It began with the ringing of a bell. Sherlock runs walking tours for foreign visitors to Kyoto — a thriving business in a country where inbound tourism is booming like never before. On the evening of May 23, he was with a small group in Yasaka Jinja, a Shinto shrine in the heart of the city. As he had many times before, he showed his four elderly clients how to offer prayers at the shrine, a ritual of bowing, clapping and ringing a bell attached to a thick rope. They were approached by a Japanese woman who complained that one of the tourists, a British woman, had behaved disrespectfully by shaking the bell too vigorously. Sherlock says that both he and the British visitor apologised. The Japanese woman, who has identified herself only as Fujino, insists that he rudely brushed her off. Either way, heated words were exchanged before Sherlock and his group left the shrine. The following day, Fujino posted a video of part of the exchange, which within hours had been viewed more than a million times. Since then she has tweeted unrelentingly about the incident, appeared on an online television programme and appealed to her followers to "help" her. It is they who hunted out his home address and phone number and posted them online, retweeted by "Fujino". After sinister Japanese callers rang asking him to give them a private tour, Sherlock has given up his tourist guide business. His wife, who ran a gallery selling kimonos and souvenirs, has been too anxious to work. The incident is the latest in a simmering cauldron of resentment about foreign tourism in Japan.