In contrast, Mecca has 15 million pilgrims annually (four million for the haj) and Disneyland, Anaheim, LA, has 18 million paying visitors every year.
In 2003 there were only five million foreign visitors to Japan, which then launched the "Visit Japan" campaign. By 2017 there were 27 million foreign visitors, 85 per cent of them from Asia, with three-quarters coming from just China, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.
In 2005, on a stop-over on the way to Europe, I was one of those foreign tourists.
Tourism locations around the world are popular for a good reason and Kyoto's reason is its temple gardens. The reason I wanted to see them was quite prosaic — I was a landscape gardener and had seen photos of the famous Japanese gardens.
I knew that these minimal, natural, but somehow stylised compositions had their design rooted in the Japanese culture and the Shinto and Buddhist religions.
Once, while grappling with the aesthetics of rock placing, I found myself climbing up a stream bed after a summer flash flood. The way the rocks and sand had been rearranged read like a static representation of the forces of nature and seemed pleasing to my eye — I decided then that one day I wanted to make the landscaper's pilgrimage and see the rock gardens of Kyoto.
At Osaka airport we were met by Masami, from nearby Mie, who had stayed with us in New Zealand when she had toured our country.
Personifying the Japanese spirit of omotenashi (hospitality), Masami shepherded us by rail to Kyoto and a hostel, stayed the night, took us around some prime sights, went back to work, and returned on the last day to put us back on the plane at Osaka.
It was winter and the off season in Kyoto. Snow had crushed the bamboo, rushes and grasses and then melted away, while black crows called from the trees and white herons waded in the Kamo River.
We headed for Rokuon-ji temple to see the pavilion, papered with gold leaf, reflected in its landscaped pond.
At the top of my list was Rhoan-ji with its garden of rocks and raked sand. Around the back (I didn't realise that there was a back, or an approach) there was a water-basin. The inscription on the stone basin said: "I learn only to be contented".
Masami translated it as "I learn so I will not want". More to the point, I thought.
At Daitoku-ji my preconception of the Japanese garden was shattered. One garden was dedicated to Sorin Ohtoma (1530-89), a Christian feudal lord from Kyushu. Viewed from a corner of the garden, rocks are arranged to hint at the reclining form of a cross — a cross "burdened on the multitude of the world, symbolised by the numberless grains of sand".
These days the multitudes are the flag-following, selfie-stick-wielding tourists, feverish to photograph everything, desperate to consume the next experience, and caring little for the consequences.
One solution to "pollution by tourism" is to stay at home.
Fred Frederikse is a self-directed student of human geography — Mapping the Millispheres, "a new millenium travel story", can be found at millisphere.blogtown.co.nz
