As my first blog post explored the rapid development of residences in the Tokyo area in response to the migration trends into the urban core for Tokyo residents, this blog will explore the trends of development in response to the expected increase in tourists with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
With the Tokyo Olympics happening in 2020, according to a report by McKinsey & Company, “Japan’s leaders…have set an aspirational target to double annual inbound tourism from 19.7million in 2015 to 40million in 2020”. With such a target set, it means that the city must consider the technicalities of accommodating such influx of people visiting from all around the world. However as an article by JapanTimes have explained, they are facing difficulties as they are already facing shortages of hotels during a tourist boom. Faced with a resource and time restriction, in the age of the 21st century, Japan has the option of considering sharing resources, rather than having to recreate new ones. This is the case of the accommodation crisis, in which the Japanese government may consider using accommodation sharing services such as Airbnb instead of rushing to develop new accommodation sites in a time of overall labour shortages in the construction industry.
Which was what happened on June 9th as the National Diet of Japan approved the legislation for the services to operate legally after long disputes of whether to allow the service to operate in Japan. However, while the government has allowed operations, the issue that arises is the acceptance of this service by the general public. Recent news updates detail that “Tokyo condos shut doors on Airbnb and other vacation rental businesses”, the article revealing the hesitation of Tokyo residents to allow unfamiliar people into their residences. In general, sharing services have face acute difficulty to operate in Japan despite their urban cores being furnished with the perfect environment and the demands to operate such services. Despite the significant potential for these systems in the Japanese society, there is push back. Chika Tsunoda of Anytimes and Director of Sharing Economy Association of Japan, explains in an interview/podcast by Disrupting Japan, that it is due to the highly regulated system of the Japanese business economy and the little room for “innovation” in the current system which makes it difficult for new kinds of economies to flourish and be accepted by Japanese society.
Looking at the bigger picture, it is interesting how this qualitative aspect of the Japanese education system gets tied into the issues of creating accommodation for tourists in light of the 2020 Olympics. As another one of my previous blog posts explored the rigid structure of tradition and rules in Japanese high schools, the severe limitations with flexibility in the school system are also factors that influence how urban spaces are structured. Cultural understandings of others, restricts certain bodies from entering specific places such as how the general public has responded to the effective use of space in a resource limited urban centre. While these cultural understandings form the Japanese identity, they are also arguably detrimental in this global age.