Japan Is Overrun With Tourists. This City Wants More.

NAGOYA, Japan—The tourists who crowd the bullet trains from Tokyo tend not to disembark at Nagoya as they speed along what is called the Golden Route linking the Japanese capital with Kyoto and Osaka.

“Nagoya tobashi,” the locals say. Nagoya gets skipped. The manufacturing hub, which anchors the region that is home to auto giant Toyota, is Japan’s fourth most-populous city and, according to a decade-old newspaper poll that still stings here, number one in dullness.