Samの英語チャンネル

With tourists’ and residents’ feelings about minpaku racing in opposite directions, wards add new local ordinances onto national laws.

“Short-term private vacation lodging” is a bit of a mouthful, and while “Airbnb-style rentals” is more concise, it singles out just one company in what’s become a rapidly expanding sector of traveler accommodations. So today, let’s just call them “minpaku,” the term used in Japanese to describe rentals for travelers that weren’t originally zoned or constructed as hotels.

Minpaku have been rapidly rising in popularity over the past few years. While the idea of staying in a converted home while on vacation has limited appeal to most Japanese travelers, foreign tourists have shown plenty of enthusiasm for minpaku, especially when coming to Japan in a group of friends or family members who want more communal space for their party than conventional hotels offer. That growing popularity with foreign tourists has simultaneously made minpaku’s presence increasingly unwelcome among local Japanese residents, however, and new ordinances mean that all 23 central wards of Tokyo have now introduced additional rules restricting or limiting their operation, including new bans on accepting guests on weekdays.

Houses and apartments are built very close to one another in Japan’s residential neighborhoods. and that creates a sort of etiquette-deterrence situation between long-term residents. The close proximity means that any excess noise or trash generated by one neighbor is likely to affect everyone around them, and vice versa, so residents generally try to stay quiet and clean as a show of mutual consideration, with the baseline tacit agreement of “I won’t cause problems for you, and you won’t cause problems for me.” The importance of maintaining polite long-term relationships within the community doesn’t apply to short-term renters, though, who’ll probably be gone in a few days’ time, and far too often ill-mannered minpaku guests party noisily late into the night, litter in the common-use areas of the buildings they stay in and on the surrounding streets, and otherwise.

Minpaku lodgings in Japan started off as a bit of a cottage industry, and the sector managed to build up significant momentum before widespread regulatory measures were put in place. Under the Private Lodging Business Law, minpaku are not allowed to accept guests for more than 180 nights in a calendar year, but many local municipalities have placed additional regulations on top of that. Most recently, Tokyo’s Kita Ward became the city’s 23rd ward to pass its own. As of January 7, Kita Ward will ban the opening of new minpaku in residential areas in which the homeowner is not present when guests are staying in the unit. Requiring the homeowner to be present should, theoretically, increase the minpaku operator’s connection, and personal responsibility, to the surrounding community, creating an accessible contact point for complaints from neighbors or regulatory enforcement by the ward, while discouraging management by remote companies whose facelessness makes it easier for them to ignore grievances.

▼ It’s harder for management to brush off complaints when they have to deal with them in-person.

Tokyo’s Taito Ward is also tightening restrictions on minpaku. As of October 1, no new minpaku within the ward will be allowed to accept guests on weekdays, and no new minpaku of any kind will be allowed to open in parts of the ward which are zoned for residential-use only. Taito is also taking action against four minpaku owners who collectively operate eight units within the ward. By law, minpaku operators are required to submit reports on a minpaku’s number of guests and nights in operation every two months, but the owners filed no reports at all for the eight properties for the period between December of 2025 and May of 2026. Taito is now giving the owners approximately three weeks to submit the required documents, and says that failure to do so will result in the owners’ names being publicly announced, followed by forced closures of the minpaku if the non-compliance continues.

Other parts of Tokyo are going even farther in their attempts to address residents’ growing irritation at minpaku. Shinjuku Ward, for example, is looking to add legislation that would not only designate areas within it as off-limits for new minpaku, but which would also force currently existing minpaku within them to shut down.

In total, Tokyo’s 23 central wards account for roughly 40 percent of all the minpaku in Japan, so it’s likely that other cities will be watching the effectiveness of these countermeasures very closely, and possibly basing their future policies on them in an effort to stave off resident complaints before any such friction with minpaku operators/guests occurs.

Source: Taito Ward (1, 2), Kita Ward, Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo MX, Mainichi Shimbun
Top image: Pakutaso
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Source: SORA NEWS24