Ridgeline subscribers —
I’m Craig Mod and I’ve been buuuuuuurnt out this last month following my epic Things Become Other Things mega book tour. Finally, I’m gingerly emerging from my recovery cave. (But reserve the right to retreat again.) Here’s a fresh dispatch — in praise of small businesses and why overtourism can be anathema to them.
A great city is typified by character and the character of great cities is often built on the bedrock of small businesses. Conversely: Chain shops smooth over the character of cities into anodyne nothingness. Think about a city you love — it’s likely because of walkability, greenery, great architecture, and fun local shops and restaurants. Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade. If you’ve ever wondered why overtourism can be a kind of death for parts of a city (the parts that involve: living there, commuting there, creating a life there) it’s because it paradoxically disincentivizes building small businesses. Nobody opens a tiny restaurant or café to be popular on a grand, viral scale. Nor do they open them to become rich.
So why do people open small shops? For any number of reasons, but my favorite is: They have a strong opinion about how some aspect of a business should be run, and they want to double down on it. For example, forty years ago Terui-san, the owner of jazz kissa Kaiunbashi-no-Johnny’s up in Morioka, was like: Hmm, nobody is spinning wa-jyazu (Japanese jazz), so I’m only going to rock it. That led to a bunch of cool knock-on connections, not the least of which was a lifelong friendship with the incredible Akiyoshi Toshiko. That singular thing can drive an initial impulse, but small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars. That — community — is probably the biggest asset of small business ownership. And the quickest way to kill community (perhaps the most valuable gift for running a small business) is to go viral in a damaging way.
Pour out a cold brew for small shops with giant lines of transient tourists. New York magazine just published a scathing/entertaining/hilarious/depressing piece by Reeves Wiedeman on Kyoto’s endemic visitor complications. It’s a city crushed (in parts, but not on the whole) by overtourism. This quote jumped out at me:
James told me about another friend who owns a cocktail bar in Kyoto that was TikToked. She had recently stopped by and found him in tears. The only reason he opened the bar, he said, was so locals and friends like her would come. Now, all he had were customers he couldn’t talk to.
That “James” is Maggie James; I’ve known Maggie for nearly twenty years and it’s kind of amazing to see her rip in this article. It seems Wiedeman didn’t censor much. And though Wiedeman tries to pull some optimism out of it all, it’s as dire a portrait as you could imagine of what’s happening to a place of delicacy and local charm like Kyoto.
But what can you do if you’re a small business and “get TikToked?” Nothing really. Just suck it up and try to find some kind of goodness in the … “weirdness” of “the event” / the happening? Most of these owners have poured much of their life savings into opening these places, taken out loans, put months or years of work into designing and building out their spaces. Years building up regular clientele, forming relationships, knowing what people like, creating true community. It’s not like they can just up and move and hide elsewhere. And why should they have to respond, anyway? It’s tricky to the max, and it’s a problem that never really existed on this scale before social media.
At risk of oversimplifying: Most “problems” in the world today boil down to scale and abstraction. As scale increases, individuals become more abstract, and humanity and empathy are lost. This happens acutely when the algorithm decides to laser-beam a small shop with a hundred-million views. If you cast a net to that many people, a vast chunk of them will not engage in good faith, let alone take a second to consider the feelings of residents or owners or why the place was built to begin with. Hence: The crush, the selfish crush.
Overtourism brings with it a corollary effect, what I call the “Disneyland flipflop.” This happens when visitors fail to see (willfully or not) the place they’re visiting as an actual city with humans living and working and building lives there, but rather as a place flipflopped through the lens of social media into a Disneyland, one to be pillaged commercially, assumed to reset each night for their pleasure, welcoming their transient deluge with open arms. This is most readily evident in, say, the Mario Kart scourge of Tokyo — perhaps one of the most breathtakingly universally-hated tourist activities. I dare you to find a resident who supports these idiots disrupting traffic as the megalopolis attempts to function around them.
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