city officials.
Some 5.35 million foreign tourists spent at least one night in Kyoto in 2023, up 40 per cent from 2019, the last year before the coronavirus put a brake on tourism. A total of 75.18 million domestic and foreign travellers visited the prefecture in 2023.
Information to help travellers navigate through a natural disaster is available via a new page that was added to the city’s tourism website late last year, according to the officials, who say it has come about due to lessons learned in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan.
“Kyoto City has learned from the 2011 earthquake, which caused more than 5 million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area to have difficulty returning to their homes,” said Jun Kawamura, director of Kyoto’s disaster prevention coordination division.
“The city of Kyoto hosts large numbers of tourists every year and, as a result, we began to consider measures to help people who are not able to return to their accommodation and experience other problems,” he told This Week in Asia.
