A 10-year tourist boom and all I got was this lousy 'Mario Kart'

They’re the scourge of Tokyo’s streets: bright-red go-karts, driven by foreign tourists waving and clad in cartoon costumes.

The providers of these personal transporters, colloquially known as "Mario Karts," once dressed riders as characters from Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. before putting them on the roads. Now, after a company lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court, some websites warn that their street karts are "in no way a reflection” of the video-game maker.

But the damnable menace continues. Like cockroaches in a nuclear apocalypse, seemingly nothing can destroy them: not legal action, not the Transport Ministry, not even the pandemic, which kept tourists outside Japan’s shores for the better part of three years and forced one karting company into a failed crowdfunding campaign. As soon as foreign visitors roared back, so too did the karts, up and down Shibuya’s Dogenzaka thoroughfare or past Tokyo Tower.

Tokyoites could blame Katy Perry, or MrBeast, the world’s most-subscribed YouTuber who recently rode on them, for inflicting these contraptions on us. ("This is not meant to be on the street!” his video proclaims, and it’s hard to disagree.) But ultimately the affliction is a problem of Japan’s own making. The days when the country was an off-the-beaten-track destination are bygone and its tourist boom is well over a decade old.

But there is still a chronic dearth of things for tourists to actually do. Despite having the past three years to do so, the country hasn’t sufficiently invested in activities catering to foreign visitors. (As with many of Japan’s administrative issues, coordination across ministries — each with their own agendas — is an issue.) And much of the tourist infrastructure still leans toward domestic travelers — with, at best, translations attached.

TripAdvisor’s list of most popular attractions in Tokyo largely features parks, shopping districts or eating; included in the top 30 is an owl cafe, where you can drink tea and view the tethered birds up close. Something seems off here. Japan is rightly considered one of the world’s most appealing destinations thanks to its impeccable customer service, centuries of history and, recently, a boost from the weak yen.

More Americans are flocking there than even before the pandemic. The most desirable sightseeing spots typically shut early. (For example, Tokyo’s Skytree tower closes at 9 p.m. versus the Eiffel Tower’s 11 p.m.) Most of the country’s museums and galleries don’t rank among the world’s best and there is no equivalent of the entertainment available in London’s West End or New York’s Broadway.

Perhaps, then, it’s no surprise that activities like go-karts have become accidental hits. The best example might be Tokyo’s Robot Restaurant, a now-defunct show featuring robots and (human) dancers, built initially to draw late-drinking salarymen. Because of its sheer tackiness, pop-colored Instagramability and the fact that it was one of the few places catering to tourists into the wee hours, the performances became an unexpected success, appearing in music videos and even featuring favorably in a Tourism Agency briefing on boosting Japan’s "night-time economy,” before closing down during the pandemic.

The Robot Restaurant succeeded because, particularly at night (which, as I have written, arrives much too early), even in the capital, your choices are limited — especially if you don’t drink alcohol. One estimate, which Japanese planners examine enviously, says London’s nighttime economy adds as much as £26 billion ($33 billion) to U.K. gross domestic product.

Tokyo desperately wants after-dark spending to increase. But with the last subway trains still running earlier than they did pre-COVID-19 and an already-acute labor shortage in the services sector, that’s an even tougher ask. And this is a metropolis of 36 million people: The situation worsens in smaller cities and second-tier towns.

Consider Japan’s famed national arts: sumo, noh or kabuki. Frequent any tourist destination in Thailand and you’ll find nightly muay events highlighting the country’s national sport. But if you want to view sumo in Tokyo — perhaps inspired by watching the hit Netflix show "Sanctuary"? — good luck with that. There are just six weeks a year to see one of the basho, assuming you can get tickets.

The success of a sumo-themed restaurant, recently opened by a former wrestler, points to demand. But why stop there? Why not nocturnal shows with retired or upcoming wrestlers? As the national sport, sumo has been reluctant to modernize — which is, of course, one of its charms. But attending the Tokyo basho last January for the first time in years, I found the experience ridiculously undersold despite being packed with visitors: Tickets were priced at just $35, with little attempt to upsell tourists with expensive drinks (just bring your own convenience-store beer).

The scars of failed investment at the height of the bubble live long in developers’ minds. The pandemic’s timing, which showed how quickly tourist money can vanish, hasn’t helped; nor does the fickleness of Chinese travelers, the biggest spenders in Japan pre-pandemic.

But no sooner had the Chinese government last month authorized tour groups to travel to the country for the first time post-COVID-19 than the uproar started over the Fukushima wastewater releases. That makes it harder for developers to finance outlet malls or department stores to hire more Chinese-speaking staff.

This vacillating leads to nimbler outfits — like, yes, Mario Karts — stepping in. After all, Japan will have spent more than 17 years debating whether to open casinos by the time one finally debuts in 2030, as reported this week. Middle East destinations have built entire tourist infrastructures in less time.

There have been successes, of course, notably the TeamLab installations that have been an international hit, attracting Instagrammers and YouTubers. But this feels like an exception that proves the rule. While writing this column, I encountered Mario Karts on three separate occasions. Like it or not, they’re the public face of this traveler surge. That might be why residents resent them — so let’s build something, ideally a little less campy, instead.