Honestly, the bamboo "forest" isn't worth a visit. I wonder if they post this news just to attract more tourists. The same story has been posted year after year.

It's just a place where someone once planted a lot of bamboo thinking they'd need it as a ressource. They didn't need it so they just left it there.

It dates back about a thousand years, so I guess it's "natural" now, but it's basically the remains of a human made plantation, albeit old.

The famous path through it is about a hundred meters long and a great spot to take that photo. I didn't feel immersed in the forest at all, because the entry and exit is visible through the entire "attraction".

There's a nice temple with an impressive garden close by and some random rich rock star dude also build a mansion with a garden on top of the mountain next to the forest, and that's it.

The whole thing felt like the kind of place that you only want to go if you're a tourist with nothing better to do.

Kyoto is still worth visiting as a whole. The thousand gates on mt. Inari is a much better use of your time.

This is why we can't have nice things.

I'm currently in Japan and visited Kyoto and the bamboo grove a few days ago. Tourists here are such shitheads. Because the Japanese yen is so low, traveling to Japan suddenly became very accessible and brought in all kinds of shitheads that have no idea what courtesy or basic human decency is.

Same with tourists defacing and stealing bones from the Paris catacombs.

When we visited several years back they had to have guides trailing in the dark watching everyone to ensure tourists didn't smash or steal or carve their initials into the old bones. We saw quite a bit of (what looked like) recent damage and defacing.

People who feel the need to vandalise stuff just for fun need significant consequences. I think reciprocity would work well. Carved your name on something? This is going to hurt. Kicked and broke a femur? Oh dear.

Call me crazy, but who cares? It's bamboo. Those names will disappear in about a week. Reinstate the entry fee, have a guy water-bottle-spray teens carving up the grass too much, and call it a day. It's not that complicated, nor a huge deal, it's bamboo.

On a walk through the woods near my house nearly every large tree has names or initials carved into it. I even found a swastika on one.

Disgusting and depressing. Humans can be so disgusting sometimes.

I think we all make impulsive poor choices sometimes. It really sucks, though, when that impulsive poor choice is permanent and publicly visible.

See: Tragedy of the Commons

Why do people have to be shit?

If you travel to Japan, honestly just... Skip Kyoto. It is so full of tourists (national and international), you cannot possibly imagine unless you've seen it.

Sure, there's a lot of impressive temples there. But so is the rest of the country.

We were lucky enough to spend 4 weeks in Japan earlier this year, and if I could do the trip again, I would straight-up skip Kyoto and Osaka.

Rent a car, drive in some random direction. You'll he a lot happier, it it will actually be your trip. By far the best memories coke from places not in any travel guide.

straight to jail

I've been there - it's a small theme park made for tourists and it's absolutely packed unless you go really early. It's a shame that tourists act shit but it's a basic probability if you allow such masses of people without seriously investing into infrastructure and protections.

There really isn't anything exception about this issue and the rise of "tourists bad in Japan" is making me really think about alt-right propaganda machine kicking into gear in Japan.

Doesn't bamboo grow like insanely fast