Kyoto wants you back, but it has some polite suggestions

KYOTO – In the months before March 2020, the food sellers in Kyoto’s Nishiki market often wished for an end to the seemingly endless stream of photo-hungry visitors from abroad who always seemed to be underfoot. “We weren’t used to foreign tourists,” said Mr Nobuyuki Hatsuda, who leads a business alliance promoting the shopping street in the city centre, where vendors sell a dizzying array of traditional Japanese foods, carefully displayed and attractively packaged. Nishiki has long been a working market, and the parade of visitors – rifling through the meticulously arranged merchandise, haggling with frazzled shopkeepers and blocking storefronts…