Is this the future of Japan tourism?

Tourists are coming back to Japan — but while in the past they were driving Mario Karts down the main streets of Tokyo, now they’re being asked to sit in groups distanced from locals at restaurants, and keep masks on while eating.
For those eager to get back into Japan, the country’s first step towards reopening to tourists in the form of chaperoned tour groups that began has been met with much derision. Social media users have compared the move to the guided tours of North Korea.
But relax: This isn’t the future of tourism in what is often ranked as the place people most want to visit. For a nation that was already quite skeptical about the merits of tourism before Covid, a measured reopening is the right approach.
Japan’s success in handling the pandemic has engendered caution among both policy makers and the public — understandable when it has seen as few deaths per capita as pandemic hero New Zealand, without resorting to lockdowns. Some might think Tokyo a laggard, still living in the pandemic era while other countries with looser policies have defeated Covid: If that’s true, it’s only been through massive sacrifice that elderly Japan will not countenance.
Tokyo is skeptical that foreign tourists will follow the informal social behaviours, such as near-ubiquitous masking, that its experts believe have kept deaths low. Some of the suspicion of outsiders is a hangover from the media frenzy last year over the prospect of people entering the country for the Olympics.
The domestic media’s role here should not be overlooked: If Japan adopted a “let it rip” approach to the borders, the pressure would undoubtedly be intense,
and the potential blowback more damaging to tourism in the long term. Every visitor that led to a cluster would make the news; a single infection on a test group earlier this month earned national headlines.
Indeed, many in Japan also see an opportunity to review the country’s relationship with tourism, which came upon the country suddenly and wasn’t always entirely welcomed.
Tokyoites had long since tired of those Mario Kart cars, and the streets are
now better without them
(a crowdfunding campaign for one operator during
the pandemic spectacularly failed to garner any support, with just four people
contributing.)
In the tourist mecca of Kyoto, many are relieved that temples and streets are no longer thronged with
foreigners.

—Bloomberg