A Different Kind of Destination Marketing
I started writing this newsletter on a plane, flying back to London from New York. Between meals and trying to sleep, a tourism ad played before one of the movies I chose to watch. It was for a Canadian destination, but I genuinely can't remember for where. There was snow. Drone shots. Hero landscapes. A slow motion shot of someone fly fishing. All paired with a voiceover about wonder or discovery or whatever word the agency landed on. It hit every beat you'd expect from a tourism board with a production budget. It was beautifully produced, but generic, and (clearly) gone from my memory before the opening credits rolled.
It got me thinking about how places sell themselves. Most destination marketing operates on a similar formula: show the most photogenic version of a place, pair it with aspirational language, plaster it as many places as you can, and then track how many flights and hotel rooms get booked.
I thought about that ad again while standing inside Japan House on Kensington High Street in London. Because Japan House is also, technically, an advertisement for a destination. It's just one that works a bit differently.
Japan House sits between a Whole Foods and a Marks & Spencer on one of West London's busiest shopping streets. Floor-to-ceiling windows face the sidewalk, showing glimpses of ceramics and textiles to anyone walking past. Step inside and there's a café doing coffee and matcha, and a ground floor filled with pottery, kitchen knives, books, clothing, and other artifacts that tie into current programming. Downstairs, a free exhibition space changes every few months, and upstairs, a restaurant serves a 5 course omakase at prices a bit outside of my budget.
I stop in whenever I'm in the area, which is maybe every couple of months. I’m never really there for any intentional reason, but I enjoy checking what's new. The space feels intentionally Japanese but not performatively so. No samurai swords on the walls. No photographs of geisha and cherry blossoms. It reads more like a contemporary window into the country than a highlight reel of cultural stereotypes. There's no real sense of being sold to, either, which is what makes it interesting. Yes, there are plenty of things to buy, but it’s not screaming “visit here.”
The London location is one of three worldwide (the others are in Los Angeles and São Paulo), and it opened in 2018 with funding from Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Kenya Hara, art director at Muji, served as a creative advisor for the project, and the London space was designed by Masamichi Katayama, who wanted to create physical spaces where people outside Japan could encounter the country's cultures without the mediation of tourism marketing. He wanted the space to surprise three audiences: people who know nothing about Japan, people who think they do, and Japanese people themselves. The High Street location was deliberate; it’s visible from the sidewalk, open to anyone walking by, and positioned to capture more organic foot traffic rather than destination visitors, who might be more centralized around South Kensington museums or Central London.
"People can just walk in and out," Heidi Isa, Japan House's director of marketing and communications, told me when I spoke with her about the space. "They don't have to make a special trip. It's right there. You walk past a café and through a shop. It feels more accessible."
I'd wanted to speak with Isa because I was curious about the tension at the heart of the project — how do you run what is effectively a government-funded cultural promotion space without it tipping into more “salesy” destination marketing? It's a fine line. Her answer kept coming back to a word she used several times: subliminal. She caught herself on it more than once, and acknowledged it didn't strike quite the right tone. Indirect is probably a better descriptor.
The downstairs exhibitions, which rotate a few times a year and are free, focus on what she called "people, place, and process. They often feature different regions of Japan, the people behind various crafts, and how things are made and put together. The current show features 123 makers and about 2,000 handcrafted objects in glass, wood, ceramic, and bamboo. One maker cuts bamboo from a forest within walking distance of his house. Another digs clay from a hillside near his studio. These aren't the kinds of subjects you'd see in a tourism campaign. There's no easy call to action. No "book now" button at the end. Just an incredibly display of craftsmanship to wander through (although I think I would have liked a few QR codes to learn more about specific artisans).
The most recent exhibition
One of my favorite exhibits was one I saw there a couple of years ago on shokuhin sampuru, the hyper-realistic plastic food displayed outside restaurants across Japan. Think plastic sushi, curry, parfaits, noodles, etc. It's an art form so ubiquitous in Japan there that most Japanese people have never really thought about it. But the exhibition managed to work on multiple levels: for someone like me, interested in design, craft, and how things are made, it was fascinating. But, it also drew many Japanese visitors as well. "Some Japanese expats were almost surprised that we made an exhibition out of something which is so everyday for them," Isa said. "And yet there's often history and process behind things that they’re less familiar with." Other exhibitions have been on the art of iconography (including for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics), traditional carpentry and woodworking techniques, Japanese graphic arts, and more.
“Get people to go to Japan” is not our mission," Isa told me when I asked directly about the relationship between cultural programming and tourism. “Travel should be a byproduct. What we really want is for people to gain a greater understanding of Japan.”
This distinction shapes everything about how the space operates. Japan House deliberately uses "Japanese cultures," plural, rather than singular. It's a small thing, but it's intentional — signaling that the country isn't one thing, that there isn't a single Japanese experience to consume and check off.
In practice, this means a Toyama textile exhibition isn't overtly promoting Toyama as somewhere you should visit. It's presenting Toyama textiles to people who are interested in weaving, or craftsmanship, or design. If they get curious about the region, well, there's a nondescript Japan National Travel Organization desk on the ground floor. Maybe they book a trip. Maybe they don't. Suggestion, not persuasion.
"Everyone knows Tokyo and Kyoto," she said. "But what about Yamagata or Toyama? Have they even heard of these places? Why not highlight somewhere none of their friends have been to, and introduce it in a way that's a bit more subtle?"
Sometimes this strategy plays out in ways they don't expect. Isa told me about a carpentry apprentice from Northumberland who visited a design exhibition at Japan House with a mentor. Months later, Japan House’s media monitoring flagged an article: the apprentice had been shortlisted for a national award in the UK. His cabinet design utilized kumiko, a Japanese joinery technique that requires no nails or screws, inspired by what he'd seen at the exhibition. Japan House is now connecting him with the show's curator in Kyoto.
There's some evidence that UK tourism to Toyama increased after Japan House ran an exhibit on the prefecture. Whether that's attributable to them or to the broader tourism boom is anyone's guess. "I'd love to say it was us," Isa admitted, "but it's just as likely a general increase in interest." She's probably right. The weak yen is doing far more heavy lifting than any exhibition. It's also doing damage.
Japan welcomed 42.7 million foreign visitors in 2025, a record, and the government is targeting 60 million visitors by 2030 while simultaneously spending millions to manage the ones already there. In Fujiyoshida, officials decided to cancel the annual sakura festival this year after residents reported tourists entering private homes to use bathrooms, defecating in gardens, and pushing schoolchildren off sidewalks during their walk to school. The issues with tourists in the geisha district of Kyoto are well documented. In Hokkaido, a row of birch trees was cut down after years of tourist encroachment onto private farmland.
Japan House wasn't designed to solve any of that, and Isa was clear their approach hasn't changed in response. But, they're no longer introducing a country that needs more visitors. Instead they have a chance to shape what kind of visitor shows up.
"I get frustrated," she told me at one point, "when people say they went to Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, back to Tokyo, and flew home. There's so much more to see."
And there is. Seventy percent of Japan is mountainous. There's unique regional agriculture, volcanic hot springs in places most international visitors have never heard of, and subtropical islands in the south. The outdoor opportunities are there, Isa said, but they haven't been as fully developed or visible to international visitors. Most outdoor-focused travelers from the US and Europe still think of Japan in one lane: winter, north island, skiing. Ski tourism has exploded, and that's great (although I’ve heard more than one complaint about the “crowds“ this year), but it's a fraction of what's available for outdoor enthusiasts year-round. Check out the 1,000 km Michinoku Coastal Trail and the Hokkaido East Trail in FieldMag.
The kumiko apprentice story in particular stuck with me after my conversation with Isa. Not because it's a clean case study in the ROI of Japan House,(after all, it's one person, one exhibition, one cabinet) but it's the kind of outcome no ad campaign could have engineered. You can't A/B test someone walking into a free exhibition and having their craft changed by it.
It’s not going to revolutionize Japanese tourism, but Japan House is betting that those small, unpredictable moments add up to something and that the approach is worth more than another drone shot consumers will forget before the movie starts. It's not a scalable model. It requires permanent real estate, government funding, and a willingness to measure success in incremental cultural curiosity over time rather than direct bookings. Most tourism boards will keep buying the drone shots. But these kinds of unique approaches just might bring more conscientious visitors.
I still haven't been to Japan. The bottomless powder will probably get me there eventually, but it's Japan House that has made me the most curious about the rest of the country.
