Kyoto City on the verge of bankruptcy

[thomas]

Not all's well in Japan's former imperial capital: decades of fiscal mismanagement, the coronavirus pandemic, and the ban on tourists have hit Kyoto especially hard. In a news conference last year, Kyoto's mayor warned of the city's likely bankruptcy in less than a decade.

But pandemic-related expenses and the collapse of tourism have merely exposed decades of fiscal mismanagement in the city. The red ink started flowing 30 years ago, when Kyoto built a second subway line at a cost that eventually ballooned to $4 billion. The Tozai line has never managed to meet its daily passenger targets. Officials also invested $120 million in a lavish upgrade and refurbishment of City Hall, complete with stained glass windows, European-style damask-covered walls, a Japanese teahouse, a roof garden, and even an underground corridor linking it to the white-elephant subway. Residents snidely note that the corridor is barely used. So, last fall, the axe finally dropped. The city government slashed transit subsidies for senior citizens, raised day-care fees and cut salaries for civil servants — despite concern that the austerity measures would hasten an already-alarming exodus of residents from Kyoto.

Kyoto, Japan's beautiful old imperial capital, is going broke fast

Before COVID hit, the ancient city's 17 world heritage sites and 2,000 temples and shrines helped to draw tens of millions of tourists every year. But it still can't pay the bills.

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