Tourism is booming in Japan, but a growing number of visitors are ditching their guidebooks for an app best known for celebrity snapshots and images of food: Instagram.
The social photo-sharing service is proving to be especially popular among those seeking destinations off the beaten track. Nagato, Yamaguchi Prefecture, saw more than 1 million visitors in 2017, a thirty-sixfold increase in three years.
After CNN profiled the town as one of "Japan's 31 most beautiful places," postings of Motonosumi-Inari Shrine started to flood Instagram.
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