Missed opportunity to talk about the locals creative responses to this.
One cafe in Tokyo is asking customers to leave negative reviews on Google and Trip Advisor to prevent over exposure (it mostly works but made me curious enough to visit).
Another specific $10 Michelin guide ramen restaurant only lets you order from a vending machine outside using a payment method you can’t access as a foreigner (one needs a physical JCB card or QUICPay - EPOS/Suica/Pasmo/Cash etc wouldn’t work).
A matcha place I like only lets you order from the real menu after you’ve unlocked enough visits from a punch card.
A resort slightly off but near the beaten path markets itself as an onsen but that’s maybe 4% of the amenities. That said, they’re serious about “no entry” if you have tattoos.
And a few more of the seedier bars just have the (time honored) “no foreigners” sign out front.
I don't know about the Ramen place (I can't believe that they wouldn't take cash?), but I agree with you that more places are doing this kind of "two markets" stuff -- it's even becoming official, in that now there's officially sanctioned "foreigner pricing" for certain temples, shrines, and parks. There's also Google Maps and Yelp vs. Japan's local version (pretty much any review on the former two are useless, and hopelessly biased by clueless tourists).
I'm of mixed minds. I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences, but those days are pretty much gone now. Foreigners are lining up for mediocre tourist traps because of something they saw on TikTok or Instagram, and there are business people who are willing to take advantage of that fact.
It's also really difficult to serve your local clientele when tourists "discover" your establishment. I have a friend with a restaurant that has become known amongst foreign tourists, and it's nearly impossible for the locals in the neighborhood to visit now. I was talking about it with him a month or so back, and while he seemed happy to have the money -- and therefore unwilling to change the situation -- he also interacted with the tourists in a completely different way. He had a back-channel reservation mechanism for locals and people he knows, but it still requires advance planning for a place that used to be a casual, walk-in experience.
> I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences
you can still have that. I'm a fulltime traveller. the key is to stay in a place longer. I usually stay in a country for at least a month. that gives you time to meet and actually get to know locals. thats how you get invited to the really cool spots and get a view the daytripppers and resort goers don't get.
... if you're a full-time traveler that can afford to stay for months at a time. For the rest (the vast majority) of us, the GP comment is what we get.
Yes, I agree that it's a better way to travel if you can do it, but most people can't [1].
That said, even for short-term tourists, Japan used to be kind of a miracle in terms of the quality and service you would get for the money. I know it sounds like hipster whining, but that time is in the past.
[1] My snobby hot-take is that if you can't travel this way you shouldn't do recreational international travel at all, unless it's to go to a luxury hotel and sit on a beach or something packaged like that. But I realize that this will not be a popular opinion.
I used to live in Japan in 1999-2001, and I was just there again for a month this summer.
Anyway, I disagree with you: Japan is still a miracle in terms of the quality and service you get for the money. I saw this many times over.
Perhaps not in Kyoto, or in the most touristed areas of Tokyo. Or in whatever random place got featured in some anime, or whatnot.
The article mentions Yamaguchi, Toyama, Morioka, etc., and I definitely agree -- there are tons of places off the tourist beaten-track, and any of them is worth a visit.
On my recent trip I was in Kobe, which unlike Yamaguchi etc. I expect the average HN reader has heard of. But even there, there was little trace of overtourism.
Alex Kerr lamented all the way back in 1993 (in his book Lost Japan) that Kyoto had essentially lost its soul. And if you go to the areas most commonly seen on Instagram and TikTok, that's probably partially true. But even in Kyoto, go off the beaten path a little, and you will find much to delight you!
> Anyway, I disagree with you: Japan is still a miracle in terms of the quality and service you get for the money. I saw this many times over.
I assume you mean "relative to other places" here, and in that sense, I agree. Japan is not yet entirely Epcot Center.
> Perhaps not in Kyoto, or in the most touristed areas of Tokyo. Or in whatever random place got featured in some anime, or whatnot.
Right, exactly. Except that I'm seeing this spread like cancer -- which it always does. Sort of like gentrification, the "authenticity seeking tourist" leaves Senso-ji a few blocks, and then before too long Kappabashi is no longer a functioning street of restaurant supply stores (instead becoming a dead zone of "japanese knife" and matcha retailers), and so on.
> But even in Kyoto, go off the beaten path a little, and you will find much to delight you
Yeah, I lived in Kyoto a decade ago, and I say that to my Japanese friends, too. The thing is, even vs. 2-3 years ago, the number of those authentic places is dramatically fewer. People have been complaining about tourism in Kyoto forever, but they're also not wrong.
So is the advice "do not visit Japan, learn about it from books and the internet"? Or just pretend it doesn't exist? Maybe do the same with all other countries?
The Japanese in turn do a lot of tourism abroad, to the point the "Japanese tourist" is as much a stereotype as the American one. Should they stay put and not leave their home towns?
It's pretty amazing that you've managed to both take the least-charitable interpretation of my comment, and apply a dated stereotype of Japanese people in one post. So:
1) There is a whole spectrum of alternatives between "do not go" and "go take selfies in the same TikTok dead zones as everyone else, while drinking overpriced matcha boba tea and eating potato spiral on a stick from a Mario kart." Perhaps do something else?
2) "Japanese tourists" haven't been going much of anywhere with the yen near all-time lows to western currencies. Setting that aside, it's been a few decades since the stereotype you're invoking was anything close to real.
But TikTok and Mario Kart tours are just one form of tourism, which you're equating to all tourism that is not living there for some months or doing volunteer work or, I quote your other comment, "going to conferences" (the hell?).
Why not visit Japan and do sightseeing? Or do you think that's automatically equivalent to Mario Kart tours?
Or like someone else argued (not you, I'm not laying this particular burden on you, just mentioning it because the sentiment is similar) "it's clear cut that it's unethical to do tourism in Barcelona". What!? Well, excuse me if I cannot live in Barcelona permanently or spend 6 months there getting to know the locals, does it mean I should just see Barcelona in the movies? Or maybe just go to Disneyland, since apparently it's all the same thing.
Re: the stereotype, it's true I don't know about Japanese tourists in the last couple of years (let's say post COVID), but if that's because of the yen blah blah then that's no defense of the stereotypical Japanese tourist -- it has nothing to do with ethics if it's just that they cannot afford it anymore. And anyway, the obnoxious Japanese tourist exist(ed) and it was common in my country, so why give them a free pass just because this article mentions the kind of tourism that bothers them?
In any case: tourism isn't necessarily evil. You can simply not be the loud careless tourist who trashes everything, is not respectful and complains about everything. A lot of us cannot spend 3 months doing volunteer work or whatever, we just want to see the world and enjoy its wonders in the 2-week or so vacation we get once a year, and planning for the whole family, not just for a single person in their 20s with no attachments and who can backpack the world for a year or whatever.
> Perhaps not in... whatever random place got featured in some anime, or whatnot.
When I went last year, two of the random places I went because they got featured in some anime were some of the most authentic-feeling experiences I had.
One was a small town on the east coast near a beach; a lot of it felt like a ghost town (I barely saw any locals, let alone tourists). I was able to go and respectfully visit a really nice shrine while being able to keep my distance enough that I knew I wasn't bothering anyone. I also found a cool aquarium I didn't know was there, and I'm pretty sure I was the only foreigner I saw/heard while visiting it.
The other was a less-deserted but still small area outside of a less popular city. There was an island I wanted to go onto that I couldn't, but I improvised and found a beautiful hike to a summit overlooking it instead. While I was walking up, I had at least two elderly folks say hello to me in Japanese, and a pair of young children walking with their mom say hello in English (way more unprompted interaction than I got just walking around in any of the cities, aside from employees advertising things).
So just because a place was featured in an anime doesn't mean it's necessarily a tourist trap. Just don't go in expecting the place to be entirely defined by that (and it also helps if it's been at least a few years since said anime was popular).
> But even in Kyoto, go off the beaten path a little, and you will find much to delight you!
Extremely true. I just got back from Japan and I was very pleased by how little effort it took to get off the tourist trail, even in Kyoto. Of course some popular attractions are still worth seeing and for those, visiting around opening is usually enough to avoid the worst of the crowds. (If you're flying in from the US there's a good chance jet lag has you up at 5am anyway, so this is an effective strategy even for non-morning people.)
The time of the year probably matters too. I didn't find Japan to be terribly overcrowded when I went this February. Certain areas (and the minuscule Kyoto buses) were, but that happens in every tourist location.
I also went to places like Beppu or Kagoshima where I barely saw any tourists.
Yes, Shikoku and Kyushu are both very pleasant from my experience. Shikoku felt the least visited. In Matsuyama, I saw only a handful of western tourists and even those were mostly blended families probably visiting relatives.
It was really pleasant. I keep trying to move farther off the beaten path on each trip.
I fully agree, whirlwind "see the major tourist attractions" sort of travel where you visit someplace for a couple of days or a week is not very interesting to me.
Honestly travel in general is not very interesting to me. It's expensive, inconvenient, commoditized, cliche. But especially that sort of travel.
I can see taking a break to go somewhere warm if you live in a place with long gloomy winters. Or going somewhere to visit family, or to do something that just isn't available where you live (skiing or fishing trip or something like that). But going somewhere to just look around? Not attractive to me.
Even if you're only going somewhere for a week, you don't have to see all the major attractions. You also don't have to plan every moment and research what restaurants to visit etc.
You can set out to discover cool stuff on your own. Walk around a non-touristy neighborhood until you see a restaurant full of locals dining and eat there.
> My snobby hot-take is that if you can't travel this way you shouldn't do recreational international travel at all
That's a bad take, because it means if you're not rich or a hippie backpacker without attachments, you cannot do international travel.
What's worse, many of these issues affect local tourism within your own country as well (ruining places for the locals, lots of tourist traps sprouting, etc).
So effectively the advice becomes "stay at home, don't vacation, or if you do vacation stay at some prepackaged place".
> So effectively the advice becomes "stay at home, don't vacation, or if you do vacation stay at some prepackaged place".
I didn't expect it to be a popular take, but I feel like the "sightseeing travel" model is varying degrees of bankrupt, and I'm not apologizing for my opinion.
Having lived in a number of tourist hotspots in my life, I've come to the conclusion that almost nothing one encounters in a tourist setting is authentic. Therefore, you're engaging in very expensive cosplay, erected entirely for your benefit, and almost always at the expense of the culture of the place you are visiting. However fun it may be for you or I, it's still just Disneyland. And while Disneyland may be of net economic benefit to the local people who live near Disneyland, let's not get hoity-toity about it and pretend that we're discovering deep truths of the universe by going to Angkor Wat and snapping a photo.
You don't have to do a "prepackaged vacation", but do something more substantial than moving around constantly and looking at stuff through a camera -- volunteer, take a course, attend a conference, teach English...whatever! Just go there for a reason other than "being a tourist".
It's not Disneyland, what's with the mania of taking everything to extremes?
> You don't have to do a "prepackaged vacation", but do something more substantial than moving around constantly and looking at stuff through a camera -- volunteer, take a course, attend a conference, teach English...whatever! Just go there for a reason other than "being a tourist".
The hell? We're discussing vacationing, not volunteer work. Teaching English? It's not my native language, why would I? I already have a job where I live, and I responsibilities here. Volunteer work? My country needs it way more than wealthy Japan, why would I go there?
What's wrong with tourism, seeing Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto? I don't get more than 2 weeks vacation where I work, I should use them to volunteer according to you?
I swear, the first world entitlement in some of these comments... like yours...
I am giving/defending my opinion, in an effort to convince. It doesn't have to be yours.
> What's wrong with tourism, seeing Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto?
I just spent several paragraphs answering that question. TL;DR: a few days/weeks of lightweight entertainment for you does real damage to the places you visit. The ethical traveler should strive for something better than photos.
> I don't get more than 2 weeks vacation where I work, I should use them to volunteer according to you?
I am saying that my opinion is that "tourism" is more-or-less ethically bankrupt. You don't have to do anything in response, and in any case, I was pretty explicit that volunteering was only one of many possible alternatives -- but you knew this, because you quoted me saying it.
It's not a high bar. Visiting friends or doing a specific activity (rock climbing! diving! fishing! sports! cooking! meditation retreat! make art! take a class! gain a skill!) would be a perfectly ethical reason to travel somewhere, in my humble opinion. Almost anything is better than piling into to the same few tourist sites and taking the same few photos that everyone else takes. And you'll have more fun, too.
> I swear, the first world entitlement in some of these comments
Having the luxury to travel is a "first-world entitlement." It isn't entitlement to say that you should strive to be more thoughtful about the costs.
> TL;DR: a few days/weeks of lightweight entertainment for you does real damage to the places you visit.
That's a bizarre take. Beyond bad, just plain weird.
> It's not a high bar. Visiting friends or doing a specific activity (rock climbing! diving! fishing! sports! cooking! meditation retreat! make art! take a class! gain a skill!) would be a perfectly ethical reason to travel somewhere, in my humble opinion
That's an extremely high bar for most of us, and that you don't see it is hilarious.
Nothing is more artificial and touristy than a "retreat" or going someplace to scuba dive, but somehow you're placing these arbitrary definitions on what is more or less ethical.
All of those "ethical" activities are extremely artificial and damaging, it's absurd thinking going abroad to do "art" or "rock climbing" is more authentic and not artificial and damaging. Unless you know someone local who can take you somewhere non commercial (which is an extremely high bar, unless you have friends all over the world) all those activities are as much Disneyland as taking photos of the Eiffel tower, I'm sorry to tell you.
Visiting friends doesn't mean you won't go sightseeing, what does one thing have to do with the other? And what if you don't have friends all over the world?
> Having the luxury to travel is a "first-world entitlement." It isn't entitlement to say that you should strive to be more thoughtful about the costs.
What you're saying amounts to gatekeeping, which is even more entitled. "If you cannot travel like the entitled few can, in the extremely narrow way I deem ethical, then don't travel at all."
Also, I don't know if you understand everything you say applies to doing tourism within your own country as well. So your advice effectively becomes "do rock climbing (and hope your children and spouse want to do that) or stay at home". Your world shrinks because you cannot do "ethical tourism" according to some absurd definition.
You balked at the idea of volunteerism, but then I gave you less...demanding...versions, and you criticize them as being imperfect. It's clear that I'm not going to convince you, and you keep cherry-picking the most expensive / burdensome examples I provide, so I'm done replying after this.
But since I didn't explain it explicitly, the principle is that while all travel is damaging, you can thoughtfully pick activities which:
1) Will help offset that damage (e.g. volunteering)
2) Require that you be in a place (e.g. seeing family / friends), or
3) Otherwise spread out your impact and/or engage with locals on a more authentic level -- even the horrible, very bad, "extremely artificial and damaging" yoga retreat (lol, come on) will put you in a small minority of travelers, many of whom will be locals themselves.
Despite your repeated mischaracterizations of my argument, it doesn't have to be expensive, and perfect is not the enemy of the good. It doesn't take much more than creativity and effort to do better with your travel.
That's rich. You haven't proven any of your alternatives is any better. Like, none of them. They are all as artificial as sightseeing, but if it makes you sleep better at night...
Your "yoga retreat" is the worst of the Eat Pray Love kind of tourism, I cannot believe what I'm reading. It's artificial as fuck, please don't suggest it ever again.
I also do not want to visit friends and family, that's a different activity entirely!
You mischaracterize all sightseeing tourism as "damaging" and the equivalent of TikTok and Mario Kart tours, yet complain that I am mischaracterizing you.
Wow. The sense of entitled gatekeeping I'm getting from you is off the charts.
I have to follow your very strict and arbitrary standards -- you, who by your own admission have lived in "several tourist hotspots" (making you a bigger part of the problem than me) -- because... somehow my visiting several interesting parts of the world where I know nobody is "damaging"?
I think you kind of missed his point. The current era of tourism does to foreign cities what gentrification did to working class neighborhoods.
At first, people want a taste of something different and authentic. But eventually the place sells out and stops being a real place and starts catering to the new entrants, pushing out the natives in the process.
Florence is a good example of this. Not long ago it was a real place where real people lived. Nowadays everyone there is a foreigner, including the workers and the people who own the businesses and Airbnbs. A tourist goes there and feels like they've gotten to know Italy, but really all they experienced was a theme park designed to take their money by catering to their expectations of what Italy is supposed to be like.
Ok, I can get that. I've been to Florence and it does feel artificial to me. And it's indeed overcrowded with peddlers selling crap. But it's not the only city in Italy, and I don't particularly like it. Italy as a whole is an amazing country and a wonderful place to do tourism and sightseeing.
What I could do without is the sanctimonious attitude of "tourism is bad unless you do it exactly like I tell you to, which also happens to be a way that 90% of the middle class that can afford traveling cannot do, but hey, I can, and I've lived near many tourist hotspots anyway [sic], so I guess it sucks to be you!".
The backpacker that can go do volunteer work or rock climbing or living among the locals for 6 months is a tiny minority of those that can travel; saying it's the only valid way of traveling abroad is gatekeeping, plain and simple.
You can be a tourist and simply not be obnoxious, but apparently that's not enough for some people.
The moralizing aspect comes in when we admit that we all made Florence (and Rome and Venice) the way they are, and that this is the inevitable end of any tourist destination.
Therefore an alternative is needed, that lets us visit a place without destroying it and stealing it from the locals. I think that's what was being proposed.
I think it's worse than that. I'm starting to think that there may not really be an ethical way to be a tourist in a foreign country. Especially coming from a high cost of living area to a lower one.
Just being there puts you in economic competition with the locals. You can spend more on everything than everyone else and that raises their costs too. Especially housing and food. Those fancy resorts take all the prime real estate and Airbnb means locals have to compete with the tourist rental prices.
And there is more and more people traveling all the time so some areas are just overloaded -- as in the article here.
Everyone thinks that they are being more respectful than average as a tourist, but the hard truth is that the best thing you can do for these places is to not be there at all.
I think there’s a zero sum fallacy in play here. For example you say “Those fancy resorts take all the prime real estate” but many resort towns in Mexico like Cancun were literally invented out of thin air for international tourism. The alternative reality is not “Cancun for the locals”; the alternative reality is no Cancun.
In general we have the ability to expand the amount of available housing/hotels/etc. to meet increased demand. It’s not a zero sum game.
Even sticking with Japan, Kyoto was basically saved by international tourism. An American tourist ended up ended up intervening 20 years after his visit when he saw Kyoto at the top of America's list of cities to use nuclear weapons on.
Although I don't think the commonly repeated story that Stinson visited on his honeymoon is true, he had gotten married in the previous century
This is a little bit what confuses me about these stories.
As someone who lives in NYC and works with Broadway shows we thrive on tourists. Are there locals who live in Times Square or a few blocks off? Sure, it’s not all that annoying, and most folks like me live in an area that isn’t particularly crowded with tourists, if at all.
When I read stories like this, I never quite understand if it’s worse other places than NYC. Or if I’d go there and be unphased. That it’s just people from some empty suburb where lots have a 10 acre minimum that are bothered by this and write these stories.
Wow, this is an extremely long-winded and self-indulgent "well actually" comment. I read the whole thing hoping to find the point, but it never came.
Who cares if it was an actual honeymoon or another trip decades after he was married? He was key to sparing the city, and his personal experience with its rich history was a part of that. That's the interesting story, and nothing in this article refutes that.
Your fallacy is that you are implicitly thinking of yourself as an intrinsically evil corrupting force that should be minimized as much as possible, in fact it would be better if you didn't exist at all.
This is a very bleak misanthropic view that isn't true. It's possible to be a force for good. To form a symbiosis where each side benefits from the other. If you see a native resident, do you think he is perfectly pure, content and happy? Or does he have his troubles and issues. How can you help him? Entertain? Teach? Trade?
There are so many humans that are blithely destructive and nearly all of them believe themselves to be good, because it is human nature to have faith in your own wholesome intentions. Overtourism is one area among many where we would be better off if more people at least considered their impact.
The ones who are going to heed your advice to minimize their existence are not the ones who need to hear it, generally. That mentality just punishes thoughtful people and will not reach the vast majority of the ones you believe are a problem.
I understand you're not the same person as the one who started your side of this argument, but you can't just jump from "there's not really an ethical way to be a tourist in a foreign country" to "I was only talking about overtourism, stop being extreme."
If self-denial is rewarding to you, that's your business. You don't decide with vague statements what's rewarding to others.
There are so many great options for exploring the world. Even in your neighborhood all it takes is a novel perspective to discover something new, and the same is true elsewhere.
Are there no mountains to climb other than Everest? Is there no way to experience a mountain other than scaling the summit?
Why must considering how you impact your surroundings mean “self-denial”? Why can’t it mean choosing amongst abundant riches and savoring the very experience of choosing?
Can I recommend thinking about your own country and then extrapolating from there to understand how foreigners feel? For example: I'm Australian. I actively want you to come be a tourist here! What I'd like you to do, though, is not go to the exact same place as 80% of the rest of the tourist inflow goes.
You don't need to go to the Gold Coast: the entire country is surrounded by water ("girt by sea" is in our national anthem), most of it has great beaches, and you're legally allowed to be on any of those beaches up to the high water mark! The 12 Apostles are cool, sort of, but they're surrounded by beautiful coastline and rainforest filled with waterfalls which a big chunk of international tourists drive through without stopping longer than a toilet and coffee break. The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House are neat and they aren't too busy, but they're also just a bridge and a big building. Uluru is big and impressive, but it's next to the far more interesting Bungle Bungles which get a tenth of the visitors each year, and the entire centre of Australia is scattered with gorges and craters and rock formations.
Go somewhere other than the top places! The best thing you can do for the locals struggling with house prices on the Gold Coast is to save your own money, skip the queues, and go literally anywhere else along the coast in NSW or QLD. Australia has the same population density as Idaho. We can absorb an effectively unlimited number of tourists as long as they ramp up slowly and spread themselves out. It's easy to be an ethical non-disruptive tourist if you just ignore tiktok and don't treat other countries like bingo cards.
It literally is quite that simple. I can tell you from experience via friends and acquaintances that tourists are crushing the locals out of Barcelona and Amsterdam. And I expect the same to be true of Warsaw or Berlin.
And its not just tourists. ASML has completely destroyed the housing market in the Brainport region. They're planning to hire 20.000 more people, but with The Netherlands currently being in one of the most severe housing crises in the world, these expats just end up pushing everyone out of the local housing market because they can overbid on houses / rental properties so much.
ASML has woken up to this and is underwriting affordable housing developments, but only at a clip of 1500 per year. So yeah, the locals are not exactly happy, even if it is good for The Netherlands and EU as a whole.
Frankly, I expect the next decade or two to be about harsh protectionism. People are really, really tired of globalisation eating the world.
Japan closed their borders to tourists during COVID. If it's as simple as you say, then they can do it again.
They won't because you couldn't get a majority of their populace to agree with you, which doesn't necessarily mean it's incorrect but does at least mean it's not simple.
Who's holding people's hands and preventing them from building new houses? It's possible Netherlands genuinely has very little land left, but the "housing crises" in most other places are completely made up. Housing is either affordable or an asset that appreciates, it can't be both.
> Everyone thinks that they are being more respectful than average as a tourist, but the hard truth is that the best thing you can do for these places is to not be there at all.
I think this is definitely not true.
And I think oversaturation generally happens because most people don't think that, or think about it at all. They have a checklist of spots to hit, photos to take, things to eat, and they follow it. They'll put up with huge lines, crazy prices, etc. Overcharging isn't terrible for everyone local, of course, but the crowding certainly changes a place. Often not better for most locals.
If you're trying to be respectful I think that rules out following those huge crowds usually. Like, seeing the Mona Lisa is usually a shitty experience, but at least its in a controlled environment. Visiting a trendy vacation spot like Barcelona, on the other hand, is hitting the whole town and frankly ... maybe not that interesting or novel. There are other places out there, many not even that far away from the hotspots. Though you also need to rein in any instinct to show off any other finds or places online, let the local place you enjoyed become deluged.
This is what I said isn't true: "Everyone thinks that they are being more respectful than average"
I think most people don't think about being respectful much at all.
I think someone who does want to be respectful would be like "hey, locals say tourism is currently out of control in Barcelona, we'll pick somewhere else for now."
What a ridiculous statement... so applying for a remote job is unethical if you live in a lower cost of living area than your employer? It's only natural that people want to make money from higher cost areas and spend it elsewhere.
And this article is about Japan, a freaking island where the government has a total control over how many people are getting in...
I know what you mean but I live close to the border of another country. Can it really be unethical to stay in a hotel in a city two hours west but not two hours northeast because of a border? Maybe you're just talking about the American experience.
There are certainly places where it is clearer cut. Hawaii and Barcelona come to mind.
As a blanket statement that's false. Barcelona is a very welcoming city for tourists. I don't think it's unethical to visit as long as one behaves and is not a loud obnoxious tourist.
Do these locals ever go on vacation to other parts of the planet?
Ok, so there's no ethical way of doing tourism. So what's the alternative?
Stay at home? Do not take vacations? Never learn anything about the outside world that's not mediated by books or the internet?
Because I can tell you not even your own country (whatever that is) is spared from this. You cannot travel within your country without causing this, either.
Lots of people saying this is ridiculously false, I think it's ridiculously true: Of course there are more ethical uses for your money than traveling, including thousands of legit charities you can write a check to right now. Tourism creates jobs and helps the economy? A good charity creates better jobs than hawking souvenirs and asking for tips.
People just quietly pretend this isn't the case, probably so they don't feel guilty about it. Or maybe they just never put 2 and 2 together.
> I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences
How long ago was that? It was certainly true in fairly large portions of the world, but there are plenty of places where, for as long as I can remember, you could pretty much expect to be scammed regularly. In many cases those scams would be for trivial (to visitors from wealthy countries) amounts of money, but it nonetheless often seemed like a large fraction of local economies would be driven by scamming tourists.
I think that the real recent change is that the “beaten path” of touristy areas has gotten larger.
> How long ago was that? It was certainly true in fairly large portions of the world, but there are plenty of places where, for as long as I can remember, you could pretty much expect to be scammed regularly.
To be clear: "scamming" is still thankfully uncommon in Japan. Getting ripped off in the tourist-trap way is the new development.
I don't know when it started exactly, but I lived there around a decade ago and it was rare then. The prices around tourist spots would always be elevated and world heritage sites often had a line of crappy souvenir shops, but you didn't see the same kind of fake "wagyu" and the like that you see everywhere today.
There were catch bars in the 90s, and Roppongi has been full of assholes as long as I can remember (anyone remember Tokyo Gas Panic?). I have not been to Japan for more than ten years so I do not know how bad it is, but my point is that even in the good old days you could get ripped off as a gullible foreigner (usually by other foreigners).
Yes, agreed. I’m not talking about places like Roppongi or the sketchier parts of Shinjuku and Shibuya, Dotonbori, Umeda, etc., which have always been red light districts.
I’m talking about a more pedestrian type of ripoff, which is simply to overcharge and underdeliver - think of $40 for tough meat, labeled “Kobe beef”, and you’ll get the idea. It’s always been around, but far more prevalent now.
Post Olympics, the Eiffel Tower is now surrounded by a tall fence and requires passing through airport style security to get in. Bit of a hassle, but no shell games in sight.
> So, much like every restaurant that becomes popular, anywhere in the world?
No, but thanks for the spot-on imitation of an entitled foreign visitor. The insinuation that somehow it's the local people's fault that they don't want their quaint neighborhood restaurants to become McDonald's is indeed part of the problem.
Many restaurants in Japan (my friend's included) are quite obviously one-man, standing-room only operations. They weren't designed or intended to accommodate big groups of people, pulling huge rolling suitcases, ordering off menu, getting offended when the proprietor doesn't offer vegan/gluten free/snowflake options, and tons of other nonsense that goes along with serving tourist hordes.
I realize that you can't un-make the baby, and that Japan's government asked for this, but a lot of locals are still upset about this kind of stuff and I have empathy. Tourism inevitably turns anything authentic into a high-volume, Epcot-center version of itself. That might be fine if you're visiting, but it sucks if you live there.
> No, but thanks for the spot-on imitation of an entitled foreign visitor. The insinuation that somehow it's the local people's fault that they don't want their quaint neighborhood restaurants to become McDonald's is indeed part of the problem.
This seems a little unfair. I think the parent was talking more about restaurants in big cities.
In Tokyo, lines down the block are extremely common, and the lines are primarily Japanese people, not foreigners. Maybe there are Japanese tourists visiting Tokyo, maybe they are Tokyo locals. But it happens with or without foreign tourism.
Indeed, I’ve seen a lot of “visit Japan” ads lately.
But the thing I worry about, having never been there, is that I might get some good recommendations for out-of-the-way spots where there would be few if any other tourists, and take the time to go find them, only to be denied entry because I’m a foreigner.
I got the two fingers making an x sign a handful when I was in Japan. It’s really not a big deal and it never felt malicious. You just move on, though it does kind of suck when you’re hungry!
It shouldn't be taken personally. It just means that they don't speak English, don't have an English menu, and are not staffed enough to be able to devote the time for understanding you.
Indeed. And it's not always final... I've not had it ever happen to me at a place that serves food, but I also generally only hear about it happening at bars/night clubs and I don't drink so never had a reason to visit one. I suspect a lot might change their stance if you just say you speak Japanese... it's not like you need to know a lot for basic food ordering anyway. The closest related experience I did have was one time I was with a friend taking him to an outdoor idol concert, a guy saw us coming and came up trying to shoo us back / something about no entry, but I just told him in Japanese that I have a ticket and the QR code was already ready to go on my phone. Immediately it's "right this way".
I also remain convinced most of the anti-foreigner tourism sentiment is anti-Chinese tourism sentiment. For westerners who can behave, it's still a great place to visit. (Though skipping Kyoto wouldn't be a bad idea.)
> But the thing I worry about, having never been there, is that I might get some good recommendations for out-of-the-way spots where there would be few if any other tourists, and take the time to go find them, only to be denied entry because I’m a foreigner.
Yep, that's the part I hate, too. The locals put up completely understandable roadblocks to preserve their own culture, but those roadblocks end up making the whole situation hostile and unpleasant for anyone who is not known to the locals.
Since you've never been, let me just say this: most tourists are utterly clueless, so just not being clueless goes far. Blend in, imitate the locals' behaviors, try to speak the language, eat what you're given, etc., and you'll be fine. For now, at least, relatively few places ban foreigners outright.
Telling someone “just speak Japanese and blend in!” is sort of an absurd suggestion. That is impossible if you’re not East Asian and even if you are, it would take years of study.
I didn't say "speak Japanese" (I said try to use the language, which is just table stakes for visiting a country), and it should go without saying that you cannot change your race.
You can still blend in far more than most tourists do by a) watching the people around you, and b) being a little bit self-conscious.
It's absolutely astounding how much tourists stand out in Japan (or Paris, or London, or New York...), and it's mostly about their behavior and clothing. Ten minutes of internet research and a little bit of introspection would go a long way to solving both problems.
The three are a Venn diagram with much more overlap than any of the three officially pretend. A Japanese friend of mine passes for a (Chinese) local across China and SE Asia.
Clothing and makeup is a better giveaway than facial features or skin tone, but even that is becoming harder with K-pop creating a pan-Asian style to aspire to.
I wonder what the end state is here. Will there be a backlash (or more of a backlash, as there's a bit of one already) against the Japanese government's policy? Something worse?
> I'm of mixed minds. I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences, but those days are pretty much gone now.
I don't think they're gone though? I just got back from a trip to Japan and I was very pleased to find these experiences were still the norm outside the most heavily touristed areas. Even in big cities. Have been to Colombia twice in the past two years and it was the same way.
It is almost a paradox or something; what makes a lot of places is the local clientele (or the long term visitors). Plus, the tourists won’t support the business during the off season (although I’m not sure if Japan really has an off season).
Is there any place you can go to avoid Scam culture? Anywhere at all? It seems pervasive.
I would like to think there is somewhere in the United States, maybe in the Midwest, or West Virginia, there has to be someplace where there are decent hard-working Americans, who are not trying to scam each other.
My family is from the "decent hard-working" part of mid-America and I am the only one without a felony so whenever one of my relatives dies, I get their guns. It used to be the crime of choice was check fraud but now it's simple burglary and drugs.
I as a non-gang, non-dealing, tall middle aged white dude am safer in Baltimore than I am at the local gas station full of tweakers in "real" America.
West Virginia has the highest, by a lot, percentage of people on social security disability because their state doesn't have good welfare benefits. All of the decent folk figured out how to scam the government out of disability payments by lying about back and stomach pain.
In Wyoming County West Virginia >33% of all adults aged 18-64 are on disability. These aren't broken down coal miners they are normal, healthy, unemployed people.
My county? 6%.
The only parts of America where people aren't trying to scam each other are uninhabited.
If you go as a tourist to a place in the US that doesn’t get a lot of tourists, like a small Midwest city, people will happily give you recommendations of things to see and do. The same if you go in a neighborhood bar or coffee shop in a big city neighborhood that’s not overtouristed.
Nobody will try to charge you the tourist rate because there isn’t one. There may be scammers and shady merchants operating in town but you will not be their primary target.
Those places are all over the US but just not very interesting. Ft. Davis (or maybe Alpine) Texas is what you're describing but no one really goes there because it's just a small town with people working and living their lives as best they can. There's nothing to attract any outside attention really. I only know that area because of my wife introducing me to Marfa TX which does a little bit of tourism because of the Judd foundation.
I fell in love with that part of Texas and the people. My wife and I were married in Marathon which is in a ~75 mile radius of the towns i listed above
West Virginia is a deeply red state; I don't think you want to go there to avoid scams. It's pervasive in the US because the political leadership is all now scam culture, all the time. Trump is, at core, a corrupt, subliterate, small-time real estate huckster. Everybody he's surrounded himself with is either an insincere grifter or severely mentally ill. And they're running the federal government and the red states, and trying to destroy the state governments of the blue ones.
Some of the restaurants have ticket vending machines outside the shop. This avoids the need for a cashier inside the restaurant. It also mostly avoids the process of staff taking your order. Purchase your meal ticket from machine outside, hand ticket to cook as you enter, and take your seat.
Most of the ticket vending machines do take cash, but if they wanted to eliminate tourists then that would be an easy change to make.
On my last trip to Tokyo, I went to one of the Ramen restaurants that had a vending machine to order food. The machine, unfortunately, did not give us any change. I felt bad trying to explain to one of the employees because we both couldn't really understand each other. He eventually understood and gave us the exact change we did expect. After that experience, I wouldn't blame them for wanting to make the change and limiting tourists.
> There's also Google Maps and Yelp vs. Japan's local version (pretty much any review on the former two are useless, and hopelessly biased by clueless tourists).
I do not understand why one would even look at tourist reviews for "authentic Japanese jalapeños" or whatever on Gmaps. But people do so what do I know.
I remember when Four Barrel Coffee had blown up in SF. I lived in the neighborhood, and learned, there was just an entrance in the ally behind the building for locals. No sign, just a way to skip the line.
I have no idea if it’s still there, but I thought it was a super clever way of doing things.
If you know anything about Japan it's very strange that a place wouldn't take cash. Post-covid (and a lot of that thanks to Olympics preparations) a lot of places in Tokyo have advanced to taking things other than cash.
You're not going far enough: before Covid, finding a place (excluding conbini) that took a credit card was rare. Credit cards are common now, like you say, but nearly any business will still accept cash.
I think I've encountered at most 1-2 restaurants in Japan that don't take cash, and none that don't at least accept credit cards.
Yes as recently as 2010s Japanese travel as a westerner was mildly stressful managing your cash balance.
Taxis, conbinis and restaurants all wanted cash.
Lots of ATMs (majority even) don't take western ATM cards, so you need to look out for JP/7-11/Citi? ones.
Delicate balance of keeping enough yen so you don't run out / have to go out of your way ATM hunting but also not head home with $100s in yen you don't need.
> That said, they’re serious about “no entry” if you have tattoos.
This is not uncommon in Japan, in general. Usually it's more of an anti-Yakuza/riffraff regulation than an anti-foreigner one. It just so happens to kill two birds with one stone, in some cases.
Replace foreigners with "white" and you're more or less spot on.
I know far too many non-Japanese-asian people who get held to the standards applied to Japanese people - not even over tattoos, but things like language, cultural understandings, etc. The aspect of this with white people is where the infamous "gaijin smash" came from.
We were told by our onsen host that as long as we made a genuine attempt at covering our tattoos, the onsen didn't mind (given that we were obviously foreigners). Making an attempt at covering was still required (and we used high end stage makeup that was waterproof).
Seems like if you smile and act friendly and dumb and American you get a lot of slack along with the Japanese shopkeeper version of an eye roll and a headpat.
This rule applies to most confucian/communal East Asian societies with individuals from the West. People aren't idiots, they realize cultures differ, so they're willing to give some slack; especially, with a culture they're somewhat familiar with through media (the US, for instance).
With Japan and Korea (especially the latter) towards Americans, there's also a soft-unspoken rule (that sort of goes both ways) due to the relationship those countries have fostered towards each other. A Brit/German/Italian/etc who spends more than a short visit in Korea/speaks Korean will probably start being taken to the side for flouting cultural norms like age-deference, polite speech, etc to be informed of their cultural mores (usually phrased with an indication that they also come from a structured society, they should understand that this is the way it is); while this will rarely happen to the same group of Americans. In some cases it's the "dumb/naive American" effect, but it also has to do with the larger relationship between the two countries.
If you’re integrating/being an “expat” in a society, you’re going to develop familiarity. The “average” Korean won’t know anything about you and continue to just treat you like a tourist (unless you speak fluent Korean), but your social and professional circle won’t. You can’t go very far into relationships in a foreign country without people knowing your background.
Less importantly but somewhat obvious: many Koreans are fairly competent in English and familiar with common American accents. They’ll know pretty quickly if you aren’t speaking with one.
language/accent obviously, dress, manners and also English people in particular look distinct physically given that most white Americans are more likely to have Northwestern European ancestry. The stereotypical "American white guy" would have an easier time on Swedish or German TV than joining the cast of Peaky Blinders
Isn't this like saying it's impossible to see the difference between a Korean person or a Japanese person speaking English? It should be fairly obvious from the accent alone.
This is a part of the issue, knowing the rules but nonetheless not following them. And then — culturally unaware — thinking it's ok because nobody says anything.
> And a few more of the seedier bars just have a “no foreigners” sign out front.
Those have existed long before tourism to Japan became common. Those signs were there when the vast majority of foreigners in Japan were English teachers and soldiers. Many tabehodai (all-you-can-eat) and most nomihodai (all-you-can-drink) places had them.
Then your friends are quite weak, because I know plenty of Japanese people who drink like sponges... my GF among them, she is your average short Japanese lady and yet she can drink twice as much a me o_O
I think you got it the other way; your girlfriend is quite a strong drinker.
Every Asian I've met gets a red face from their first glass of wine. Of course I'm not saying that every Asian must be like that. However it's well known that they're not heavy drinkers (compared to, let's say, an average English, Nordic or Russian drinker).
The US is building modern day concentration camps for immigrants. Maybe the country isnt actively killing the out groups right now like a handful of other countries but I'd say the racism is extreme and up there.
And yet the 'White House border czar', Tom Homan, was on Fox News earlier today saying that physical appearance is sufficient grounds for detention, and that probable cause is not required.
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1943671875961287024
It isn't incidental. Trump's entire political legacy has been marked by his bigotry against people from, as he called them, "shithole countries," and remember how badly wanted to wall off Mexico, but not Canada. I believe this is explicitly an attempt to purge the US of its nonwhite immigrant population, possibly out of fear of "white replacement" (which Trump has alluded to believing more than once.)
Not to Godwin (but kind of to Godwin,) the Nazis put plenty of non-Jews into camps, and some Jews even collaborated with Nazi Germany. That doesn't mean the number of Jews persecuted by the Nazis was incidental.
My point is that if a bunch of Latino Americans wanted to wall off Mexico, that would be many things, but it would not be racism against a racial outgroup. According to The Hill, 43% of Central Americans support the border wall. Not a majority, but far too statistically significant to describe as racism against an outgroup.
Not trying to get into US politics on HN, but I think my point is clear when it comes to comparing this American situation to the views of non-ethnics in foreign cultures, which was the original OPs argument.
Aren't private businesses in the US allowed to deny access to their premises for any reasons? Seems like a weird thing to get sued over, I think in most places if you own the local, you get to decide who goes there, unless it's a place for government or similar.
You may deny entry based on your own criteria provided you are not discriminating on race, color, religion, national origin, disability status, veteran status, age (more wiggle room here) or other state-specific traits (sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, etc.).
I don't think there's any place in America that would be illegal to bar entry based on the presence of tattoos.
Yeah, but the opposite isn't true, my national origin can be Swedish but I can reside in Spain, so banning by residency isn't banning by national origin, seems like a way to ban foreigners (non-residents).
Edit: Actually wait
> since if your national origin is the US you're automatically a resident
This isn't true is it? If you're born in the US but you live (100% of the time) elsewhere, you're no longer a resident, are you?
Ok, but you're a citizen, which is a higher status than a "permanent resident."
Actually, you fully can discriminate for or against local or state residency. I think national residence would be harder, though to be fair you're absolutely able to not hire non-residents.
Frankly the biggest barrier might be that as actual residents would get mad if you asked for proof, and if you didn't test everyone it would likely be an open-and-shut racial (or maybe national origin if you tested on the basis of accent) case.
> Ok, but you're a citizen, which is a higher status than a "permanent resident."
That sounds like a immigration/social hierarchy/importance rather than something that matters in discrimination contexts, what exactly you mean with "higher status"?
If a bar bans non-US residents, if a US-citizen+Spanish-residency tries to enter, then it shouldn't matter if they're US citizens or not, because the criteria is residency, not citizenship. Or is there like a priority/order for OK/not OK discrimination criteria?
Now that I think about it a better quibble is that you probably can't get around anti-discrimination laws by posting a sign that says "No Canadians or Americans that have spent too long in Canada."
As I understand it, it'd be illegal even with just "No Canadians" because that's a "national origin" right? Instead you'd post "No Canadian Residents" and you'd be in the clear :)
Sometimes I believe one can also face legal trouble for unreasonably banning things strongly correlated with a protected characteristic.
I can’t sidestep gender discrimination law by refusing to hire people with long hair, unless the job is something like “wig model” or “Jeff bezos impersonator” where being bald is a bona fide occupational qualification.
Definitely not. This kind of discrimination is explicitly prohibited by federal civil rights law (Civil Rights Act 1964). It protects people regardless of their national origin (in addition to their skin color).
You can deny entry on a non-discriminatory basis. E.g., a bar can kick out an individual Black American for being a nuisance or otherwise troublesome, they can't kick out a black guy for wearing blue (unless it's a blanket ban and reasonable, such as it being a theme bar) or being black.
This is why the signs are always phrased as "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone/any person".
As with most things though, this is just the minimum federal regulation and states will handle how far they take it differently. There are jurisdictions that wouldn't touch a "no tattoos" policy with a ten-foot pole at the risk of a lawsuit. While there are others that are more lax.
Yes! I was a bouncer for a while here in Philadelphia, and our bar/dancefloor had a rule on St. Patricks day: If you're wearing any green, you can't come in.
Worked great, never had any problems on St. Patricks day.
"You can go to any other bar in the city, just not this one."
You could totally bar people with tattoos from your business in teh USA. You'd be unpopular given their prevalence, but you would be on oslid legal ground.
Those signs have nothing to do with protecting culture. Most of the time, they are simply a naive defense against dealing with a population often doesn't speak Japanese very well.
Every time I've come across one of these signs and wanted to patronize the establishment, a friendly chat with the manager in Japanese was always enough to get them to let me in.
>USA has a 250 year history while Japan has 10x of that.
Is that supposed to imply that Japan has more culture, or that it needs more protection because it's 10x longer? Even if Japanese culture is 10x longer than American culture, it doesn't necessarily follow that there's less of it. Pop music and hollywood music might not be considered "culture" by snobs, but they're still culture, and arguably more plentiful and pervasive than Japanese culture.
If you are an outsider, you should adhere to that country's rules. Why are you going to a foreign country? Are you an invasive species or an inquisitive bumblebee?
> It's such a contrast to USA, where I doubt that such a thing would even be legal.
The sign itself is probably protected speech.
As for the policy, it is probably also legal here. Private businesses have broad rights to refuse individual customers without stating a reason.
Fabricating a legitimate business reason to deny service to a particular group of customers is usually trivial, as well. Proving it was fabricated for discriminatory reasons can be difficult.
No. It is most definitely illegal here. It would violate Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 42 U.S. Code § 2000a:
>(a) All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.
Restaurants are considered public accommodation under 42 U.S. Code § 2000a (b)(2).
Could a business lie about why they're discriminating? Yes, but that wouldn't be possible with a sign saying "No foreigners" and eventually, someone will file a title II complaint.
> Private businesses have broad rights to refuse individual customers without stating a reason.
They don't have to state a reason. The entire foundation of the common law system is to have a court decide intent; not be technically bound by your words.
It would only take showing a continued behavior of denying people in a discriminatory manner (e.g. 10% of your visitors are foreigners, but 95% of the people barred entry are in that group) to fine/sanction/shut down the business.
> They don't have to state a reason. The entire foundation of the common law system is to have a court decide intent; not be technically bound by your words.
Yes, I agree. It becomes more difficult to infer intent without a stated reason.
Practically speaking, I think most civil rights lawsuits that are decided in the plaintiff’s favor are very, very explicit cases of discrimination. Someone was called a slur, someone was refused service violently, someone had racist iconography scrawled on their property. Yes, fines and sanctions then. Well, sometimes.
The ones who are clever about it never get to that stage. They don’t put up a sign saying “no foreigners,” they put up a sign saying “we speak english here,” “proud to be an american,” and etc. Confederate flags, military paraphernalia, the usual soft threats against the other.
Foreigners in particular are going to find it very difficult to interact with our justice system. A civil rights case that goes to trial is going to take much longer than the typical tourist visa allows. It’s going to be prohibitively expensive for the typical tourist to procure the services of a skilled lawyer.
> The ones who are clever about it never get to that stage. They don’t put up a sign saying “no foreigners,” they put up a sign saying “we speak english here,” “proud to be an american,” and etc. Confederate flags, military paraphernalia, the usual soft threats against the other.
These are going to be in places that are not heavily touristed even by other Americans. You're talking about places in the deep south; or in some survivalist community in Wyoming/Montana/etc. Not in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.
So there's no one to complain. If someone did, they would most certainly face some legislative action.
> Foreigners in particular are going to find it very difficult to interact with our justice system. A civil rights case that goes to trial is going to take much longer than the typical tourist visa allows. It’s going to be prohibitively expensive for the typical tourist to procure the services of a skilled lawyer.
There's two cases where foreigners would complain:
A) they are on a visa, in which case they have the capability and are available to do so (and tend to be a pretty outspoken group considering the trouble they went through to get the visa in the first place).
B) they are visiting friends/family, in which case the friends/family will complain due to discrimination their loved ones faced.
You're using extreme examples to prove it could happen, because you're being disingenuous (imo). No one is doubting it could happen, racist/exclusionist stuff happens all the time. The people in this thread are saying it's not a norm, and (more importantly) that it's not legal. It's quite easy to prove a trend of discrimination, especially if your bar is clad in known racist/nationalist-adjacent paraphernalia.
Or, in other words, just ask yourself this: there are racists and nationalists in LA, SF, Denver, NY, Miami, Seattle, Dallas, etc....so, if it's so easy to skirt the legislation, why do we not find these sorts of bars in places that people actually go to versus insular communities where people are unlikely to raise a fuss?
> These are going to be in places that are not heavily touristed even by other Americans. You're talking about places in the deep south; or in some survivalist community in Wyoming/Montana/etc. Not in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.
It is really hard to dispute the myth that “America” only consists of a few large cities, à la Death Stranding. Unfortunately, the whole country is not as enlightened as LA, SF, and NYC.
International tourism is also not limited to these cities. NPS alone attracts millions each year. Although, I understand the fees for foreign visitors is increasing soon.
That part is key. If they do state a reason, it could become a civil rights issue. The sign alone might not be enough to make a case, but it's a very good start.
"they’re serious about “no entry” if you have tattoos"
That's nothing unusual in Japan, even Japanese people in Japan can't join a gym or get car insurance if they've got tattoos. They're serious about that stuff for a reason.
It's fairly unusual to strictly enforce it on foreigners. Every place I've been with a no tattoos policy generally overlook tourists with smaller unassuming tattoos.
I went to Japan for about a month as someone with tattoos. I didn't have many issues out and about but I was told in the gym and I could not have them showing.
I just wore sleeves over them and although less comfortable than my normal gym attire it was fine.
I was denied access to an Onsen because I honestly forgot about the tattoo thing for a while but was able to find one that was tattoo friendly. They were not mean or anything they just informed me it was policy. Completely understandable given the history.
My tattoos are very noticeable though. Like you would never miss large forearm tattoos, so it's probably hard for them to overlook for them and let it slide even for a foreigner
I was in a Shikoku hotel's public bath a couple month ago, and a guy with full on Yakuza back (and arms) tattoo came in to shower. No one batted an eye. Granted no staff was present, so no one enforced the rule. I also did not try to get a glimpse of his pinkies.
I think it’s very taboo regardless of the tattoo design. That said, there are also tattoo-friendly places, and ones where you can just put a bandaid over.
To be fair, that's not a very difficult sentence to read for someone who has studied a moderate amount of Japanese. Doesn't mean you could actually order food.
You obviously didn't click through to look at the sign, which says in both Japanese and English 'No vacancy', with the language endorsement in smaller text at the bottom.
It's funny how everybody seems totally cool with this in Japan (or other Asian countries) but all hell breaks lose if somebody pulls that off in Europe. Actually this is just the news currently as a public swimming facility in Switzerland recently banned foreigners due to problems with visitors from France. The guests now seem super happy but it has been in he news already for a few days. In Germany you can even sue in such a case as we have anti-discrimination laws.
Vending machines outside is pretty much the standard for ramen restaurants. Most of them will take passmo/suica, which most foreigners are also likely to have since it is also used for all public transport.
I’ve been to this restaurant. They take cash as payment so I don’t think they are trying to dissuade tourists.
Also, just a short few years ago I would say less than 10% of restaurants took any form of electronic payment.
Even as a foreigner who speaks Japanese, I frequently got the "we're closed" and crossing the hands in an X response while locals continued eating. Sometime they'd laugh and I'd hear "gaijin" (rude slang for foreigner) as I walked out.
But plenty of places were super warm and friendly after the initial apprehension if you speak Japanese and read some kanji. Worth the effort!
I think this is a misconception spread by people who get mad about being laughed at by locals, including kids, and have insisted on being called gaikukojin (foreign-country person) instead over the last 20-30 years.
The reason I say so is that Japanese is full of abbreviated words like this; gaijins literal meaning is 'outside person' and the koku part is redundant. You see such abbreviations in the written language too. For example 友人 (yuujin) and 友達 (tomodachi) both mean 'friend' but as you can see the latter kanji is a lot more work to write as well to say.
The real reason (in my view) is that this word 外人 has the same pronunciation as 害人 and the same slang meaning, but 害 carries an implication of harm or injury. Japanese has a small number of sounds compared to other languages so homophony abounds and double meanings like this are very common, both for humorous effect or for making veiled negative comments.
Switching a character around is a normal Japanese way of dealing with meaning clashes. For example 和 (wa) means harmony, but also refers to Japan: 和食 (washoku) is Japanese food, 和服 (wafuku) is Japanese clothing etc. etc.. This word is ancient, going back ~1800 years to when Chinese & Korean explorers first had contact with Japan and called it the 'Kingdom of Wa'. However the Chinese used the character 倭 (also wa) which means distant, but can also mean dwarf (as in stature) or submissive. The Japanese used the same character for about 500 years but eventually decided they found the double meaning offensive and switched to 和. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(name_of_Japan) is a great deep dive into this if you're interested in etymology.
I get why some people take umbrage at the use of words like gaijin, but to my mind if you don't like such things you don't really like the language, and if you make an issue out of it people will just find more subtle ways to express their negative (and possibly escalated) sentiments and might start to view you as 害虫.
If I remember correctly, gaijin is just how you say 'foreigner' in standard Japanese. The rude slang is jingai.
And I also have the experience of people really appreciating it if you actually speak and read Japanese. Which makes sense, I can easily imagine it being a relief to find that you can just speak with someone normally instead of having to struggle with this absolutely bonkers weird language that one may be only vaguely familiar with.
I can imagine that people in, say, the United States wouldn't be very happy if I went around and only spoke Dutch.
> And I also have the experience of people really appreciating it if you actually speak and read Japanese.
100%. You don't even need to know that much. Even if you have to switch to English, showing respect by demonstrating some effort to learn the local language and culture goes a long way.
I never got this, but at busy times it was not uncommon to get a super apologetic "we're full" when there were clearly a few seats available. Honestly I get it, foreigners are higher effort to deal with and if you're already busy you might not want to deal with that. Or they could be holding seats for regulars, etc.
> A matcha place I like only lets you order from the real menu after you’ve unlocked enough visits from a punch card.
What's the "fake menu" you have to order from before you unlock the real one? Or do you just have to swing by but aren't allowed to order anything? Compared to the others, it's hard to think of how this would necessarily help the business, aside from possibly disincentivizing people who are uncaring enough that their traffic would be bad but still care enough that they won't go there if they can't order something specific.
Snack bars (the seedier bars you talk about) have always had a policy of no foreigners. In fact, I think it’s just in the standard snacks bar sign template.
Many places also (used to) have sign saying 一見さんおことわり which roughly translate to "first time visitor not allowed". A little bit up to interpretation but usually in the scope of:
* store only for patrons, but welcome if you come with patron.
* anyone welcome but if you're only coming once (tourist etc), please don't (destroy the vibe).
For obvious reasons foreign tourist couldn't get this so many places just put up a "no foreigner" sign. You'll still see local foreigner sometimes hang around those places though
This is false, IME. If you spent enough time to learn how to navigate it, you could get in to most of them. I'm not even fluent and it really wasn't a big deal.
I did this living there from ~2009 - ~2016. Wasn't an issue in my visits afterwards either, at least up until the COVID years.
I will say that when I go back each year (1x/2x per) post COVID, I've seen more of them trying to be firm on it though - presumably due to the tourism influx.
Its about time we do that. This look online for good local places to go needs to stop. You either live there for some times and discover the place by getting to know the locals or yeah you just do not get to know the place.
I remember this. Wanted to order something from a vending machine and had no clue what to do. I went to a nearby hotel and asked person at the reception to help. They actually agreed and bought the item I wanted and didn't want cash for it. Made my day.
how does the physical JCB card prevent people? Amex has an agreement with JCB (for over 20 years) for JCB to process all Amex cards. Amex is accepted everywhere because JCB is accepted everywhere
> Another specific $10 Michelin guide ramen restaurant only lets you order from a vending machine outside using a payment method you can’t access as a foreigner (one needs a physical JCB card or QUICPay - EPOS/Suica/Pasmo/Cash etc wouldn’t work).
It must be quite the character who has the discipline and drive to get a Michelin star and takes pleasure in putting giant roadblocks in front of traveling foodies. Reminds me of this elderly couple who despised kids and ran a successful toy store.
I live in Tokyo at the moment. I get the overtourism thing, because after you've been here even just a little while (months) you start to have a disdain for tourists that do tourist things. Like breaking the rules, being a nuisance, swarming parts of the city.
I don't know what can be done about it though. Japan's economy is in trouble, and the tourist money helps and hurts at the same time. It creates tax revenue, yet inflates prices for locals. Japan's stumbling economy is a factor in itself of the tourism influx due to the weak yen.
In the next few decades I fear Japan is going to go through a difficult period of cultural erosion. It needs foreign workers and at the rate they'll be entering, they won't integrate to the level that the Japanese people want.
I'd like to think I'm one of the "15%" that the article describes - I go to great lengths to integrate despite not speaking a lot of Japanese. But deep down I know that I don't belong here, and that Japan would prefer to be a homogenous society without expats like me. And I hold no hard feelings toward them for that.
> But deep down I know that I don't belong here, and that Japan would prefer to be a homogenous society without expats like me. And I hold no hard feelings toward them for that.
I think this is an important point that I am struggling to articulate. I actually like the fact that they "prefer to do things their way". When I was traveling there, it is clear that I stand out from my behavior. We might share the same skin color but I don't speak the language nor have the mannerism.
I don't fit, they don't know how to deal with me and that is fine. In fact, I would prefer it to be that way. I prefer Japan to be Japan. Of course there are societal issues that needs to be fixed but those are orthogonal to what I am talking about.
My home country, the UK, has already been through this cultural erosion which is why I respect Japan's right to defend its own. London in particular has become a place for everybody and at the same time for nobody. It's a city of people of different values and wavelengths with very little shared strata compared with Tokyo.
Funny to see this sentiment here but in the USA if a conservative-leaning politician talks about "preserving our culture" or saying that immigrants should "assimilate" they are accused of being a code-word (or even an overt) racist.
US conservatives get no benefit of the doubt thanks to years of racism and racist policy. It is clear that they are reactionaries looking to codify white supremacy.
However, American culture has moved on (a lot) from that though. For several generations, it has been described as a "melting pot" or understood through the lens of The New Colossus mounted on the Statue of Liberty.
The question is, do you think it's fine for the same line of "Japanese supremacy" thought to apply in Japan, and if so, why do you think it's different?
Completely different. American culture is immigrant centric. I am an American, and I refuse the biblical indoctrination that some wish would represent "our" culture. Why should conservatives get to dictate what America's culture is? As far as I am concerned, we are a nation of immigrants, and no one should assimilate to certain ideas. In particular, because these ideas can be weaponized. The Church can mangle with the state, because America is mostly evangelical. Free speech can exclude criticism of foreign nations (like Isra-l), because America's most affluent are Jews. Services can be refused on the basis of one's romantic inclinations. Some people end up as more free than others. So I reject this culture claim that you are defending and do not accept that these conservatives have America's best interests in their heart. They are merely choosing the rhetoric that resonates most with lower classes (as history has taught us is a strategy that worked with peasants in the days of yore), because a critique of upper classes or billionaires or those that profit from our toil is them biting the hand that feeds them.
> Free speech can exclude criticism of foreign nations (like Isra-l)... So I reject this culture claim that you are defending and do not accept that these conservatives have America's best interests in their heart.
Do not pretend like liberals were on a different page than conservatives on that issue before the election. Support for Israel was happening under Biden and would have continued under Harris; Trump's the one who did a bait-and-switch with pretending he'd be more neutral until he got in. And conservatives have been called antisemitic by liberals far more than the reverse.
> American culture is immigrant centric.
What does this mean? Because to me, it means we don't have a culture and never will have one. What does immigrant-centric mean to people who are born not immigrants, besides getting out of the way for the next generation on its way in?
It was only under the current admin that permanent residents were detained, and American citizens were doxxed openly (I agree that deans of colleges were fired and students at Ivies doxxed by Ackman and his cronies during the previous admin). All because criticism of Isr-el. And sure, both parties are pro-Isra-l and always will be (at least until lobbying is eliminated or America-first lobbies are the only ones allowed). Hell, an op-ed written by a lady got her detained a la Gestapo. As to your second point, much of America continues to be defined by immigrants. Tesla is the best selling auto maker, and Elon an immigrant is behind it (who overstayed and was illegal for some time as a matter of fact). Chobani yogurt. Nvidia was founded by an immigrant. I could go on. I'd argue conservatism is getting in the way of the next generation, by hindering growth. Tourism in the US is down 22%. Those hurting are American businesses, and small ones in particular
London isn’t an example of cultural erosion—the pie has simply grown. The same applies to New York. Diverse cultures enrich London; they add to it rather than diminish it.
Absolutely absurd. Why is it people feel the need to make out that western cities are somehow magically immune from the exact same detrimental effects that they happily accept about everywhere else?
"Enrichment" is a buzzword for the insulated elite happy that they have new things on their lunch menu, somehow ignoring all the negatives that come with it.
I can't help observing that Britain established a global empire (so vast in scope that they could truthfully say the sun never set upon it, until quite recently) and made it clear to the countries they colonized that Britain, and particularly England, was the center of civilization. We're surrounded by the artefacts of this empire, from Imperial measurements in the USA to Greenwich Mean time being the default timezone to which all others are calibrated.
If you establish a vast trading empire, and tell the often surprised new inhabitants of it that the empire requires their spices/ silks/ slaves, can you really be surprised that the more enterprising and adventurous colonised people gravitate toward the point of origin? Is it some sort of mystery that there should be more people from Algeria and Congo in France, or why there are so many Indonesian people in the Netherlands?
I feel a similar perplexity about many people in the USA making loud complaints about cultural adulteration despite a good quarter of the land having previously been part of Mexico and this being reflected in most of the place names (to take but one example). Some commentators object with an absolute straight face to hearing so many people speaking Spanish in cities with names like Los Angeles.
Migration is a policy issue, not some natural force like osmosis.
It's entirely irrelevant why migrants want to come, when you have an existing population that is being harmed by migration policy.
It's simply that the wealthy benifit from increasing labour supply; this is the "enrichment" you get. Not an improvement in culture or conditions, an increase in wealth concentration.
It's entirely reasonable for a citizen in an English speaking nation to complain about other languages becoming common, as it is direct evidence of the migration policy that is doing them harm.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I am indifferent to the plight of former colonial nations experiencing the same phenomenon in reverse.
Migration is a policy issue, not some natural force like osmosis.
There's a whole discipline called social physics successfully leveraging models from physics, chemistry, and mathematics to analyze and predict social phenomena. Just as the behavior of flocking birds can be reliably modeled with a few differential equations, so can a great many social changes.
There is a disgusting degree of callousness with this comment.
It's not a "colonial nation" that is being harmed by migration, it's working class people. Meanwhile the same classes that benefited from colonialism now benifit from the wholesale destruction of communities.
Every empirical study I have seen shows that high migration lowers happiness and trust. Does that align with your pseudoscience?
Not as callous as pinning all social problems on migrants who mostly just want economic opportunity, and who generally commit crime at lower levels than the domestic population. Nor is it as callous as shrugging off the social and economic losses inflicted on those countries when they were colonized in the first place, or 'granting' them freedom without compensation for the looting, murder, and de facto enslavement.
working class people
I've got a feeling you're not a socialist, though.
Always amusing that lowering the percentage of natives in a culture is an improvement, "enrichment", "vibrancy", and so on, but only in one particular kind of direction...
And interestingly, the people who utter this ideology are usually from the natives - because fundamentally it's a type of narcissism - a kind of "I'll show you" or "I like you being hurt" that feels pleasurable or gives a sense of superiority.
Can't imagine this ever being tolerated within China and Russia though, perhaps that's why they're the current bogeymen.
Yup, this happens to any melting pot city (Paris, New York, LA, San Francisco, etc).
The downside of multiculturalism is these places become low-trust societies.
Do you dare leave your bike outside unlocked in these cities?
Of course, being Japan, they also have a compulsory bike registration scheme and police can and do (not-so-)randomly stop people on the street to check that they're not riding stolen bikes.
I am from a country in South East Asia, and its sad here as well. We have absolutely 0 connection to our ancestors from just 100 years ago. We (and me) have truly forgotten and don't have any identity beyond the surface level. We suffered from Arabification of every part of our culture.
I honestly think the original culture is pretty much extinct. Very, very few of the incoming generation even desire to uphold and rekindle that culture. In fact, it is despised.
This is such a weird notion. Waves of immigrants have created some of the biggest most economically productive cities the world has ever seen. If Tokyo goes this route, only greatness lays in its future.
The rest is just nostalgia, and that's fine. But realistically, a big piece of Japanese culture will be well preserved in the new culture that will emerge. As it is, we've stopped lamenting the arrival of Buddhist influence on the island, so too will other immigration influences.
Hopefully Tokyo actually rejects this western culture and mentality as fundamentally self-effacing instead, and rejects your kind's weird notions and narcissistic pronouncements of cultural superiority (so weird they'd want to be them - all Asian and Japanese like - omg gross, enrich them right away!) instead.
Eventually they may even come to view the westerner, evidenced by their minds in such a shocking condition, as a fundamentally grotesque thing, and go full closed-country again - especially after their power wanes. Certainly one case would be more beautiful than the other!
Tangential to this but I lived in Taiwan for years and every time I saw a new Starbucks or McDonald's go up, I'd have to restrain my gag reflex.
To hell with these multinational corporations that erect their sterile altars to unbridled capitalism, resulting in the mass homogenization of culture. A culture that caters to "everyone" caters to no one.
I find it amusing when Japan wants to be a homogenous society everybody respects their right to have that opinion. But when a european country voices the same wish, everybody loses their mind.
I wouldn't go so far as to say everybody respects it. Some people, maybe.
Ultimately, it's the same underlying xenophobia and racism you find everywhere else. It's easier for people to like people who are like them and harder for them to like people who are not like them.
In my opinion, people don't talk about how well America integrates other cultures enough. It's one of our defining strengths, even still.
America is built on mass migration spread across centuries. It very much is a melting pot. Or at least seems to be like one to someone who has never been there.
>Ultimately, it's the same underlying xenophobia and racism you find everywhere else. It's easier for people to like people who are like them and harder for them to like people who are not like them.
Yes and this is completely normal human behavior, and in my opinion should not be completely outright demonized. I suspect one of the many reasons why europe is the way it is today in regards to this topic, is because we have repressed these natural tribal tendencies.
And just to stir the pot; I wonder how welcoming and nice many of the e.g. majority muslim countries would to the non-arabs & non-muslims if they were to mass migrate to said countries. I think they would very much exercise and impose their 'xenophobia' upon these foreigners in certainly more tougher ways.
> And I hold no hard feelings toward them for that.
But isn't that why Japan ended up like this? Every country needs either immigration or babies, and Japan chose option C: neither. And now the decision has been made for them, a very high dose of immigration is required.
It's like ignoring a cavity and eventually needing a root canal.
Xenophobia is simply an unworkable idea, like eugenics and other discredited beliefs. Or at least it needs to be paired with a religion that encourages having kids.
Yes, but for most of human history we didn't have contraception either. People had children because it was either that or abstinence, and abstinence sucks. Not to mention the need to create heirs who could look after you when you became too old to work.
In an advanced society where the threat is depopulation rather than invasion, xenophobia is harmful unless you can find a way to convince people to have more children than is rational for them to have.
I get it too. I visited japan recently and in the main touristy spots (tokyo and kyoto), it felt like there were more westerners then japanese. I felt bad.
If you experience this in Tokyo, you're dealing with the fact that it's a truly global city and you're not venturing off the tourist path enough. It's definitely still a thing in some parts of Tokyo to have few-to-no westerners.
Kyoto was never going to be able to deal with the level of tourism that it's currently struggling with, though. My friends and I refuse to even stop there now - and I tried to get some friends who visited recently to avoid it in favor of some other culturally significant spots, but the TikTok trend seems to be incredibly powerful. I don't know if I have the words to express how that interaction made me feel, but it's definitely weird.
Old-fashioned-guidebooks, like the other commenter said, can be useful... but IMO it's a gamble.
One option if you're looking to avoid Kyoto, but want something that still feels sufficiently old world, is Kanazawa. You can take the Shinkansen from Tokyo to get there; ever since this line was opened it also has its fair share of tourists, but it's way less popular than Kyoto and IMO very nice. Old Samurai town out on the western coast of Japan.
If you want history that's more somber, and you're already visiting Osaka, just take the Shinkansen a bit further down to Hiroshima. The atomic bomb museum there is IMO required viewing for seeing and understanding the impact those events had. The Nagasaki one was even more powerful of an exhibit, but frankly to go to Nagasaki you need to fly (a Shinkansen exists but it's not a fully connected route at this time).
I'm out drinking at the moment so I'm not about to write a novel, but whenever you go to book your stuff you can feel free to email me (should be in my profile) and I'd be happy to help figure things out. People should visit Japan - I don't ever want to gatekeep it; I just think people should avoid chasing the same beaten path. :)
Buy an old-fashioned guide book instead of using the internet, the consumer parts of which are an advertising machine that inexorably trends towards the lowest common denominator.
We tried going off the tourist path a bit, but since we didn't have that much time there, and know no japanese, it isn't super easy to do figure out where to go / what to do.
Seems like a golden opportunity to be smart about it and use advertising to make less visited parts of cities tourist attractions. People want to experience Japan, but naturally focii will appear over time via positive feedback, you have to overcome that with advertising and promotions on the web via influencers and advertising. That seems like a government focus if they are really interested in doing something about it.
> going to go through a difficult period of cultural erosion
I am not sure what cultural erosion you speak of. I am sure Japanese culture won't be replaced by a cultural vacuum. Japanese culture has evolved for centuries, both under external influences and because of its internal dynamics.
Many modern beloved Japanese cultural assets were formed in such manner, as noted in this article: https://archive.md/2c1WI
> Japan's economy is in trouble, and the tourist money helps and hurts at the same time. It creates tax revenue, yet inflates prices for locals
I lived in a successful major tourist region from its inception to maturity. You are incorrect in saying that it creates tax revenue: The Tourism sector generally gets tax breaks and subsidies, so it ends up eating up tax revenue to enrich whatever oligarchic structure or family dominates the landscape. Moreover, in any mild temporary crisi,s it risks collapsing and forces the government to bail it out by spending enormous amounts of money.
Tourism is like a tick that sucks away the productive forces and resources of a country - it diverts both budget (tax breaks, subsidies) and educated manpower away from actual goods and services production, provides sh*t jobs to those employed in tourism, causes inflation and CoL rise across regions and even the entire country. If you want to cripple a country's industrial and technological power, the best thing to do is to push tourism on it.
> But deep down I know that I don't belong here, and that Japan would prefer to be a homogenous society without expats like me. And I hold no hard feelings toward them for that.
I get what you're saying, but I also marvel at how completely contrary this is to the "freedom of movement" ethics of the West. I mean, someone who holds this same opinion in Europe or America would be considered a Neo-Nazi.
I think you are laboring from behind a few very common blind spots.
First, Japan is an island nation, and historically a somewhat isolated one (due to weather patterns rather than distance). Islands are fundamentally different from continents, anthropologically, lexically, strategically.
Second, 'the West' has historically been very expansionist; because of its continental configuration, there have been many, many waves of migration and military conquest, and the development of global navigation and seafaring vessels during the Renaissance made for a centuries-long outward expansion.
Third, this sort of expansionism has being going on in the Asia-Pacific region over even longer timescales and there are very different discourses with many contentious points of view if you include Japanese, Korean, Chinese and other perspectives.
On general anthropology, maybe try JAred Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel or for a more academic take, Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization. For the history of Japan, Mason & Caiger's History of Japan is comprehensive without being a huge study commitment.
There is an actual difference between those two words. GP said he lives in Tokyo "at the moment." Immigrants intend to settle permanently; expats move places temporarily and will eventually either move on to somewhere else or go back home.
Expats can turn into immigrants, but one who "knows deep down they don't belong" is less likely to.
That’s traditional outlook, but it doesn’t hold ground anymore. A lot of people considered immigrants are staying somewhere temporarily, for a few years. Most of all in comes down to people not wanting to label themselves as immigrants, because they have some prejudices against this terminology. Quite common it comes down to a person with European background labelling himself as an “expat” or “relocant”, and people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Middle East (except Israel) as “immigrants”. In the end, from point of view of host country, they are all the same immigrants that live in the country based on the same documents, e.g. resident permits, but people labelling themselves as “expats” may often support local anti-immigrant policies, not realising it will hurt them as well.
The problem isn't small businesses. Japan already have millions of hard to find gems that even the locals don't know, because the owners barely market things (runs on local patronage) and those are still doing fine outside the tourism craze. And those places can be quite direct about not wanting the one-off tourist; When I was an exchange student in Kyoto we were told off from a couple of places, which wasn't an issue.
The "small businesses" being swamped are rarely those kinds. They want that extra income but can't really serve it, and often realize that one off selfie tourists just generally have little respect for rules and end up trashing the place,(or the surroundings, not necessarily because bad intent but cultural differences) causing ire from the locals.
Yeah that was sort of the vibe I got too. I understand the point of the article, that regular customers are a nicer customer base than tourists, but it sort of has a pretentious "most tourists aren't worth of Japan" hypothesis to the article which feels silly once you think about it in a broader, economic scope
Anyone who's ever worked in customer support will tell you that dealing with customer regularly sucks balls, even worse if they're foreign and don't know the local language, customs and etiquette so they annoy you and your local patrons while thinking they're entitled to because "we spend money here and support your economy", or even more worse if they're foreign and also intoxicated or acting up for the camera (social media streamers).
Hospitality is already a low margin business, so if you're a small business owner and need to deal with the customers yourself instead of via hired work, why would you want that extra hassle of dealing with annoying foreigners unless it's purely for milking them dry with huge markups for it to be worth it?
I am in Spain (where people, imho wrongfully, think tourism is ruining everything) and I dont see the issue; my wife and myself make enough in the summer to not have anything to do the rest of the year. I have IT businesses which I scale back to run the pub in summer for 3 month. I don't really care about whatever they do as long as it is not fighting: the more drunk and loud they are, especially guys with girls, the more they will just basically order anything of whatever price. And many of them. And yeah, some drinks and food locals would never ever buy so we mark them up 10x. Do not see an issue with that: it is not hidden and locals dont pay less for the same product: it is on the menu, everyone can see it, it's just not popular while for some groups of foreigners it's the first they ask. Welcome please!
My impression of these Japanese small businesses is that many are run purely as lifestyle businesses and making more money isn't the point. They're run for the owners to feel a sense of accomplishment and ownership and give something back to the community. There is no desire to close the business and go on vacation, especially if it means being very aggravated when they are opened.
I think it is hard to explain to HN crowd whose most would like to run business to make most money possible in shortest time period and would not understand running business that just pays its bills and gets owner ramen profitable unless it is just a point on path to becoming unicorn.
>I am in Spain (where people, imho wrongfully, think tourism is ruining everything) and I dont see the issue; my wife and myself make enough in the summer to not have anything to do the rest of the year.
Do you have any self reflection to see why this is a problem for other citizens who aren't making bank from tourism 3 months per year and actually need to work 12 months a year but also have to deal with the issues tourism ads for them: higher rents, higher prices, extra traffic, extra noise at night from your drunken patrons, crowds, pickpockets, scammers, etc?
You arguments is just "over tourism is not a nation/city problem because it's making me rich". You can't make this up. I couldn't be as oblivious about it if I tried.
Which is why it's better to not have any customers. And not make any money, because dealing with taxes sucks balls, too. Best, really, is not to be alive, because otherwise you'll need to deal with illness, hunger, sadness and stuff.
Yea this was major de-growther vibes to me. A couple of small businesses getting swamped just means you don't have enough small businesses. It's true that generally there aren't enough small businesses.
I'd like our productivity gains to free up people to pursue their weird jazz-coffee bar fantasies and start more businesses. That's a better world to me than the the one OP is trying to get us to retreat to.
There's lots of terrible things about social media but its ability to spread the wealth of attention to small businesses is probably the best thing about it.
Bad tourists? FINE THEM. I realize the Japanese don't like to see their relationships as transactional, but they have foreigners there and managing their behavior via transactions is totally fair to me.
P.S: I know, I know I have recently been to Japan and seen its over-tourism first hand. I also don't know a country better equipped to get a handle on it and gasp scale.
Well it is a job innit? Most my well paid CTOs and tech contacts I meet cannot behave either. They always have to be rude that I am just a small fish, misspell my name every time to be funny or lazy or whatnot etc. I don't care, pay the bill within 14 days, cheers.
They don't have a problem with customers, they have a problem with foreign customers that often can't behave. Being c-suite doesn't give one a free pass to be an asshole. I suggest reading the source that the linked post is an answer to: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/kyoto-japan-tourism-...
I have issues with them too (rowdy pub clients and rude c suites), but I fear, after 5 decades alternating in both these jobs, I cannot avoid them, so, I learn to play them and make more money than they came in to spend.
I would like harder evidence that Japanese business owners hate high-spending tourists. From my personal experience small business owners have at least appeared to very much appreciate my custom. There is a sordid history of Westerners defending Japan from itself - I'm not saying that is happening here, but I would like to see more systematic evidence.
I'm the CTO & Founder of TableCheck, the booking system used by 10,000+ restaurants in Japan. My two cents: the issue isn't simply "too many tourists" but rather over-concentration at a few hotspots, a domestic-first market, low English proficiency (ranked #87 globally, a notch above Afghanistan), and a culture deeply focused on orderliness and not causing inconvenience for others.
That said, nearly all hospitality owners in Japan I work with now recognize the importance of inbound tourism--critical for a country facing a 30% population decline by 2070. When I started TableCheck ~12 years ago, many places avoided non-Japanese guests--not always from "racism", but often a fear of miscommunication and dissatisfying guests. That mindset is rapidly fading: venues that don't capture inbound guests' revenue simply won't survive.
No, I really don't. Chefs and restaurant operators chose their profession out of a genuine desire to share cuisine and hospitality experiences with as many people as possible, and the vast majority genuinely appreciate meeting international guests who share their love for food. I've even heard Michelin chefs go as far to say that they feel their culinary art is more appreciated by international guests than the domestic audience.
In Japan there is a "system" ("kata") for everything, and in addition, there is a concept of hospitality called "omotenashi" which means something like "the host will anticipate the all guest's needs" (you can think "omakase"--meaning "chef chooses"--is a facet of "omotenashi")
To illustrate these concepts: I had two friends visiting from India who were religious vegetarians, they had asked me to book a traditional Japanese restaurant but almost everywhere I called used "dashi" (fish-based soup stock) as a core ingredient. I asked if dashi could be removed, but nearly every restaurant refused as they "didn't think it would taste as good"--I tried to explain my friends really wouldn't know the difference, to no avail--the system is the system, the goal is "omotenashi".
Language tends to be an issue as well, but many restaurants will say "We don't speak English and we don't have well-translated menus, but if you want to try it anyway we'll welcome you." Another example here: Tokyo Disney gives a VIP tour only in Japanese, and you have to pay extra for an English translator. I asked them why they can't just have the English speaker gives the tour; the answer was "Because the tour is in Japanese." The system is the system.
So it's easy to mistake this "omotenashi" insistence to follow the system as "(intentionally) not catering to foreign guests", but it has much more to do with "quality control" like you might find in a Toyota factory.
Are there a handful of close-minded bigots in the Japan, who refuse non-Japanese speakers/non-Japanese people? Sure, there are in any country. You are not likely to encounter them on a trip to Japan--in 17 years living here I really haven't encountered many--and if you do, just take your business elsewhere.
I can say that this fact of population decline (and population aging) weighs heavily on the Japanese psyche, especially in the business world. The hottest topic for our customers in sales discussions is definitely "attracting inbound tourists".
It makes sense Japanese business owners would be interested in attracting inbound tourists as a financial solution to population decline for their businesses. At the same time, it can be possible for tourism to not be a solution to the underlying problem of population decline for wider society (including longer-term longevity of businesses, and the feasibility of future businesses).
As devil's advocate, do you not see a potential disconnect here between what makes financial sense for your customers and what makes logistical sense for the nation as a whole?
Developing a healthy tourism industry, developing English skills to communicate with the world at large, all make great sense for the country as a whole. I think these can be developed without losing the cultural aspects that make Japan great.
One could argue that the tourism industry was already beyond healthy, that the impact on English skills is negligible and that it hurts others, such as business people having problems do travel because hotels have doubled or trippeled their prices.
English skills put hospitality staff in a better position to serve guests, and ultimately reduce the burden/friction on the operators themselves.
As for business travel, the price of business hotels in Japan overall has not dramatically increased—certainly not beyond what corporate budgets can afford—and much of business travel is to cities that are not of particular interest to tourists. Staying outside the city and commuting by train is also an option.
I do live in Japan. Looking at APA Hotel in Ginza I see prices in the 10-20,000 JPY range ($66-$133) per night it just doesn’t feel insanely high. And thats smack in the middle of a major business/tourist area.
Well yeah, that doesn't look high in dollars for US people earning a lot, sure.
But I never said that it looks high, I said that it increased. You could easily find APAs for about 5000 JPY not long ago. And don't forget that we currently have summer, so much less tourists.
Its not clear how much of the increase is due to tourist demand vs. global price inflation in general. 5000 yen is now $33. Thats an unthinkably low price in the US unless you are going for bedbugs and a piss-stained mattress…
Prices in Japan seem to be de-coupling from the rest of the world… e.g. the “Japanese only” language-locked Nintendo Switch 2
It is very clear if you compare hotel prices to renting an apartment, which have almost been stagnant over the last 1-2 years (before they were rising quite a bit of course). At least very from 100%+ increases that I can see for hotels everywhere in Tokyo, including most of greater Tokyo area.
I am not sure I understand the argument the author is making. Is this what they are saying? [Overtourism is bad for small businesses because it encourages them to cater to tourists, and therefore to chase global trends rather than to serve the taste of the local community]
I am sure many of them would be a little upset, but I don't understand how this counts as "hurting" small businesses?
he thinks there are businesses out there that do it for the love, and somehow dont need customers or revenue to survive. and ill have to dig my heels in when he says they arent doing it to get rich.
...small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars.
If you want to be a members' only club, be a members' only club. I understand concerns with Venice sinking or a tiny train station being overrun with anime fans, but Kyoto is and always will be a popular tourist destination for many reasons.
These sorts of critics always struck me as elitist and pretentious. If reminds me of those kids gatekeeping music genres and claiming you couldn't call yourself a fan unless you listened to the most obscure album of the most obscure band.
Just a fashionable way to say you've been there and done that, and that you're above the hoi polloi.
Popular cities, and popular attractions within, are popular for a reason.
Craig's been more or less an indirect cultural ambassador/link for Japan in the tech scene for something like the past 15-20 years. I very much doubt he's gatekeeping.
In my experience everyone believes they're part of this 15% of travelers interested in the local culture and not one of those stupid NPC going through the motions so the distinction this article is drawing between good and bad tourism completely defeats the point it was trying to make.
Tourism in Japan is still pretty low compared to traditional tourism hot spots like Paris or Rome. As is usual, it's the relative change that is significant rather than the absolute numbers. The change from "almost none" to "some" affects a place more than the change from "a lot" to "even more".
It also felt to me to be weirdly concentrated in particular small areas. I spent a few weeks in various places in northern Japan which varied from "very quiet" to "tourists but not too many"; but in Tokyo, Akihabara was absolutely heaving with tourists (in a way it wasn't five years ago). And even in Tokyo just getting a little way away from the hotspots you could find beautiful but quiet places still. So I agree with the author's suggestion to go to parts of the country that aren't the tiny fraction of super-famous locations or social-media sensations.
I feel like tourist places are “weirdly concentrated” as you put it. When I was Florence the center was obviously super busy, but walking only 15 minutes in one direction there seemed to be almost no tourists around (of course, the area I was in didn’t have any sights). It made me think that maybe there’s a bias to the feeling of overtourism because people think about the one part of the city where all the tourists are.
New Orleans Louisiana is like this, walk down Bourbon street and it's packed with tourists but turn and walk perpendicular to Bourbon street for 2 blocks and you're all alone.
I don’t think that’s true if you add in Chinese tourists, which are like 80% of Japan’s overseas tourist mix, it is china’s #2 overseas tourist destination after Korea (adjacency has a lot to do with that). France is #23, while China is the largest and fastest growing market for overseas tourists.
Tourism in Japan is fine if concentrated in central Tokyo or major cities for instance. You can try to flood Shibuya or Ginza with tens of thousands of tourists everyday it won't be much of an issue.
Tourists spilling over on less prepared and smaller places is the real issue IMHO. Seeking "authenticity" while not being local/integrated understandingly generates friction at scale.
Rome had been the center of the western world for 2000 years, and Paris for 400. You can't compare those "well-trodden" cities to Kyoto, which was relatively secluded from tourists until the invention of jet airliners.
AFAICT, Germans & Brits outnumber Americans in Paris and Chinese outnumber Americans in Tokyo. So American numbers aren't particularly significant, IMO.
But seanmcdirmid in a sibling comment is likely correct, and I'm possibly wrong.
Hmm. As a Brit I would not consider a trip to Paris to be "tourism". It's just a trip over the border. Yes they speak a different language there but it's a language that I was forced to study in school. No doubt Germans feel the same way.
Going to Spain on the other hand would be tourism. I don't speak Spanish, it's not a neighbouring country, you arrive in an airport, etc.
If an American or a Chinese person goes to Paris I feel they likely have different motivations and itinerary than a Brit, Belgian, etc who is taking the train possibly only for the day.
I was in Rome a couple of summers ago (not as a tourist) and it was pretty crazy how many tourists there were. You could hardly walk along the streets in the centre. I wouldn't want to live there as a local, or ever be anywhere which is "not quite as bad as Rome".
I was thinking similarly, because you go to a famously tourist packed city like Paris and find nothing by local shops. But concluded differently than you: the article is just wrong.
I felt awful about being in Kyoto last year. Had I known how bad it was for the locals I would never have went. I can’t imagine how frustrated and angry if my home town was the same. The infrastructure can’t support the number of tourists unlike Tokyo. Locals can’t even get a bus without them being completely full to the brim all the day long.
It’s 100% social media. It’s the most vapid thing in the entire world. It makes tourist destinations theme parks with zero regards for the locals.
Municipal bankruptcy is a medium-term problem, but as we're seeing, the dose makes the poison. Suffocating under an excess of tourism is arguably worse than a shortage of it, which could be replaced by other sorts of economic activity.
A good, nuanced piece, especially if you read the footnotes. I'd add that some businesses aren't set up for seasonality as well as others. Pretty much every country has beach towns full of shops and motels that close in winter. But a lot of the small businesses the article is talking about are open year round and depend on locals. If you can't get into your local 4 months out of the year, it probably isn't your local anymore
Only anecdotal, but I’ve noticed recently what seems to be a gap in the social-media-driven concentration of tourists in Japan: traditional museums.
I have lived in Japan since 1983, and my sisters and their husbands recently spent three weeks in Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, and Tokyo. It was the first visit here for three of them. They’re all in their early 70s and don’t use social media much, so they got most of their ideas for places to go from web searches, which led them to travel blogs and to sites like Tripadvisor.
I tried to steer them away from the areas that I knew would be overcrowded, but with mixed success. I warned them in particular that Kyoto would be packed, but they insisted on taking a day trip there from Osaka anyway. It turned out to be the most unpleasant part of their trip because of the crowds.
As their trip progressed, they focused more on avoiding the crowds, and they gradually started adding more museums to their itinerary. I took them to the Osaka Museum of Housing and Living and the Tokyo National Museum, and on their own they visited the Osaka Museum of History, Yushukan Museum at the Yasukuni Shrine, JCII Camera Museum, and several others. None of them were crowded, and they seemed to enjoy them all.
I was particularly surprised at how empty the Tokyo National Museum was, as forty years ago it was a standard destination for foreign visitors. It still has a great collection, but very few of the thousands of tourists wandering around nearby Ueno that day chose to go there.
Personally (and ironically), I wouldn't usually think of museums if I'm looking for something non-touristy. Walking through a museum, reading and looking at things that've been laid out in a specific order for me to consume, just feels like reading a website. Unless it's a unique exhibit, there's little interactivity, and while things can certainly be learned, I often wonder if I couldn't have learned them just as well from a book.
That's not to say I'll never go to a museum; I stumbled into a small science and technology museum near the imperial palace gardens, for example. But the bigger a museum is and the more lists it's on, the more I'd assume it's touristy. The Tokyo National Museum being "a standard destination for foreign visitors" is exactly why I'd shy away from it. (Why the general public would follow that trend for museums but not for other tourist destinations, I don't know.)
I’ve lived in Nagoya for 20 years and Kyoto’s unbearable to visit anymore. I loved it twenty years ago but I have no interest in wading through the tourists from overseas.
In the mid 2000s, I visited (white American) with my then-fiancé (a foreign-born native), and it was absolutely incredible to travel with her and her still-living-there extended family.
Saw so many incredible places and was welcomed everywhere with open arms (except a coed day spa that allowed foreigners — that was difficult). When her native uncle and I got drunk at a karaoke bar, we were tolerated as tip-friendly locals.
I greatly-respected the open hostility to foreigners — to protect their culture — and would never travel again without a local guide.
Sorry to hear it's going to shit. What keeps you there?
I find Japan a bit strange about these "making profit" topics. I still don't fully grasp how it's possible so many of these business that "poured much of their life savings into opening these places, taken out loans" don't rejoice and raise their prices (a bit? a lot?), making them able to do this thing they are doing, much better. Heck invite the regulars to the 2nd drink with that extra money that is coming in now if you want, or give them a discount.
Here there is the opportunity of a lifetime, and many Japan business are straight out rejecting the money that comes pouring in. Meanwhile Japan economy is the worst it's been in 40-50 years, and virtually every week there's articles about the bleak future. It's too frustrating seeing articles complaining about how business are closing down with no money, and at the same time how these people trying to give them money are being rejected.
Background: living in Japan 5-10 years, I'm from Spain so it's not "in my blood" to think about profit also, but heck it's just too surprising some times.
PS, I'm for reducing tourism overall here actually, I'm just baffled at Japanese rejecting money.
From the parent comment: "Heck invite the regulars to the 2nd drink with that extra money that is coming in now if you want, or give them a discount." That could even be revenue neutral, if she wants it to be. Why not try that?
I know, I'm totally fine with that, but then don't bring money into the article like those people are burdened economically by these tourists, you cannot have it both ways.
They probably just don't know how to do it right, not that they're against the money.
Other cultures have zero qualms about a "foreigner price".
Perhaps they just need better training in how to fleece foreigners without impacting their long term local customers - it's those relationships that are probably their major concern.
I was just thinking about restaurants. The iconic French or Italian restaurant is larger than the iconic Japanese izakaya with 10 seats. And unlike the tapas bars of Spain, it isn't expected you'll move on to the next place or take your food outside.
I'll agree certain locations are getting "instagram famous" and really ruining it for the locals, but I don't think they are worse off because of it. Just let people flock to the one picture spot, they did it before social media, and now there are just more of them, nothing new here.
This argument seems to be heavily tinged with xenophobia. Local customers good, foreign ones bad? I can understand if it was specifically about the volume…
Not only that, but these business owners are actively complaining about an influx of business.
I get it if your goal is not necessarily to make as much money as possible and just wanted to create some small, local, "underground" thing. As a small business owner myself, I can think of a few different ways you could accomplish that in spite of massive attention. I mean you can have certain days of the week where you're closed to the general public but patrons with a loyalty card can get in or something. That's just one idea; point is there are solutions.
So I tend to agree with you - this reeks of "we just don't like foreigners. They're ruining our business by being foreign."
My wife and I are about to open our first brick and mortar business and it would be our dream come true to get popular on TikTok and to be a tourist destination. Even though we are a small business in a trendy neighbourhood doing something rather niche that is [hopefully] going to attract a loyal local following.
So what? They’re right. Japanese are a million times more civilized than us foreigners/tourists.
They also have a vastly different culture with many possible faux-pas that one can make, which all tourists inevitably make, which they hate. I think they are unfair about this however
I live in Colorado and we have a similar issue (though not nearly to the scale of Japan). The line about getting "TikTokked" really struck a chord because there have been a few places that have fallen to the same fate, spots that the locals only knew about are now filled to the brim with both locals and tourists from out of state.
My rule now is when we travel somewhere, we look to see what all the viral places from TikTok, and then we don't go there unless the place holds some incredible cultural significance (ie. The Louvre, Sagrada Família, etc).
What we found is cities are usually filled to the brim with the kind of spots that get "TikTokked" but only a few select places actually go viral and attract all the attention. When you use the "viral places" as a guide of where NOT to go, you end up going down some paths that lead you to some really special experiences with practically no other tourists around.
> […] unless the place holds some incredible cultural significance (ie. The Louvre, Sagrada Família, etc).
Honestly, I give those a pass too. I don't want to go to Barcelona and exacerbate the problem of overtourism (same goes for Venice). Paris is doable of course, but there too I wouldn't consider the Louvre right now. Not with its employees holding strikes because of the overcrowding!
It's a big world, and there are plenty of places where I am welcome as a tourist. The experience is better in any case; I hate crowds.
I also live in Colorado and have noticed the same thing lately. A state park near me gets slammed with tourists but there isn't much to do there unless you like hiking up steep trails or rock climbing. Most folks seem to drive in, walk around for 30 minutes, and then leave.
IMO it's not that travel is to cheap, it's that social media has created "hot spots" around the globe.
Take a random example: 5 cute coffee shops around Paris, all of them have that Parisian vibe that tourists are looking for but one of them had an influencer walk in and make some content. Now that one shop is all over the internet and tourists are flocking to it, creating huge lines and overwhelming the business, while the other 4 shops sit at roughly the same level of popularity as they did before.
The problem I see isn't that travel is democratized, it's that people are lazy at planning their trips and just go on social media and find these "hot spots" instead of actually doing their homework or heck even a little exploring around the city.
And I get it, planning a trip and actually doing your homework is hard, it's much easier to get on TikTok and have the entire itinerary planned in one afternoon than spending weeks researching spots on your own.
> The problem I see isn't that travel is democratized, it's that people are lazy at planning their trips and just go on social media and find these "hot spots" instead of actually doing their homework or heck even a little exploring around the city.
The problem is people are shallow. People are _actively_ seeking the queue. I know because I know people that are like this.
They want to be part of the queue because...I am not sure why. To take a quick picture at a very specific angle to avoid the crowd? To make their followers think they are doing something great? To make them jealous?
It is as if beauty have to be told and highlighted to them. They need a signboard that says "this is pretty, take a picture here!". They are not able to appreciate the minutiae of life.
Of course, I am sounding mighty superior here, but I don't think I am wrong.
The same reasons why folks prefer buying things on Amazon (or Walmart). It is renown and you know that it will have what you need and qualities are reasonably guaranteed.
Yeah I argue with my wife about this.
She lives her lists, and trawls her social media feeds for stuff.
I prefer to have a loose agenda of which neighborhoods are interesting, pick one and wander it for an afternoon. Odds are we will find lots of interesting things.
We usually meet in the middle and do a mix. More and more she admits in retrospect to having stressed herself out with building and following an agenda.
I think the more interesting story here wouldn’t be the “over tourism” of the globally desirable internet-famous locations— It’s all the little regional resort towns and tourism destinations that are now ignored.
All over the US are locations that used to be the place where a people would go for a three day weekend or summer getaway. But now they are ghost towns because the cost of travel and the algorithm have reframed travel as global and not regional.
Like… Niagara Falls used to be “the” honeymoon destination for couples in the northeast. Now it seems like every honeymoon is in a beachy tropical location and the falls have been gutted economically
And quite possibly also because UK beach towns are generally sad and cold (except for Cornwall and Devon for two weeks per year), compared to Spain’s?
Signed, someone living in the UK.
This is something that I feel doesn't get discussed in a lot of these sorts of discussions (overtourism, local food, etc.). Reducing your carbon/social footprint by consuming locally is MUCH more enjoyable in some locations than in others.
people insist that they need "the BEST", so they hop on a plane to get the picture-perfect locale that they see online at the expense of hollowing out anything that is merely "pretty good".
Isn't this what pricing is for? The "best" places can raise prices because of the high demand. Then the "pretty good" places in comparison wind up being a good value option.
> All over the US are locations that used to be the place where a people would go for a three day weekend or summer getaway. But now they are ghost towns because the cost of travel and the algorithm have reframed travel as global and not regional.
I find that local travelling within the US is often more expensive for the quality they offer and travelling outside the US may cost the same but give you a better experience, or at least novel.
A lot of those tiny locations all over the US are in red states. Lots of people aren't going to want to go to locations where public infrastructure has been hollowed out and discrimination is legal.
Do you have proof of these red states re-legalizing discrimination, or repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and/or Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990)?
I failed to find anything about this supposed upheaval of established legal statute after a quick google search.
I think the point of is that every state had its decent share of local tourists going to local attractions. It's one thing if the blue state travelers who were traveling in the first place are now traveling somewhere else, but it's also an impact that there are also less local tourists in these states than there have been historically, because even the local tourists are now traveling elsewhere.
Either I get "Southern Hospitality" AKA decently outwardly friendly people (if you're white) and people who actually donate to charity or I get good infrastructure and legal weed, but people who are anti-social and would piss on the homeless if it were legal.
You can't win. This is why folks travel in the first place.
Yeah travel should be a privilege reserved for the ultra rich so the lower classes can focus on working until their body is used up and then they can crawl in a hole and die.
'Globe trotting' has been 'democraticized' only for the top income earners from the high-income countries. The rest of the world is not able to globe trot. Combined with digital nomadism, golden visas et al, this 'democratization' is a new form of colonization in which the high CoL countries' people can literally buy out poorer countries' most desirable regions or set themselves up as an aristocratic elite on top of the locals.
It used to be the case, now the majority of the people in high-income countries and the high earners of medium-income countries can globe trot, it is a massive increase.
As for the "colonial" aspect, Japan is not exactly a poor country. It is, in fact, a rather expensive destination (a bit less now because the Yen is cheap) and you will certainly not be seen as an aristocratic elite. You will be respected as a guest because that's how Japan works, but there is a line and it will become very clear if you ever attempt to cross it.
I think that "colonial style" tourism is on the decline, simply because the world is developing and what used to be poor countries now do very well by themselves. They will still accept your money though.
> It used to be the case, now the majority of the people in high-income countries and the high earners of medium-income countries can globe trot, it is a massive increase.
Except that is still a ~20% minority at the top. And worse, they can only trot by gentrifying cheaper locations - they can't trot in central London, Ottawa, or Japan, bar a few who are much richer.
> As for the "colonial" aspect, Japan is not exactly a poor country
This new colonization phenomenon doesnt have much to do with those. Foreigners who earn more than their peers of equivalent level come into a country and they eventually push those, even including the white collars, out of their own cities by gentrifying them through long term or short term rentals, and especially through buying properties to live in or for 'investment' (speculation, really). This happened in Lisbon, Barcelona, Madrid, and is now happening in Valencia. It will inevitably happen in Japan. The only reason it has not happened yet is that Japan's digital nomad visa is just 6 months. If it starts giving out a year or more, you will see how fast the colonization will happen. It took only 2 years for Spain. Japan would likely be a more popular destination, so it could happen faster.
Or also for the "middle" class but as an expensive treat that would have been chosen over something else, like it used to be. After all the environmental cost of a 20€ EasyJet ticket isn't nothing.
Well, problem here is that airlines are under control of national regulatory agencies while flying internationally. Sure, a mandate of say, drastically improving comfort levels by making something like an old-style business class seat (38" pitch recliner, 4 abreast in a narrowbody) the absolute allowed minimum - could work: it will make passengers happier, reduce air rage, and lift prices to the level that somewhat curbs overtourism. But it's impossible to introduce because if one nation does so it will simply make their airlines uncompetitive abroad.
That’s a fair counter point, but I’m just saying that it did have negative consequences and we might want to consider it. It’s kinda crazy you can sometimes fly 6000 km for less than a few round trip train tickets between London and Edinburgh.
I wonder if Americans’ pitifully short vacation allowance paired with high incomes is an issue. If you’re going to Japan for a week you’re likely to only hit a few top attractions, I imagine.
Perhaps it would help to frame the problem as domestic travel being too expensive as opposed to international travel being too cheap. By the way, overtourism is not a "there's too many Americans/Europeans who can afford vacations" problem, most tourists in Japan are from nearby East Asian countries. In fact, the share of tourists to Japan who come from the US and Europe has declined in recent years.
Another is the numeric ratings on reviews on various restaurants and shops. The top scored places are often overwhelmed. An AirBNB operator (in the US) told me she much prefers one of the two bakeries near her, but her guests go to the other one because "it had a better Yelp rating." It was 4.5 vs 4.4 aka random.
I walked the Kumano Kodo after reading Craig's essay about it. I like to think I was one of the 15% he talks about here. One of these days I'll go back to Japan and I'll make sure to go to Morioka.
My favorite line in this article:
> I’ve come to see overtourism as a kind of natural disaster. How can you get angry at the earth for having an earthquake?
> So why do people open small shops? For any number of reasons, but my favorite is: They have a strong opinion about how some aspect of a business should be run, and they want to double down on it....That singular thing can drive an initial impulse, but small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars. That — community — is probably the biggest asset of small business ownership. And the quickest way to kill community (perhaps the most valuable gift for running a small business) is to go viral in a damaging way.
> Pour out a cold brew for small shops with giant lines of transient tourists.
> "James told me about another friend who owns a cocktail bar in Kyoto that was TikToked. She had recently stopped by and found him in tears. The only reason he opened the bar, he said, was so locals and friends like her would come. Now, all he had were customers he couldn’t talk to."
One possible interpretation of TFA is that "small shops" only want to allow certain people to enter and not others.
I wonder if some form of private club would be more appropriate.
I just got back from Japan, and even though it wasn’t peak season, the effects of overtourism were immediately apparent.
The main driver seems to be social media, obviously not unique to Japan but is really blatant. Tourists were chasing selfies and videos at iconic locations they’d seen online, rarely venturing beyond those well-known spots. This creates heavy congestion and puts strain on specific neighborhoods and landmarks. In the West, TikTok appears to be the biggest influence; among Chinese tourists, the app Xiaohongshu (Rednote) by plays a similar role. The result is a tourism culture shaped less by genuine interest or curiosity and more by curated photo ops.
Japan faces unique challenges in managing the surge in tourism. Despite the modern and cosmopolitan feel of its cities, the culture remains markedly different: socially conservative and culturally illiberal. Xenophobia and racial bias are not uncommon, and nationalist political voices have increasingly framed tourists as scapegoats for a range of domestic issues. At the same time, the country lacks sufficient infrastructure to support the growing number of visitors. In Kyoto, for example, the city’s bus system is frequently overwhelmed…you could almost argue that separate systems for locals and tourists are needed.
Many tourists also appear unprepared, I admittedly was completely unprepared for the weather. Japan is not an easy place to navigate culturally, and some visitors behave with surprising ignorance or entitlement, especially at temples and shrines. There’s a tendency to treat the country like a kind of Disneyland, an exoticized backdrop for social media content, rather than a living culture with its own rules, rhythms, and expectations. This contributes to growing resentment, particularly in a society where individuals are often viewed in terms of the groups they represent. One tourist’s behavior can easily become a reflection on all.
There’s no easy solution. But it’s clear that both travelers and destinations need to rethink their relationship. Tourism should be approached with more awareness, humility, and a willingness to engage with complexity, not just consume it.
> The result is a tourism culture shaped less by genuine interest or curiosity and more by curated photo ops
Well said, but definitely not unique to Japan. Sadly, I notice this almost everywhere I go anymore. It's also why you read about someone falling down a cliff or waterfall taking a selfie once or twice a year now.
I don't have any idea what the solution is, but it definitely makes most sights worth seeing less enjoyable now.
The cynic in me thinks that destinations/countries are going to have to pay an influencer tax and have a strong social media policy that works to direct/redirect and educate potential tourists. Japan needs to start spreading tourism a bit more evenly across the country. They could probably work with hotels to use pricing to even out visitors. But you’re right, this is a huge problem that goes well beyond Japan.
I agree. These go-karts are only street legal vehicles if the government agrees that they are street legal. If the government passes a rule that says go-karts are not street legal, they can be confiscated and destroyed as soon as they are spotted by the police. It seems that this problem could be easily solved.
It's happened on and off over the years, and at one point Nintendo took legal action against the business itself. It's just an annoyingly persistent tourist trap.
I've traveled to Japan twice in the last 6 years; once pre-pandemic in 2019, and again in 2023, both times in the Fall. It is unbelievable how tourism has exploded there in such a short amount of time, and I thought it was bad in 2019. Areas that were quiet and mostly traversable in 2019 were impossible to navigate with the crowds four years later.
I've been to other big touristy hotspots like Rome and Venice, but overtourism in Tokyo/Kyoto was more noticeable to me, perhaps because of the culture (loud groups of tourists entering quiet orderly establishments). I recall in 2019 going to teamLab Tokyo, and there was a large group of Western tourists who had removed their shoes and were lying on the ground in the mirror room.
There are a ton of articles about over-tourism in Japan lately, and after thinking about it for awhile, I think you can boil it down to two things other than the obvious (the yen losing value, etc.)
1. The extreme success of Japanese culture via media, specifically abroad. This wasn't just a thing that happened accidentally, it was in some sense planned for decades. See for example the Cool Japan initiative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan
I haven't been to Korea, but I imagine that their tourism numbers have dramatically increased in the last decade due to k-pop, k-dramas, Squid Game, etc. – all of which have been deliberately used to promote the country's culture abroad.
2. Japan is one of the few countries in the world which has navigated modernity without essentially just becoming Westernized. Sure, there are many Western chains and technologies there, but there are also tons of social practices, attitudes, and other things which are very different from the Western world. Or at least they have the appearance of being very different to Western eyes.
This is why there are constantly weird thing in Japan articles on Reddit and HN: it's a place that has managed to navigate its own path in the modern world, rather than just adopting the typical neoliberal homogeneity route.
I visited in 2007 and 2024 and the weird is still there, but some of the “this place is at the absolute cutting edge of cool and tech and weird” is gone. The most disappointing thing was seeing how much of the cutting edge “PC” and electronics culture was gone from Akihabara (presumably it all went to Shenzhen) and how everything sold there is just older gaming systems (did not stop us from purchasing a beautiful Nintendo Famicom.) I’m sure there are some interesting things happening that will be cool in a decade, but it’s definitely a slightly different place.
There's a meme that Japan entered the 2000s in the 80s and then just stayed there.
My first trip was in 2017, but even between then and the second trip in 2022, I could tell Akiba lost even more of its electronics culture. I was there last December and helped someone build a PC. At least for "standard" stuff you can get by, though for sourcing many things the best solution was often, somewhat sadly, Amazon JP. For things like GPUs you had to double-check you're buying new, not used, because shops will display both sometimes in the same case. All prices were somewhat more than what it'd cost to import from the US + pay taxes on that. (Except for canon camera batteries, I picked up an extra one on one of my trips and was surprised how much cheaper it was.)
For another of my own purchases, I needed to get some extra laptop RAM to finish a graphics project locally as my home machine I was remoting to was acting up. It was a struggle finding any place with them in stock at all, in or outside Akiba, and then those in sizes greater than 4 GB. And when I did, I still had to talk to someone at the counter, who pulled out a shoebox of assorted brands and sizes. Just so bizarre compared to almost every other component from HDDs to SSDs to USB sticks and more being on public walls/racks to pick over -- at worst there'd be just a rack of tags and you select the product by tag and the person at the counter will get it when you check out. Didn't have that at all for laptop RAM. I found a place at last that had a single 16 GB stick I could use, which at least helped me make progress until Amazon could get a second one to me and let me stop toeing the edge of maxing out my memory.
Strongly disagree with #2. I think every foreigner who visits the big Japanese cities gets charmed by its quirky land use and small shops, but the reality of Japan is that most things are owned by conglomerates and that depopulation means that increasingly blue collar work is being done by immigrants (sound familiar?) Japanese lifestyle resembles America from the 2000s in broad strokes. China and India still have a lot of their older culture present. Indians often dress in clothing that's recognizably non-Western in every day situations and both countries have food cultures that are pretty different from the West.
I'm not sure how Japan is not neoliberal or how this label relates to their culture. I think you are conflating neoliberalism with western pop culture more broadly?
Maybe neoliberal was a bad word choice. I basically just mean that many “modern” places in the world have the same generic look to them, whether you’re in Dubai or New York or Warsaw. Japan also has these places, but somehow they are a bit more uniquely Japanese than in most other places (for example, the phenomenon of salarymen.)
I didn't say the cities look the same, I said many modern places in them do. And yes, for example Hudson Yards looks quite similar to a typical mall in Warsaw (e.g., the main one by the train station.) There is nothing about either mall that screams "this is a unique place."
There's undoubtedly a cohort of tourists that come to Japan with the "Disneyland" mindset, and I agree that some sort of government-level change is needed to curb abuse. But I would like to believe these folks are in the minority.
I think a greater proportion of the tourist population are individuals that visit Japan and maybe haven't done enough research, or are just unaware of norms here. Not understanding where to queue, how to order, navigate public transport, what to do at a temple, onsen, etc. This group isn't the 15% of "Best in Class tourists" Craig writes about, but rather the 75% that want to be respectful and don't know any better.
Many locals/expats will see this group and look down in disdain (or lament about them in a blog post...), but why don't more people just ask if they need help? It takes little effort to point someone in the right direction, and if it helps them better understand the country it's a win-win for both tourists and residents alike.
I feel like people love to talk about how considerate Japanese culture is, but don't care to practice it themselves when given the chance.
I've been aware of Craig Mod from a distance for a while, and from what I've seen of his books and other works, he's very thoughtful and deeply sensitive to culture, but somehow it seems pretty hypocritical to write this when his most recent book is essentially a travelogue about obscure places in Japan. Of course the Tik Tok generation is not likely to be reading his books, but he is in effect adding to the load on locations which may not be ready for them.
I was in Japan in 1996 back when a Lonely Planet guidebook was the best authentic reference for western travelers. People decried guidebooks' impact then and now. It's hard to do travel ethically in places that aren't ready for it. This isn't just about Tik Tok. As individuals, we each have to consider our impact culturally, economically, and environmentally.
The solution isn't no tourism, because tourism encourages more global awareness and cross-cultural communication. It also adds to the economy. However, places that are filled with tourists and no locals aren't much fun for most people, local or tourist. It has to be a balance.
> but in my opinion, the most rewarding point of travelling is: to sit with, and spend time with The Other ...
I didn't grow up with grandparents, so I have a natural affinity for grandmas. Some of my most cherished moments have been interacting with old ladies in places like Cinque Terre, Portofino, Brussels, Tokyo, NYC etc. I like to walk around the neighborhoods, off the beaten track, and if I get a chance to interact with an old lady, even better.
my favorite food from my visit was a mochi stand in Fujisawa station. it was a station of tables and had a sign that said MOCHI all over it
i wanted to give it a review but it didnt exist on google maps and it was even in a blind spot of Google street view inside Fujisawa
been thinking for a few years how crazy it was that my favorite place on our 10 day trip was completely invisible online in 2024. havent checked back recently but now i hope its still invisible online
I loved going to Japan in 2011, when it was still mainly just weebs doing tourism and they were relatively very few and quite harmless. I would not go today, because I neither want to see nor contribute to this problem.
I'll come back when the idiots settle down. Meanwhile, my wife wants to see France and Scotland.
Overtourism is such a comical exaggeration, NYC gets twice as many international visitors annually as Tokyo, with less local population, but doesn’t feel the need to discriminate against tourists at all basically
Visiting Japan in 2025 definitely had a different vibe than my 2010s visits.
First of all, so many more foreigners, and multiple western languages overheard nearly anywhere I went.
And clearly some locals fairly annoyed by it, such that some weren't interested in engaging with a basic level Japanese speaker/listener like me.
I have basic enough speaking/reading/(and less so listening) ability to previously navigate smaller cities with little English speaking, pick a restaurant / order some food, make small talk with taxi drivers, and entertain middle aged locals who don't see a lot of westerners.
I also saw a lot more restaurants that had extremely limited set course only menus for non-japanese speakers, and no patience for someone with non-fluency to try the Japanese menu.
This trip I felt I could not get out of Tokyo fast enough. Parts of it just felt like every other tier 1 global city, and a passive aggressive unwelcomeness that wasn't to the level of Barcelona, but clearly different than 15 years ago.
I left Austin in 2020 and the social-media-powered tourism boom there from 2010 on was insane. In a decade, the entire east side of the city went from low income black and hispanic families to airbnbs and sterile cinder-block condos and bars. Downtown went from old dive bars and music venues in old brick buildings to high-price-but-not-high-quality residential high-rises and FAANG skyscrapers. South Congress went from kitschy shops and local restaurants to glass and steel instagram food factories. All the things I loved about it in the early 2000s are gone.
I feel like this one is a mixed bag. I would be very annoyed if my every day life was disrupted by tourists, especially like in the train stop example, and losing local businesses and attractions to outsiders is terrible. I don't want to minimize these issues at all, so to be clear, the rest of this post is just me wondering about the right thing to do while also still getting to visit interesting locations.
I feel like this article really lays it on thick to make tourists seem like vapid TikTokers. I think the reality is more nuanced. We can't pretend that every person in the world has the same upbringing, morals, and values. There are people in the US who park their grocery cart in the middle of the aisle, and I have had plenty of tourists from other countries who just stop as soon as they enter a room and gum up the whole business. But plenty of tourists DON'T do this, and plenty of locals ALSO DO THIS. 85% of tourists are not stopping the middle of roads for selfies constantly.
And the other parts feel like gatekeeping. Oh, you only get a few days off a year and can only afford cheap accommodations? You are contributing to the death of small business and the enshittification of our shining cities. If you can't afford to spend more time in fewer places, further off the beaten path (sometimes costing more/having fewer affordable options) then you are a bad traveler. Why do I have to visit locations I have never heard about in order to be considered good? How do I even find them if I can only be in a location for a short time?
It just feels like a lose lose situation as a traveler. I read about the Roman Empire, I've seen pictures of the Italian cathedrals, I've watched documentaries about Pompeii, and I've drank Tuscan wine, so I should... go visit some small town for 2 weeks with very little tourist presence, and no one speaks my language? I'm not allowed to enjoy the cultural monuments of these countries?
I don't understand how you can portray these small-business owners as some helpless lambs, powerless against tourists. I can think of many ways to stop tourists from patronising an establishment. But of course (that one cocktail bar owner notwithstanding), most businesses operate for profit, and lap that money up.
Really, it seems to me like this essay is more about turning up your nose that some people are not enjoying Japan the "right" way.
I'm sympathetic to most of the article but I really dislike when articles like this slip in things like "This is most readily evident in, say, the Mario Kart scourge of Tokyo".
You can just ban those karts! It's not tourists fault that you haven't.
I went to Japan in 2019, before the pandemic, the previous peak and not far off the current numbers of tourists.
Maybe I went at a quiet time, but white people were as rare as hens teeth. There are 37 million a year. Australia has 7 million and Sydney is a lot smaller than Tokyo. There's way more Japanese tourists in Japan than foreigners, every tourist trap I saw was jam packed with locals.
I think it's all just a tiny handful of small places that are tiktok famous. This is not a Japan problem, it's a problem for a single conbini near Fuji and a couple of bars.
There's also a bunch of social media outrage over a handful of rude tourists. This is not a problem with Japan, it's a made-up problem on social media.
Go to the Vatican or Bali if you want to see a tourist problem.
Show me a picture of Americans overrunning Ueno Park or Disney and I'll change my mind, but I've never seen a picture of a large number of foreign tourists in Japan, just a few tourists being annoying, with almost everyone around them being Japanese.
> Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade.
That may be true in Manhattan, but Japan has amazing, lovable chains. The fact that you are never far from a 7-Eleven, Family Mart, Coco Ichibanya, or Ichiran (and they are often open late if not 24 hours) is one of my favorite parts of Japan.
And the shopping is pretty good. A Muji flagship store just has a lot of things to buy that you aren’t going to find in a downtown Portland or Paris Muji.
This seems to be be becoming an increasing problem in many places, there are a number of protests that have popped up in Madrid, Venice, Hawaii, Mexico City, Lisbon...
I can't blame them really, I've been kind of disgusted by the behavior of tourists I've seen in some places to the point where I think I won't travel much to major cities any more. What happened to trying to blend in?
“It’s bad for my business that I now have lots of customers who aren’t my preferred race/nationality” seems a wild thing to say, because the reality is that the customers stop coming not because of “tourists”, but because they don’t like “foreigners“.
A big part of their success today is embracing globalism, beginning with the Westernization effort in the Meiji era and continuing into the present era with top Japanese firms becoming multinational, eg Nintendo/Sony of America, Toyota opening plants in the US, etc.
Communism, on the other hand, seems to have led to more isolation in the Cold War era, and is also another way to cultivate some interesting cultural identity, although not necessarily the culture you want.
Missed opportunity to talk about the locals creative responses to this.
One cafe in Tokyo is asking customers to leave negative reviews on Google and Trip Advisor to prevent over exposure (it mostly works but made me curious enough to visit).
Another specific $10 Michelin guide ramen restaurant only lets you order from a vending machine outside using a payment method you can’t access as a foreigner (one needs a physical JCB card or QUICPay - EPOS/Suica/Pasmo/Cash etc wouldn’t work).
A matcha place I like only lets you order from the real menu after you’ve unlocked enough visits from a punch card.
A resort slightly off but near the beaten path markets itself as an onsen but that’s maybe 4% of the amenities. That said, they’re serious about “no entry” if you have tattoos.
And a few more of the seedier bars just have the (time honored) “no foreigners” sign out front.
I don't know about the Ramen place (I can't believe that they wouldn't take cash?), but I agree with you that more places are doing this kind of "two markets" stuff -- it's even becoming official, in that now there's officially sanctioned "foreigner pricing" for certain temples, shrines, and parks. There's also Google Maps and Yelp vs. Japan's local version (pretty much any review on the former two are useless, and hopelessly biased by clueless tourists).
I'm of mixed minds. I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences, but those days are pretty much gone now. Foreigners are lining up for mediocre tourist traps because of something they saw on TikTok or Instagram, and there are business people who are willing to take advantage of that fact.
It's also really difficult to serve your local clientele when tourists "discover" your establishment. I have a friend with a restaurant that has become known amongst foreign tourists, and it's nearly impossible for the locals in the neighborhood to visit now. I was talking about it with him a month or so back, and while he seemed happy to have the money -- and therefore unwilling to change the situation -- he also interacted with the tourists in a completely different way. He had a back-channel reservation mechanism for locals and people he knows, but it still requires advance planning for a place that used to be a casual, walk-in experience.
> I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences
you can still have that. I'm a fulltime traveller. the key is to stay in a place longer. I usually stay in a country for at least a month. that gives you time to meet and actually get to know locals. thats how you get invited to the really cool spots and get a view the daytripppers and resort goers don't get.
> you can still have that
... if you're a full-time traveler that can afford to stay for months at a time. For the rest (the vast majority) of us, the GP comment is what we get.
Nah, you don't have to be full time. You just need to figure out what to do based on not Instagram/tiktok.
It also helps if you rent a car so you can get to places that aren't accessible to most tourists unless they put in a lot of effort
Yes, I agree that it's a better way to travel if you can do it, but most people can't [1].
That said, even for short-term tourists, Japan used to be kind of a miracle in terms of the quality and service you would get for the money. I know it sounds like hipster whining, but that time is in the past.
[1] My snobby hot-take is that if you can't travel this way you shouldn't do recreational international travel at all, unless it's to go to a luxury hotel and sit on a beach or something packaged like that. But I realize that this will not be a popular opinion.
I used to live in Japan in 1999-2001, and I was just there again for a month this summer.
Anyway, I disagree with you: Japan is still a miracle in terms of the quality and service you get for the money. I saw this many times over.
Perhaps not in Kyoto, or in the most touristed areas of Tokyo. Or in whatever random place got featured in some anime, or whatnot.
The article mentions Yamaguchi, Toyama, Morioka, etc., and I definitely agree -- there are tons of places off the tourist beaten-track, and any of them is worth a visit.
On my recent trip I was in Kobe, which unlike Yamaguchi etc. I expect the average HN reader has heard of. But even there, there was little trace of overtourism.
Alex Kerr lamented all the way back in 1993 (in his book Lost Japan) that Kyoto had essentially lost its soul. And if you go to the areas most commonly seen on Instagram and TikTok, that's probably partially true. But even in Kyoto, go off the beaten path a little, and you will find much to delight you!
> Anyway, I disagree with you: Japan is still a miracle in terms of the quality and service you get for the money. I saw this many times over.
I assume you mean "relative to other places" here, and in that sense, I agree. Japan is not yet entirely Epcot Center.
> Perhaps not in Kyoto, or in the most touristed areas of Tokyo. Or in whatever random place got featured in some anime, or whatnot.
Right, exactly. Except that I'm seeing this spread like cancer -- which it always does. Sort of like gentrification, the "authenticity seeking tourist" leaves Senso-ji a few blocks, and then before too long Kappabashi is no longer a functioning street of restaurant supply stores (instead becoming a dead zone of "japanese knife" and matcha retailers), and so on.
> But even in Kyoto, go off the beaten path a little, and you will find much to delight you
Yeah, I lived in Kyoto a decade ago, and I say that to my Japanese friends, too. The thing is, even vs. 2-3 years ago, the number of those authentic places is dramatically fewer. People have been complaining about tourism in Kyoto forever, but they're also not wrong.
So is the advice "do not visit Japan, learn about it from books and the internet"? Or just pretend it doesn't exist? Maybe do the same with all other countries?
The Japanese in turn do a lot of tourism abroad, to the point the "Japanese tourist" is as much a stereotype as the American one. Should they stay put and not leave their home towns?
It's pretty amazing that you've managed to both take the least-charitable interpretation of my comment, and apply a dated stereotype of Japanese people in one post. So:
1) There is a whole spectrum of alternatives between "do not go" and "go take selfies in the same TikTok dead zones as everyone else, while drinking overpriced matcha boba tea and eating potato spiral on a stick from a Mario kart." Perhaps do something else?
2) "Japanese tourists" haven't been going much of anywhere with the yen near all-time lows to western currencies. Setting that aside, it's been a few decades since the stereotype you're invoking was anything close to real.
But TikTok and Mario Kart tours are just one form of tourism, which you're equating to all tourism that is not living there for some months or doing volunteer work or, I quote your other comment, "going to conferences" (the hell?).
Why not visit Japan and do sightseeing? Or do you think that's automatically equivalent to Mario Kart tours?
Or like someone else argued (not you, I'm not laying this particular burden on you, just mentioning it because the sentiment is similar) "it's clear cut that it's unethical to do tourism in Barcelona". What!? Well, excuse me if I cannot live in Barcelona permanently or spend 6 months there getting to know the locals, does it mean I should just see Barcelona in the movies? Or maybe just go to Disneyland, since apparently it's all the same thing.
Re: the stereotype, it's true I don't know about Japanese tourists in the last couple of years (let's say post COVID), but if that's because of the yen blah blah then that's no defense of the stereotypical Japanese tourist -- it has nothing to do with ethics if it's just that they cannot afford it anymore. And anyway, the obnoxious Japanese tourist exist(ed) and it was common in my country, so why give them a free pass just because this article mentions the kind of tourism that bothers them?
In any case: tourism isn't necessarily evil. You can simply not be the loud careless tourist who trashes everything, is not respectful and complains about everything. A lot of us cannot spend 3 months doing volunteer work or whatever, we just want to see the world and enjoy its wonders in the 2-week or so vacation we get once a year, and planning for the whole family, not just for a single person in their 20s with no attachments and who can backpack the world for a year or whatever.
Do what Japan desperately wants people to do, and visit any of the 95% of the country that isn’t Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Fuji, or Nara.
Why do they advertise those cities then? No such thing as "Japan", there are multiple interests.
And what for those who haven't seen Tokyo, Kyoto, etc with their own eyes. Should they NOT visit then? Why not?
> Perhaps not in... whatever random place got featured in some anime, or whatnot.
When I went last year, two of the random places I went because they got featured in some anime were some of the most authentic-feeling experiences I had.
One was a small town on the east coast near a beach; a lot of it felt like a ghost town (I barely saw any locals, let alone tourists). I was able to go and respectfully visit a really nice shrine while being able to keep my distance enough that I knew I wasn't bothering anyone. I also found a cool aquarium I didn't know was there, and I'm pretty sure I was the only foreigner I saw/heard while visiting it.
The other was a less-deserted but still small area outside of a less popular city. There was an island I wanted to go onto that I couldn't, but I improvised and found a beautiful hike to a summit overlooking it instead. While I was walking up, I had at least two elderly folks say hello to me in Japanese, and a pair of young children walking with their mom say hello in English (way more unprompted interaction than I got just walking around in any of the cities, aside from employees advertising things).
So just because a place was featured in an anime doesn't mean it's necessarily a tourist trap. Just don't go in expecting the place to be entirely defined by that (and it also helps if it's been at least a few years since said anime was popular).
> But even in Kyoto, go off the beaten path a little, and you will find much to delight you!
Extremely true. I just got back from Japan and I was very pleased by how little effort it took to get off the tourist trail, even in Kyoto. Of course some popular attractions are still worth seeing and for those, visiting around opening is usually enough to avoid the worst of the crowds. (If you're flying in from the US there's a good chance jet lag has you up at 5am anyway, so this is an effective strategy even for non-morning people.)
The time of the year probably matters too. I didn't find Japan to be terribly overcrowded when I went this February. Certain areas (and the minuscule Kyoto buses) were, but that happens in every tourist location.
I also went to places like Beppu or Kagoshima where I barely saw any tourists.
Yes, Shikoku and Kyushu are both very pleasant from my experience. Shikoku felt the least visited. In Matsuyama, I saw only a handful of western tourists and even those were mostly blended families probably visiting relatives.
It was really pleasant. I keep trying to move farther off the beaten path on each trip.
In Beppu you’d mostly find Korean tourists who come by ferry, rather than the wrecking ball tokyo-osaka-kyoto tourists.
I fully agree, whirlwind "see the major tourist attractions" sort of travel where you visit someplace for a couple of days or a week is not very interesting to me.
Honestly travel in general is not very interesting to me. It's expensive, inconvenient, commoditized, cliche. But especially that sort of travel.
I can see taking a break to go somewhere warm if you live in a place with long gloomy winters. Or going somewhere to visit family, or to do something that just isn't available where you live (skiing or fishing trip or something like that). But going somewhere to just look around? Not attractive to me.
Even if you're only going somewhere for a week, you don't have to see all the major attractions. You also don't have to plan every moment and research what restaurants to visit etc.
You can set out to discover cool stuff on your own. Walk around a non-touristy neighborhood until you see a restaurant full of locals dining and eat there.
It's nice to break out of your routine and experience something new for a few days.
Just hanging out in a walkable city for a few days is nice change from driving everywhere in the suburbs. I couldn't live in a city though.
Cool! So when will most jobs give you month-long (or more) vacations so that we mortals can do "proper" tourism?
> But going somewhere to just look around? Not attractive to me
What is there in life but looking around, learning new things and experiencing new stuff?
> My snobby hot-take is that if you can't travel this way you shouldn't do recreational international travel at all
That's a bad take, because it means if you're not rich or a hippie backpacker without attachments, you cannot do international travel.
What's worse, many of these issues affect local tourism within your own country as well (ruining places for the locals, lots of tourist traps sprouting, etc).
So effectively the advice becomes "stay at home, don't vacation, or if you do vacation stay at some prepackaged place".
Which I frankly disagree with.
> So effectively the advice becomes "stay at home, don't vacation, or if you do vacation stay at some prepackaged place".
I didn't expect it to be a popular take, but I feel like the "sightseeing travel" model is varying degrees of bankrupt, and I'm not apologizing for my opinion.
Having lived in a number of tourist hotspots in my life, I've come to the conclusion that almost nothing one encounters in a tourist setting is authentic. Therefore, you're engaging in very expensive cosplay, erected entirely for your benefit, and almost always at the expense of the culture of the place you are visiting. However fun it may be for you or I, it's still just Disneyland. And while Disneyland may be of net economic benefit to the local people who live near Disneyland, let's not get hoity-toity about it and pretend that we're discovering deep truths of the universe by going to Angkor Wat and snapping a photo.
You don't have to do a "prepackaged vacation", but do something more substantial than moving around constantly and looking at stuff through a camera -- volunteer, take a course, attend a conference, teach English...whatever! Just go there for a reason other than "being a tourist".
It's not Disneyland, what's with the mania of taking everything to extremes?
> You don't have to do a "prepackaged vacation", but do something more substantial than moving around constantly and looking at stuff through a camera -- volunteer, take a course, attend a conference, teach English...whatever! Just go there for a reason other than "being a tourist".
The hell? We're discussing vacationing, not volunteer work. Teaching English? It's not my native language, why would I? I already have a job where I live, and I responsibilities here. Volunteer work? My country needs it way more than wealthy Japan, why would I go there?
What's wrong with tourism, seeing Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto? I don't get more than 2 weeks vacation where I work, I should use them to volunteer according to you?
I swear, the first world entitlement in some of these comments... like yours...
I am giving/defending my opinion, in an effort to convince. It doesn't have to be yours.
> What's wrong with tourism, seeing Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto?
I just spent several paragraphs answering that question. TL;DR: a few days/weeks of lightweight entertainment for you does real damage to the places you visit. The ethical traveler should strive for something better than photos.
> I don't get more than 2 weeks vacation where I work, I should use them to volunteer according to you?
I am saying that my opinion is that "tourism" is more-or-less ethically bankrupt. You don't have to do anything in response, and in any case, I was pretty explicit that volunteering was only one of many possible alternatives -- but you knew this, because you quoted me saying it.
It's not a high bar. Visiting friends or doing a specific activity (rock climbing! diving! fishing! sports! cooking! meditation retreat! make art! take a class! gain a skill!) would be a perfectly ethical reason to travel somewhere, in my humble opinion. Almost anything is better than piling into to the same few tourist sites and taking the same few photos that everyone else takes. And you'll have more fun, too.
> I swear, the first world entitlement in some of these comments
Having the luxury to travel is a "first-world entitlement." It isn't entitlement to say that you should strive to be more thoughtful about the costs.
> TL;DR: a few days/weeks of lightweight entertainment for you does real damage to the places you visit.
That's a bizarre take. Beyond bad, just plain weird.
> It's not a high bar. Visiting friends or doing a specific activity (rock climbing! diving! fishing! sports! cooking! meditation retreat! make art! take a class! gain a skill!) would be a perfectly ethical reason to travel somewhere, in my humble opinion
That's an extremely high bar for most of us, and that you don't see it is hilarious.
Nothing is more artificial and touristy than a "retreat" or going someplace to scuba dive, but somehow you're placing these arbitrary definitions on what is more or less ethical.
All of those "ethical" activities are extremely artificial and damaging, it's absurd thinking going abroad to do "art" or "rock climbing" is more authentic and not artificial and damaging. Unless you know someone local who can take you somewhere non commercial (which is an extremely high bar, unless you have friends all over the world) all those activities are as much Disneyland as taking photos of the Eiffel tower, I'm sorry to tell you.
Visiting friends doesn't mean you won't go sightseeing, what does one thing have to do with the other? And what if you don't have friends all over the world?
> Having the luxury to travel is a "first-world entitlement." It isn't entitlement to say that you should strive to be more thoughtful about the costs.
What you're saying amounts to gatekeeping, which is even more entitled. "If you cannot travel like the entitled few can, in the extremely narrow way I deem ethical, then don't travel at all."
Also, I don't know if you understand everything you say applies to doing tourism within your own country as well. So your advice effectively becomes "do rock climbing (and hope your children and spouse want to do that) or stay at home". Your world shrinks because you cannot do "ethical tourism" according to some absurd definition.
Yuck.
You balked at the idea of volunteerism, but then I gave you less...demanding...versions, and you criticize them as being imperfect. It's clear that I'm not going to convince you, and you keep cherry-picking the most expensive / burdensome examples I provide, so I'm done replying after this.
But since I didn't explain it explicitly, the principle is that while all travel is damaging, you can thoughtfully pick activities which:
1) Will help offset that damage (e.g. volunteering)
2) Require that you be in a place (e.g. seeing family / friends), or
3) Otherwise spread out your impact and/or engage with locals on a more authentic level -- even the horrible, very bad, "extremely artificial and damaging" yoga retreat (lol, come on) will put you in a small minority of travelers, many of whom will be locals themselves.
Despite your repeated mischaracterizations of my argument, it doesn't have to be expensive, and perfect is not the enemy of the good. It doesn't take much more than creativity and effort to do better with your travel.
That's rich. You haven't proven any of your alternatives is any better. Like, none of them. They are all as artificial as sightseeing, but if it makes you sleep better at night...
Your "yoga retreat" is the worst of the Eat Pray Love kind of tourism, I cannot believe what I'm reading. It's artificial as fuck, please don't suggest it ever again.
I also do not want to visit friends and family, that's a different activity entirely!
You mischaracterize all sightseeing tourism as "damaging" and the equivalent of TikTok and Mario Kart tours, yet complain that I am mischaracterizing you.
Wow. The sense of entitled gatekeeping I'm getting from you is off the charts.
I have to follow your very strict and arbitrary standards -- you, who by your own admission have lived in "several tourist hotspots" (making you a bigger part of the problem than me) -- because... somehow my visiting several interesting parts of the world where I know nobody is "damaging"?
Wow. That's rich.
I think you kind of missed his point. The current era of tourism does to foreign cities what gentrification did to working class neighborhoods.
At first, people want a taste of something different and authentic. But eventually the place sells out and stops being a real place and starts catering to the new entrants, pushing out the natives in the process.
Florence is a good example of this. Not long ago it was a real place where real people lived. Nowadays everyone there is a foreigner, including the workers and the people who own the businesses and Airbnbs. A tourist goes there and feels like they've gotten to know Italy, but really all they experienced was a theme park designed to take their money by catering to their expectations of what Italy is supposed to be like.
Ok, I can get that. I've been to Florence and it does feel artificial to me. And it's indeed overcrowded with peddlers selling crap. But it's not the only city in Italy, and I don't particularly like it. Italy as a whole is an amazing country and a wonderful place to do tourism and sightseeing.
What I could do without is the sanctimonious attitude of "tourism is bad unless you do it exactly like I tell you to, which also happens to be a way that 90% of the middle class that can afford traveling cannot do, but hey, I can, and I've lived near many tourist hotspots anyway [sic], so I guess it sucks to be you!".
The backpacker that can go do volunteer work or rock climbing or living among the locals for 6 months is a tiny minority of those that can travel; saying it's the only valid way of traveling abroad is gatekeeping, plain and simple.
You can be a tourist and simply not be obnoxious, but apparently that's not enough for some people.
The moralizing aspect comes in when we admit that we all made Florence (and Rome and Venice) the way they are, and that this is the inevitable end of any tourist destination.
Therefore an alternative is needed, that lets us visit a place without destroying it and stealing it from the locals. I think that's what was being proposed.
something like Banff or Leavenworth just is Disneyland.
but whats wrong with seeing different place's interpretation of disneyland? thats still fun and interesting. people do like Disneyland
You’re basically saying that only extroverts are allowed to be tourists.
Fuck that.
I think it's worse than that. I'm starting to think that there may not really be an ethical way to be a tourist in a foreign country. Especially coming from a high cost of living area to a lower one.
Just being there puts you in economic competition with the locals. You can spend more on everything than everyone else and that raises their costs too. Especially housing and food. Those fancy resorts take all the prime real estate and Airbnb means locals have to compete with the tourist rental prices.
And there is more and more people traveling all the time so some areas are just overloaded -- as in the article here.
Everyone thinks that they are being more respectful than average as a tourist, but the hard truth is that the best thing you can do for these places is to not be there at all.
I think there’s a zero sum fallacy in play here. For example you say “Those fancy resorts take all the prime real estate” but many resort towns in Mexico like Cancun were literally invented out of thin air for international tourism. The alternative reality is not “Cancun for the locals”; the alternative reality is no Cancun.
In general we have the ability to expand the amount of available housing/hotels/etc. to meet increased demand. It’s not a zero sum game.
Even sticking with Japan, Kyoto was basically saved by international tourism. An American tourist ended up ended up intervening 20 years after his visit when he saw Kyoto at the top of America's list of cities to use nuclear weapons on.
Although I don't think the commonly repeated story that Stinson visited on his honeymoon is true, he had gotten married in the previous century
This is a little bit what confuses me about these stories.
As someone who lives in NYC and works with Broadway shows we thrive on tourists. Are there locals who live in Times Square or a few blocks off? Sure, it’s not all that annoying, and most folks like me live in an area that isn’t particularly crowded with tourists, if at all.
When I read stories like this, I never quite understand if it’s worse other places than NYC. Or if I’d go there and be unphased. That it’s just people from some empty suburb where lots have a 10 acre minimum that are bothered by this and write these stories.
more details on the Honeymoon myth in this https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2023/07/24/henry-stimson-did...
Wow, this is an extremely long-winded and self-indulgent "well actually" comment. I read the whole thing hoping to find the point, but it never came.
Who cares if it was an actual honeymoon or another trip decades after he was married? He was key to sparing the city, and his personal experience with its rich history was a part of that. That's the interesting story, and nothing in this article refutes that.
Your fallacy is that you are implicitly thinking of yourself as an intrinsically evil corrupting force that should be minimized as much as possible, in fact it would be better if you didn't exist at all.
This is a very bleak misanthropic view that isn't true. It's possible to be a force for good. To form a symbiosis where each side benefits from the other. If you see a native resident, do you think he is perfectly pure, content and happy? Or does he have his troubles and issues. How can you help him? Entertain? Teach? Trade?
There are so many humans that are blithely destructive and nearly all of them believe themselves to be good, because it is human nature to have faith in your own wholesome intentions. Overtourism is one area among many where we would be better off if more people at least considered their impact.
The ones who are going to heed your advice to minimize their existence are not the ones who need to hear it, generally. That mentality just punishes thoughtful people and will not reach the vast majority of the ones you believe are a problem.
Living an examined life and choosing actions in tune with your conscience is its own reward, not self-denial.
Staying home is not the only alternative to participating in the most destructive acts of overtourism.
I understand you're not the same person as the one who started your side of this argument, but you can't just jump from "there's not really an ethical way to be a tourist in a foreign country" to "I was only talking about overtourism, stop being extreme."
If self-denial is rewarding to you, that's your business. You don't decide with vague statements what's rewarding to others.
There are so many great options for exploring the world. Even in your neighborhood all it takes is a novel perspective to discover something new, and the same is true elsewhere.
Are there no mountains to climb other than Everest? Is there no way to experience a mountain other than scaling the summit?
Why must considering how you impact your surroundings mean “self-denial”? Why can’t it mean choosing amongst abundant riches and savoring the very experience of choosing?
Can I recommend thinking about your own country and then extrapolating from there to understand how foreigners feel? For example: I'm Australian. I actively want you to come be a tourist here! What I'd like you to do, though, is not go to the exact same place as 80% of the rest of the tourist inflow goes.
You don't need to go to the Gold Coast: the entire country is surrounded by water ("girt by sea" is in our national anthem), most of it has great beaches, and you're legally allowed to be on any of those beaches up to the high water mark! The 12 Apostles are cool, sort of, but they're surrounded by beautiful coastline and rainforest filled with waterfalls which a big chunk of international tourists drive through without stopping longer than a toilet and coffee break. The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House are neat and they aren't too busy, but they're also just a bridge and a big building. Uluru is big and impressive, but it's next to the far more interesting Bungle Bungles which get a tenth of the visitors each year, and the entire centre of Australia is scattered with gorges and craters and rock formations.
Go somewhere other than the top places! The best thing you can do for the locals struggling with house prices on the Gold Coast is to save your own money, skip the queues, and go literally anywhere else along the coast in NSW or QLD. Australia has the same population density as Idaho. We can absorb an effectively unlimited number of tourists as long as they ramp up slowly and spread themselves out. It's easy to be an ethical non-disruptive tourist if you just ignore tiktok and don't treat other countries like bingo cards.
It's not quite that simple. Your tourism money is valuable. It's a huge influx of money into the local economy. They don't want it to go to zero.
It literally is quite that simple. I can tell you from experience via friends and acquaintances that tourists are crushing the locals out of Barcelona and Amsterdam. And I expect the same to be true of Warsaw or Berlin.
And its not just tourists. ASML has completely destroyed the housing market in the Brainport region. They're planning to hire 20.000 more people, but with The Netherlands currently being in one of the most severe housing crises in the world, these expats just end up pushing everyone out of the local housing market because they can overbid on houses / rental properties so much.
ASML has woken up to this and is underwriting affordable housing developments, but only at a clip of 1500 per year. So yeah, the locals are not exactly happy, even if it is good for The Netherlands and EU as a whole.
Frankly, I expect the next decade or two to be about harsh protectionism. People are really, really tired of globalisation eating the world.
Japan closed their borders to tourists during COVID. If it's as simple as you say, then they can do it again.
They won't because you couldn't get a majority of their populace to agree with you, which doesn't necessarily mean it's incorrect but does at least mean it's not simple.
Who's holding people's hands and preventing them from building new houses? It's possible Netherlands genuinely has very little land left, but the "housing crises" in most other places are completely made up. Housing is either affordable or an asset that appreciates, it can't be both.
Medieval places that have nowhere to expand to (Venice, Dubrovnik) are hit extra hard.
That said, I visited Rome 20 years ago and a year ago, and what used to be fairly live city center is now one writhing mass of bodies.
I suspect the people profiting off tourism aren't the same ones who gets squeezed out by it.
Barcelona has immigration problem, not tourists. The same with Warsaw and Berlin.
Meaning they've become gentrified by rich foreigners?
> Everyone thinks that they are being more respectful than average as a tourist, but the hard truth is that the best thing you can do for these places is to not be there at all.
I think this is definitely not true.
And I think oversaturation generally happens because most people don't think that, or think about it at all. They have a checklist of spots to hit, photos to take, things to eat, and they follow it. They'll put up with huge lines, crazy prices, etc. Overcharging isn't terrible for everyone local, of course, but the crowding certainly changes a place. Often not better for most locals.
If you're trying to be respectful I think that rules out following those huge crowds usually. Like, seeing the Mona Lisa is usually a shitty experience, but at least its in a controlled environment. Visiting a trendy vacation spot like Barcelona, on the other hand, is hitting the whole town and frankly ... maybe not that interesting or novel. There are other places out there, many not even that far away from the hotspots. Though you also need to rein in any instinct to show off any other finds or places online, let the local place you enjoyed become deluged.
How do you say it’s not true and then immediately follow by suggesting people just shouldn’t go to Barcelona?
I'm not sure what you mean?
This is what I said isn't true: "Everyone thinks that they are being more respectful than average"
I think most people don't think about being respectful much at all.
I think someone who does want to be respectful would be like "hey, locals say tourism is currently out of control in Barcelona, we'll pick somewhere else for now."
This is in the section you quoted before saying it’s not true:
> the hard truth is that the best thing you can do for these places is to not be there at all.
What a ridiculous statement... so applying for a remote job is unethical if you live in a lower cost of living area than your employer? It's only natural that people want to make money from higher cost areas and spend it elsewhere.
And this article is about Japan, a freaking island where the government has a total control over how many people are getting in...
I know what you mean but I live close to the border of another country. Can it really be unethical to stay in a hotel in a city two hours west but not two hours northeast because of a border? Maybe you're just talking about the American experience.
There are certainly places where it is clearer cut. Hawaii and Barcelona come to mind.
It's unethical to do tourism in Barcelona? What's so "clear cut"?
The locals really don't want tourists to be there.
As a blanket statement that's false. Barcelona is a very welcoming city for tourists. I don't think it's unethical to visit as long as one behaves and is not a loud obnoxious tourist.
Do these locals ever go on vacation to other parts of the planet?
> there may not really be an ethical way to be a tourist in a foreign country.
You can hire a full time tour guide using your wealth disparity. Providing a real job to someone with a real schedule and predictable income.
Ok, so there's no ethical way of doing tourism. So what's the alternative?
Stay at home? Do not take vacations? Never learn anything about the outside world that's not mediated by books or the internet?
Because I can tell you not even your own country (whatever that is) is spared from this. You cannot travel within your country without causing this, either.
I take it you have a degree from a US university
Lots of people saying this is ridiculously false, I think it's ridiculously true: Of course there are more ethical uses for your money than traveling, including thousands of legit charities you can write a check to right now. Tourism creates jobs and helps the economy? A good charity creates better jobs than hawking souvenirs and asking for tips.
People just quietly pretend this isn't the case, probably so they don't feel guilty about it. Or maybe they just never put 2 and 2 together.
In touristy places, tourism can easily be 10-20% of the GDP. That's not nothing.
> I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences
How long ago was that? It was certainly true in fairly large portions of the world, but there are plenty of places where, for as long as I can remember, you could pretty much expect to be scammed regularly. In many cases those scams would be for trivial (to visitors from wealthy countries) amounts of money, but it nonetheless often seemed like a large fraction of local economies would be driven by scamming tourists.
I think that the real recent change is that the “beaten path” of touristy areas has gotten larger.
> How long ago was that? It was certainly true in fairly large portions of the world, but there are plenty of places where, for as long as I can remember, you could pretty much expect to be scammed regularly.
To be clear: "scamming" is still thankfully uncommon in Japan. Getting ripped off in the tourist-trap way is the new development.
I don't know when it started exactly, but I lived there around a decade ago and it was rare then. The prices around tourist spots would always be elevated and world heritage sites often had a line of crappy souvenir shops, but you didn't see the same kind of fake "wagyu" and the like that you see everywhere today.
There were catch bars in the 90s, and Roppongi has been full of assholes as long as I can remember (anyone remember Tokyo Gas Panic?). I have not been to Japan for more than ten years so I do not know how bad it is, but my point is that even in the good old days you could get ripped off as a gullible foreigner (usually by other foreigners).
Yes, agreed. I’m not talking about places like Roppongi or the sketchier parts of Shinjuku and Shibuya, Dotonbori, Umeda, etc., which have always been red light districts.
I’m talking about a more pedestrian type of ripoff, which is simply to overcharge and underdeliver - think of $40 for tough meat, labeled “Kobe beef”, and you’ll get the idea. It’s always been around, but far more prevalent now.
In Japan? A few years ago the experience was completely different.
Not Japan. Plenty of other countries, though.
It can be pretty shocking seeing all the shell games immediately underneath the Eiffel tower, to your point.
Post Olympics, the Eiffel Tower is now surrounded by a tall fence and requires passing through airport style security to get in. Bit of a hassle, but no shell games in sight.
> it still requires advance planning for a place that used to be a casual, walk-in experience
So, much like every restaurant that becomes popular, anywhere in the world?
> So, much like every restaurant that becomes popular, anywhere in the world?
No, but thanks for the spot-on imitation of an entitled foreign visitor. The insinuation that somehow it's the local people's fault that they don't want their quaint neighborhood restaurants to become McDonald's is indeed part of the problem.
Many restaurants in Japan (my friend's included) are quite obviously one-man, standing-room only operations. They weren't designed or intended to accommodate big groups of people, pulling huge rolling suitcases, ordering off menu, getting offended when the proprietor doesn't offer vegan/gluten free/snowflake options, and tons of other nonsense that goes along with serving tourist hordes.
I realize that you can't un-make the baby, and that Japan's government asked for this, but a lot of locals are still upset about this kind of stuff and I have empathy. Tourism inevitably turns anything authentic into a high-volume, Epcot-center version of itself. That might be fine if you're visiting, but it sucks if you live there.
> No, but thanks for the spot-on imitation of an entitled foreign visitor. The insinuation that somehow it's the local people's fault that they don't want their quaint neighborhood restaurants to become McDonald's is indeed part of the problem.
This seems a little unfair. I think the parent was talking more about restaurants in big cities.
In Tokyo, lines down the block are extremely common, and the lines are primarily Japanese people, not foreigners. Maybe there are Japanese tourists visiting Tokyo, maybe they are Tokyo locals. But it happens with or without foreign tourism.
GGP is responding to my own anecdote, about my own friend who runs a small neighborhood restaurant that is now overrun with tourists.
I don't think I misinterpreted the response.
So you disagree that popular restaurants have long lines regardless of foreign tourists?
Japan is a big place. You can find anything.
Indeed, I’ve seen a lot of “visit Japan” ads lately.
But the thing I worry about, having never been there, is that I might get some good recommendations for out-of-the-way spots where there would be few if any other tourists, and take the time to go find them, only to be denied entry because I’m a foreigner.
I got the two fingers making an x sign a handful when I was in Japan. It’s really not a big deal and it never felt malicious. You just move on, though it does kind of suck when you’re hungry!
Nah, that’s just discrimination. It’s bad when anyone does it
This is discrimination of the worst kind: Against me.
It shouldn't be taken personally. It just means that they don't speak English, don't have an English menu, and are not staffed enough to be able to devote the time for understanding you.
Indeed. And it's not always final... I've not had it ever happen to me at a place that serves food, but I also generally only hear about it happening at bars/night clubs and I don't drink so never had a reason to visit one. I suspect a lot might change their stance if you just say you speak Japanese... it's not like you need to know a lot for basic food ordering anyway. The closest related experience I did have was one time I was with a friend taking him to an outdoor idol concert, a guy saw us coming and came up trying to shoo us back / something about no entry, but I just told him in Japanese that I have a ticket and the QR code was already ready to go on my phone. Immediately it's "right this way".
I also remain convinced most of the anti-foreigner tourism sentiment is anti-Chinese tourism sentiment. For westerners who can behave, it's still a great place to visit. (Though skipping Kyoto wouldn't be a bad idea.)
When I, personally, am discriminated against, don’t be surprised if I take it personally.
I have Google Lens and Translate. Lack of an English menu is a very small problem these days.
> But the thing I worry about, having never been there, is that I might get some good recommendations for out-of-the-way spots where there would be few if any other tourists, and take the time to go find them, only to be denied entry because I’m a foreigner.
Yep, that's the part I hate, too. The locals put up completely understandable roadblocks to preserve their own culture, but those roadblocks end up making the whole situation hostile and unpleasant for anyone who is not known to the locals.
Since you've never been, let me just say this: most tourists are utterly clueless, so just not being clueless goes far. Blend in, imitate the locals' behaviors, try to speak the language, eat what you're given, etc., and you'll be fine. For now, at least, relatively few places ban foreigners outright.
Telling someone “just speak Japanese and blend in!” is sort of an absurd suggestion. That is impossible if you’re not East Asian and even if you are, it would take years of study.
I didn't say "speak Japanese" (I said try to use the language, which is just table stakes for visiting a country), and it should go without saying that you cannot change your race.
You can still blend in far more than most tourists do by a) watching the people around you, and b) being a little bit self-conscious.
It's absolutely astounding how much tourists stand out in Japan (or Paris, or London, or New York...), and it's mostly about their behavior and clothing. Ten minutes of internet research and a little bit of introspection would go a long way to solving both problems.
Then you don't go "off the beaten path" and instead stick to the tourist friendly places.
Demanding the locals to accommodate your lazyness is basically shouting "I'm entitled".
Being East Asian doesn't make you blend in (visually). Japanese people look different to Korean and Chinese people.
The three are a Venn diagram with much more overlap than any of the three officially pretend. A Japanese friend of mine passes for a (Chinese) local across China and SE Asia.
Clothing and makeup is a better giveaway than facial features or skin tone, but even that is becoming harder with K-pop creating a pan-Asian style to aspire to.
I wonder what the end state is here. Will there be a backlash (or more of a backlash, as there's a bit of one already) against the Japanese government's policy? Something worse?
> I'm of mixed minds. I really miss the days when it was possible to be welcomed pretty much anywhere as a foreigner and have almost universal expectations of high quality, scam-free experiences, but those days are pretty much gone now.
I don't think they're gone though? I just got back from a trip to Japan and I was very pleased to find these experiences were still the norm outside the most heavily touristed areas. Even in big cities. Have been to Colombia twice in the past two years and it was the same way.
It is almost a paradox or something; what makes a lot of places is the local clientele (or the long term visitors). Plus, the tourists won’t support the business during the off season (although I’m not sure if Japan really has an off season).
Is there any place you can go to avoid Scam culture? Anywhere at all? It seems pervasive.
I would like to think there is somewhere in the United States, maybe in the Midwest, or West Virginia, there has to be someplace where there are decent hard-working Americans, who are not trying to scam each other.
>maybe in the Midwest, or West Virginia
My family is from the "decent hard-working" part of mid-America and I am the only one without a felony so whenever one of my relatives dies, I get their guns. It used to be the crime of choice was check fraud but now it's simple burglary and drugs.
I as a non-gang, non-dealing, tall middle aged white dude am safer in Baltimore than I am at the local gas station full of tweakers in "real" America.
West Virginia has the highest, by a lot, percentage of people on social security disability because their state doesn't have good welfare benefits. All of the decent folk figured out how to scam the government out of disability payments by lying about back and stomach pain.
In Wyoming County West Virginia >33% of all adults aged 18-64 are on disability. These aren't broken down coal miners they are normal, healthy, unemployed people.
My county? 6%.
The only parts of America where people aren't trying to scam each other are uninhabited.
If you go as a tourist to a place in the US that doesn’t get a lot of tourists, like a small Midwest city, people will happily give you recommendations of things to see and do. The same if you go in a neighborhood bar or coffee shop in a big city neighborhood that’s not overtouristed.
Nobody will try to charge you the tourist rate because there isn’t one. There may be scammers and shady merchants operating in town but you will not be their primary target.
Those places are all over the US but just not very interesting. Ft. Davis (or maybe Alpine) Texas is what you're describing but no one really goes there because it's just a small town with people working and living their lives as best they can. There's nothing to attract any outside attention really. I only know that area because of my wife introducing me to Marfa TX which does a little bit of tourism because of the Judd foundation.
I fell in love with that part of Texas and the people. My wife and I were married in Marathon which is in a ~75 mile radius of the towns i listed above
i'd generally expect that if they're an american and theyre talking to you, there's likely a scam.
if you arent somewhere to mutually enjoy something, they're there to sell something
West Virginia is a deeply red state; I don't think you want to go there to avoid scams. It's pervasive in the US because the political leadership is all now scam culture, all the time. Trump is, at core, a corrupt, subliterate, small-time real estate huckster. Everybody he's surrounded himself with is either an insincere grifter or severely mentally ill. And they're running the federal government and the red states, and trying to destroy the state governments of the blue ones.
Just because Trump can be inserted into almost any conversation doesn't mean Trump should be inserted into almost any conversation.
Some of the restaurants have ticket vending machines outside the shop. This avoids the need for a cashier inside the restaurant. It also mostly avoids the process of staff taking your order. Purchase your meal ticket from machine outside, hand ticket to cook as you enter, and take your seat.
Most of the ticket vending machines do take cash, but if they wanted to eliminate tourists then that would be an easy change to make.
On my last trip to Tokyo, I went to one of the Ramen restaurants that had a vending machine to order food. The machine, unfortunately, did not give us any change. I felt bad trying to explain to one of the employees because we both couldn't really understand each other. He eventually understood and gave us the exact change we did expect. After that experience, I wouldn't blame them for wanting to make the change and limiting tourists.
Sure, of course. I've just never seen one that didn't take cash or credit card.
> There's also Google Maps and Yelp vs. Japan's local version (pretty much any review on the former two are useless, and hopelessly biased by clueless tourists).
I do not understand why one would even look at tourist reviews for "authentic Japanese jalapeños" or whatever on Gmaps. But people do so what do I know.
Interestingly, Apple Maps is integrated with Tabelog. So using Apple Maps to search for restaurants in Japan can be an effective strategy.
I’ve found many times that Apple Maps simply couldn’t find the restaurant though, as if it didn’t exist.
I remember when Four Barrel Coffee had blown up in SF. I lived in the neighborhood, and learned, there was just an entrance in the ally behind the building for locals. No sign, just a way to skip the line.
I have no idea if it’s still there, but I thought it was a super clever way of doing things.
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> I can't believe that they wouldn't take cash?
What's so hard to believe about that? Lots of places in the Netherlands don't accept cash (probably out of convenience).
If you know anything about Japan it's very strange that a place wouldn't take cash. Post-covid (and a lot of that thanks to Olympics preparations) a lot of places in Tokyo have advanced to taking things other than cash.
You're not going far enough: before Covid, finding a place (excluding conbini) that took a credit card was rare. Credit cards are common now, like you say, but nearly any business will still accept cash.
I think I've encountered at most 1-2 restaurants in Japan that don't take cash, and none that don't at least accept credit cards.
Yes as recently as 2010s Japanese travel as a westerner was mildly stressful managing your cash balance.
Taxis, conbinis and restaurants all wanted cash.
Lots of ATMs (majority even) don't take western ATM cards, so you need to look out for JP/7-11/Citi? ones.
Delicate balance of keeping enough yen so you don't run out / have to go out of your way ATM hunting but also not head home with $100s in yen you don't need.
> That said, they’re serious about “no entry” if you have tattoos.
This is not uncommon in Japan, in general. Usually it's more of an anti-Yakuza/riffraff regulation than an anti-foreigner one. It just so happens to kill two birds with one stone, in some cases.
Indeed, but in my experience many of these places have an unspoken sub-rule that the tattoo rule is not enforced for foreigners.
Replace foreigners with "white" and you're more or less spot on.
I know far too many non-Japanese-asian people who get held to the standards applied to Japanese people - not even over tattoos, but things like language, cultural understandings, etc. The aspect of this with white people is where the infamous "gaijin smash" came from.
Maybe they view them more like a different species then - as if being strict towards them would be like demanding a buffalo be potty-trained?
We were told by our onsen host that as long as we made a genuine attempt at covering our tattoos, the onsen didn't mind (given that we were obviously foreigners). Making an attempt at covering was still required (and we used high end stage makeup that was waterproof).
Otherwise, I think skin-coloured patches for this purpose are available here and there.
Seems like if you smile and act friendly and dumb and American you get a lot of slack along with the Japanese shopkeeper version of an eye roll and a headpat.
This rule applies to most confucian/communal East Asian societies with individuals from the West. People aren't idiots, they realize cultures differ, so they're willing to give some slack; especially, with a culture they're somewhat familiar with through media (the US, for instance).
With Japan and Korea (especially the latter) towards Americans, there's also a soft-unspoken rule (that sort of goes both ways) due to the relationship those countries have fostered towards each other. A Brit/German/Italian/etc who spends more than a short visit in Korea/speaks Korean will probably start being taken to the side for flouting cultural norms like age-deference, polite speech, etc to be informed of their cultural mores (usually phrased with an indication that they also come from a structured society, they should understand that this is the way it is); while this will rarely happen to the same group of Americans. In some cases it's the "dumb/naive American" effect, but it also has to do with the larger relationship between the two countries.
I struggle to believe this. How can the average Korean tell the difference between a white American and a white Brit?
If you’re integrating/being an “expat” in a society, you’re going to develop familiarity. The “average” Korean won’t know anything about you and continue to just treat you like a tourist (unless you speak fluent Korean), but your social and professional circle won’t. You can’t go very far into relationships in a foreign country without people knowing your background.
Less importantly but somewhat obvious: many Koreans are fairly competent in English and familiar with common American accents. They’ll know pretty quickly if you aren’t speaking with one.
language/accent obviously, dress, manners and also English people in particular look distinct physically given that most white Americans are more likely to have Northwestern European ancestry. The stereotypical "American white guy" would have an easier time on Swedish or German TV than joining the cast of Peaky Blinders
Isn't this like saying it's impossible to see the difference between a Korean person or a Japanese person speaking English? It should be fairly obvious from the accent alone.
minus the talking, theres internet tests you can take and theyre pretty difficult
This is a part of the issue, knowing the rules but nonetheless not following them. And then — culturally unaware — thinking it's ok because nobody says anything.
I mean "don't have a tattoo" isn't really a rule you can follow based on a sign very easily.
But somehow you can follow rules with signs like "women(men) only". I bet it's easier to follow no tattoo rule.
I mean you can't quickly remove a tattoo or change your gender based on a sign.
You can still get a private onsen room.
> And a few more of the seedier bars just have a “no foreigners” sign out front.
Those have existed long before tourism to Japan became common. Those signs were there when the vast majority of foreigners in Japan were English teachers and soldiers. Many tabehodai (all-you-can-eat) and most nomihodai (all-you-can-drink) places had them.
> nomihodai
I think this is for economic/profit reasons.
I am not a strong drinker at all but I can drink 4-5 [X] sour but my Japanese friends were already well intoxicated with 1 or 2 beers...
At 100kg, I never noticed that I ate more than my 65kg friends, but it still made me feel questionable at a tabehodai.
Then your friends are quite weak, because I know plenty of Japanese people who drink like sponges... my GF among them, she is your average short Japanese lady and yet she can drink twice as much a me o_O
I think you got it the other way; your girlfriend is quite a strong drinker.
Every Asian I've met gets a red face from their first glass of wine. Of course I'm not saying that every Asian must be like that. However it's well known that they're not heavy drinkers (compared to, let's say, an average English, Nordic or Russian drinker).
I think more for liability reasons.
If you tell a male [insert western country] university student on holiday that it's "all you can drink for $20" there's going to be bodies.
> no foreigners
It's such a contrast to USA, where I doubt that such a thing would even be legal. And also the bit about no tattoos. That's lawsuit city.
Indeed, and as I frequently say.. those who thinks US is the most racist country in the world should visit 5-10 other countries and report back.
The US is building modern day concentration camps for immigrants. Maybe the country isnt actively killing the out groups right now like a handful of other countries but I'd say the racism is extreme and up there.
But the immigrants aren't racial or ethnic outgroups per se. Many are incidentally Latino, yes, but so is the current Secretary of State.
And yet the 'White House border czar', Tom Homan, was on Fox News earlier today saying that physical appearance is sufficient grounds for detention, and that probable cause is not required. https://x.com/atrupar/status/1943671875961287024
They certainly use language suggesting that all Latinos are illegal: https://medium.com/the-antagonist-magazine/debunking-the-65-...
Rubio has taken "close the door behind me" and dialed it up to 11
It isn't incidental. Trump's entire political legacy has been marked by his bigotry against people from, as he called them, "shithole countries," and remember how badly wanted to wall off Mexico, but not Canada. I believe this is explicitly an attempt to purge the US of its nonwhite immigrant population, possibly out of fear of "white replacement" (which Trump has alluded to believing more than once.)
Not to Godwin (but kind of to Godwin,) the Nazis put plenty of non-Jews into camps, and some Jews even collaborated with Nazi Germany. That doesn't mean the number of Jews persecuted by the Nazis was incidental.
My point is that if a bunch of Latino Americans wanted to wall off Mexico, that would be many things, but it would not be racism against a racial outgroup. According to The Hill, 43% of Central Americans support the border wall. Not a majority, but far too statistically significant to describe as racism against an outgroup.
Not trying to get into US politics on HN, but I think my point is clear when it comes to comparing this American situation to the views of non-ethnics in foreign cultures, which was the original OPs argument.
Among Japanese, tattoos are almost exclusively worn by yakuza members. The shop owners don't want any trouble or criminal activity on their premises.
"Has tattoos" is not a protected class. You're free to ban tattooed people from your place of business if you like.
has tattoos should be a protected class though. same with political affiliation
Denying to an individual for any reason is ok but excluding entire groups is generally frowned upon or straight up illegal.
> That's lawsuit city
Aren't private businesses in the US allowed to deny access to their premises for any reasons? Seems like a weird thing to get sued over, I think in most places if you own the local, you get to decide who goes there, unless it's a place for government or similar.
You may deny entry based on your own criteria provided you are not discriminating on race, color, religion, national origin, disability status, veteran status, age (more wiggle room here) or other state-specific traits (sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, etc.).
I don't think there's any place in America that would be illegal to bar entry based on the presence of tattoos.
But no shoes, no shirt, no service is quite common.
Sure, but you can instantly go put on some shoes and a shirt if necessary.
So it would be legal to bar non-US residents then? "Residency" seems different from all the criteria's you listed.
Residency inherently includes national origin, since if your national origin is the US you're automatically a resident.
Yeah, but the opposite isn't true, my national origin can be Swedish but I can reside in Spain, so banning by residency isn't banning by national origin, seems like a way to ban foreigners (non-residents).
Edit: Actually wait
> since if your national origin is the US you're automatically a resident
This isn't true is it? If you're born in the US but you live (100% of the time) elsewhere, you're no longer a resident, are you?
Ok, but you're a citizen, which is a higher status than a "permanent resident."
Actually, you fully can discriminate for or against local or state residency. I think national residence would be harder, though to be fair you're absolutely able to not hire non-residents.
Frankly the biggest barrier might be that as actual residents would get mad if you asked for proof, and if you didn't test everyone it would likely be an open-and-shut racial (or maybe national origin if you tested on the basis of accent) case.
> Ok, but you're a citizen, which is a higher status than a "permanent resident."
That sounds like a immigration/social hierarchy/importance rather than something that matters in discrimination contexts, what exactly you mean with "higher status"?
If a bar bans non-US residents, if a US-citizen+Spanish-residency tries to enter, then it shouldn't matter if they're US citizens or not, because the criteria is residency, not citizenship. Or is there like a priority/order for OK/not OK discrimination criteria?
Now that I think about it a better quibble is that you probably can't get around anti-discrimination laws by posting a sign that says "No Canadians or Americans that have spent too long in Canada."
As I understand it, it'd be illegal even with just "No Canadians" because that's a "national origin" right? Instead you'd post "No Canadian Residents" and you'd be in the clear :)
But no Canadian residents is equivalent to what I put above, and the actual impact of the discrimination is the problem, not the wording.
> But no Canadian residents is equivalent to what I put above
No? "No Canadians" is ambiguous enough that it could mean citizenship, residency, country you were born in, country you identify most with and so on.
"Canadian Residents" isn't ambiguous (you either have residency or not), and also doesn't seem to be protected at all, only national origin is.
Sometimes I believe one can also face legal trouble for unreasonably banning things strongly correlated with a protected characteristic.
I can’t sidestep gender discrimination law by refusing to hire people with long hair, unless the job is something like “wig model” or “Jeff bezos impersonator” where being bald is a bona fide occupational qualification.
> deny access to their premises for any reasons
Definitely not. This kind of discrimination is explicitly prohibited by federal civil rights law (Civil Rights Act 1964). It protects people regardless of their national origin (in addition to their skin color).
"National origin" is what country you are born in right? So banning non-US residents would be OK it seems?
You can deny entry on a non-discriminatory basis. E.g., a bar can kick out an individual Black American for being a nuisance or otherwise troublesome, they can't kick out a black guy for wearing blue (unless it's a blanket ban and reasonable, such as it being a theme bar) or being black.
This is why the signs are always phrased as "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone/any person".
As with most things though, this is just the minimum federal regulation and states will handle how far they take it differently. There are jurisdictions that wouldn't touch a "no tattoos" policy with a ten-foot pole at the risk of a lawsuit. While there are others that are more lax.
Yes! I was a bouncer for a while here in Philadelphia, and our bar/dancefloor had a rule on St. Patricks day: If you're wearing any green, you can't come in.
Worked great, never had any problems on St. Patricks day.
"You can go to any other bar in the city, just not this one."
You could totally bar people with tattoos from your business in teh USA. You'd be unpopular given their prevalence, but you would be on oslid legal ground.
> lawsuit city.
A.k.a. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Miami ... take your pick.
Litigation, the great all-American pastime.
More like lawsuit country - whole legal system is designed to allow lawyers to take everyone to the cleaners with impunity.
You have to protect your culture. USA has a 250 year history while Japan has 10x of that.
Those signs have nothing to do with protecting culture. Most of the time, they are simply a naive defense against dealing with a population often doesn't speak Japanese very well.
There's no prohibition against requiring customers to be able to speak Japanese, and this works very well as a tourist filter.
The signs say No Foreigners not No non Japanese speakers . A subtle but important difference.
Every time I've come across one of these signs and wanted to patronize the establishment, a friendly chat with the manager in Japanese was always enough to get them to let me in.
YMMV.
the US has that much history too, it just chooses to ignore it
Japan also closed itself to the world for 250 years, and it looks like some people haven't still gotten the memo that the Edo era is long gone.
>USA has a 250 year history while Japan has 10x of that.
Is that supposed to imply that Japan has more culture, or that it needs more protection because it's 10x longer? Even if Japanese culture is 10x longer than American culture, it doesn't necessarily follow that there's less of it. Pop music and hollywood music might not be considered "culture" by snobs, but they're still culture, and arguably more plentiful and pervasive than Japanese culture.
If you are an outsider, you should adhere to that country's rules. Why are you going to a foreign country? Are you an invasive species or an inquisitive bumblebee?
> It's such a contrast to USA, where I doubt that such a thing would even be legal.
The sign itself is probably protected speech.
As for the policy, it is probably also legal here. Private businesses have broad rights to refuse individual customers without stating a reason.
Fabricating a legitimate business reason to deny service to a particular group of customers is usually trivial, as well. Proving it was fabricated for discriminatory reasons can be difficult.
No. It is most definitely illegal here. It would violate Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 42 U.S. Code § 2000a:
>(a) All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.
Restaurants are considered public accommodation under 42 U.S. Code § 2000a (b)(2).
Could a business lie about why they're discriminating? Yes, but that wouldn't be possible with a sign saying "No foreigners" and eventually, someone will file a title II complaint.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000a
> Private businesses have broad rights to refuse individual customers without stating a reason.
They don't have to state a reason. The entire foundation of the common law system is to have a court decide intent; not be technically bound by your words.
It would only take showing a continued behavior of denying people in a discriminatory manner (e.g. 10% of your visitors are foreigners, but 95% of the people barred entry are in that group) to fine/sanction/shut down the business.
> They don't have to state a reason. The entire foundation of the common law system is to have a court decide intent; not be technically bound by your words.
Yes, I agree. It becomes more difficult to infer intent without a stated reason.
Practically speaking, I think most civil rights lawsuits that are decided in the plaintiff’s favor are very, very explicit cases of discrimination. Someone was called a slur, someone was refused service violently, someone had racist iconography scrawled on their property. Yes, fines and sanctions then. Well, sometimes.
The ones who are clever about it never get to that stage. They don’t put up a sign saying “no foreigners,” they put up a sign saying “we speak english here,” “proud to be an american,” and etc. Confederate flags, military paraphernalia, the usual soft threats against the other.
Foreigners in particular are going to find it very difficult to interact with our justice system. A civil rights case that goes to trial is going to take much longer than the typical tourist visa allows. It’s going to be prohibitively expensive for the typical tourist to procure the services of a skilled lawyer.
Individuals don't have to file a lawsuit for discrimination by public accommodations nor do they need to stick around for a trial.
All one does is file a complaint with the Justice department (or a local states'). The Justice department is who investigates and sues.
> The ones who are clever about it never get to that stage. They don’t put up a sign saying “no foreigners,” they put up a sign saying “we speak english here,” “proud to be an american,” and etc. Confederate flags, military paraphernalia, the usual soft threats against the other.
These are going to be in places that are not heavily touristed even by other Americans. You're talking about places in the deep south; or in some survivalist community in Wyoming/Montana/etc. Not in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.
So there's no one to complain. If someone did, they would most certainly face some legislative action.
> Foreigners in particular are going to find it very difficult to interact with our justice system. A civil rights case that goes to trial is going to take much longer than the typical tourist visa allows. It’s going to be prohibitively expensive for the typical tourist to procure the services of a skilled lawyer.
There's two cases where foreigners would complain:
A) they are on a visa, in which case they have the capability and are available to do so (and tend to be a pretty outspoken group considering the trouble they went through to get the visa in the first place).
B) they are visiting friends/family, in which case the friends/family will complain due to discrimination their loved ones faced.
You're using extreme examples to prove it could happen, because you're being disingenuous (imo). No one is doubting it could happen, racist/exclusionist stuff happens all the time. The people in this thread are saying it's not a norm, and (more importantly) that it's not legal. It's quite easy to prove a trend of discrimination, especially if your bar is clad in known racist/nationalist-adjacent paraphernalia.
Or, in other words, just ask yourself this: there are racists and nationalists in LA, SF, Denver, NY, Miami, Seattle, Dallas, etc....so, if it's so easy to skirt the legislation, why do we not find these sorts of bars in places that people actually go to versus insular communities where people are unlikely to raise a fuss?
> These are going to be in places that are not heavily touristed even by other Americans. You're talking about places in the deep south; or in some survivalist community in Wyoming/Montana/etc. Not in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.
It is really hard to dispute the myth that “America” only consists of a few large cities, à la Death Stranding. Unfortunately, the whole country is not as enlightened as LA, SF, and NYC.
International tourism is also not limited to these cities. NPS alone attracts millions each year. Although, I understand the fees for foreign visitors is increasing soon.
>without stating a reason
That part is key. If they do state a reason, it could become a civil rights issue. The sign alone might not be enough to make a case, but it's a very good start.
"they’re serious about “no entry” if you have tattoos"
That's nothing unusual in Japan, even Japanese people in Japan can't join a gym or get car insurance if they've got tattoos. They're serious about that stuff for a reason.
It's fairly unusual to strictly enforce it on foreigners. Every place I've been with a no tattoos policy generally overlook tourists with smaller unassuming tattoos.
I went to Japan for about a month as someone with tattoos. I didn't have many issues out and about but I was told in the gym and I could not have them showing.
I just wore sleeves over them and although less comfortable than my normal gym attire it was fine.
I was denied access to an Onsen because I honestly forgot about the tattoo thing for a while but was able to find one that was tattoo friendly. They were not mean or anything they just informed me it was policy. Completely understandable given the history.
My tattoos are very noticeable though. Like you would never miss large forearm tattoos, so it's probably hard for them to overlook for them and let it slide even for a foreigner
I was in a Shikoku hotel's public bath a couple month ago, and a guy with full on Yakuza back (and arms) tattoo came in to shower. No one batted an eye. Granted no staff was present, so no one enforced the rule. I also did not try to get a glimpse of his pinkies.
I suspect a blind eye would be turned if it’s pretty obviously not a yakuza tattoo right?
I wouldn't think so. It seemed to me that most places were quite strict about it.
I think it’s very taboo regardless of the tattoo design. That said, there are also tattoo-friendly places, and ones where you can just put a bandaid over.
>or get car insurance
eh? there's a stripping-down room in insurance offices?
do you have to submit nudes if you're buying insurance online?
https://www.reddit.com/r/funnysigns/comments/1getgra/a_resta...
Edit: The red text at the bottom says: この日本語が読める方は、 ご入店くださいませ = "if you can read this Japanese text, please come in"
Edit 2: just the original reddit post link then
To be fair, that's not a very difficult sentence to read for someone who has studied a moderate amount of Japanese. Doesn't mean you could actually order food.
The link is dead
It's not.
However this is easily "beaten" by using circle to search -> translate on your smart phone.
After "beating" it with a translator, take a hint and don't enter still.
Xenophobia: :(
Xenophobia, Japan: :)
I guess the trick will be less effective to the extent to which people try to work around it. But,
1) most people wouldn’t bother to translate something with a fake translation right above it
2) why do people want to go places they aren’t welcome? It is good to let the locals have some things…
But if you can't read Japanese, you would enter because you don't understand the sign in the first place...
You obviously didn't click through to look at the sign, which says in both Japanese and English 'No vacancy', with the language endorsement in smaller text at the bottom.
Indeed I didn't. Reddit is blocked on my network.
> “no foreigners” sign out front
It's funny how everybody seems totally cool with this in Japan (or other Asian countries) but all hell breaks lose if somebody pulls that off in Europe. Actually this is just the news currently as a public swimming facility in Switzerland recently banned foreigners due to problems with visitors from France. The guests now seem super happy but it has been in he news already for a few days. In Germany you can even sue in such a case as we have anti-discrimination laws.
Vending machines outside is pretty much the standard for ramen restaurants. Most of them will take passmo/suica, which most foreigners are also likely to have since it is also used for all public transport.
I’ve been to this restaurant. They take cash as payment so I don’t think they are trying to dissuade tourists. Also, just a short few years ago I would say less than 10% of restaurants took any form of electronic payment.
This is also tied to labor availability. A vending machine interface is expensive to set up, but less than the cost of a full time cashier.
I've been 10 years on-and-off, and 10% sound way too low _if we include_ Suica/Pasmo. Credit card is another story and I'd agree.
Even as a foreigner who speaks Japanese, I frequently got the "we're closed" and crossing the hands in an X response while locals continued eating. Sometime they'd laugh and I'd hear "gaijin" (rude slang for foreigner) as I walked out.
But plenty of places were super warm and friendly after the initial apprehension if you speak Japanese and read some kanji. Worth the effort!
"gaijin" (rude slang for foreigner)
I think this is a misconception spread by people who get mad about being laughed at by locals, including kids, and have insisted on being called gaikukojin (foreign-country person) instead over the last 20-30 years.
The reason I say so is that Japanese is full of abbreviated words like this; gaijins literal meaning is 'outside person' and the koku part is redundant. You see such abbreviations in the written language too. For example 友人 (yuujin) and 友達 (tomodachi) both mean 'friend' but as you can see the latter kanji is a lot more work to write as well to say.
The real reason (in my view) is that this word 外人 has the same pronunciation as 害人 and the same slang meaning, but 害 carries an implication of harm or injury. Japanese has a small number of sounds compared to other languages so homophony abounds and double meanings like this are very common, both for humorous effect or for making veiled negative comments.
Switching a character around is a normal Japanese way of dealing with meaning clashes. For example 和 (wa) means harmony, but also refers to Japan: 和食 (washoku) is Japanese food, 和服 (wafuku) is Japanese clothing etc. etc.. This word is ancient, going back ~1800 years to when Chinese & Korean explorers first had contact with Japan and called it the 'Kingdom of Wa'. However the Chinese used the character 倭 (also wa) which means distant, but can also mean dwarf (as in stature) or submissive. The Japanese used the same character for about 500 years but eventually decided they found the double meaning offensive and switched to 和. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(name_of_Japan) is a great deep dive into this if you're interested in etymology.
I get why some people take umbrage at the use of words like gaijin, but to my mind if you don't like such things you don't really like the language, and if you make an issue out of it people will just find more subtle ways to express their negative (and possibly escalated) sentiments and might start to view you as 害虫.
If I remember correctly, gaijin is just how you say 'foreigner' in standard Japanese. The rude slang is jingai.
And I also have the experience of people really appreciating it if you actually speak and read Japanese. Which makes sense, I can easily imagine it being a relief to find that you can just speak with someone normally instead of having to struggle with this absolutely bonkers weird language that one may be only vaguely familiar with.
I can imagine that people in, say, the United States wouldn't be very happy if I went around and only spoke Dutch.
> And I also have the experience of people really appreciating it if you actually speak and read Japanese.
100%. You don't even need to know that much. Even if you have to switch to English, showing respect by demonstrating some effort to learn the local language and culture goes a long way.
> If I remember correctly, gaijin is just how you say 'foreigner' in standard Japanese.
I think this depends on tone. It is a literal translation, but I don't think you have to call someone non-human for it to be rude.
> I can imagine that people in, say, the United States wouldn't be very happy if I went around and only spoke Dutch.
We do have a large amount of people (and an increasing number of businesses) who think it's fine to only speak Spanish.
Gaikokujin is the correct way to say it. Gaijin is slang but I'm not sure how rude it would be considered.
I never got this, but at busy times it was not uncommon to get a super apologetic "we're full" when there were clearly a few seats available. Honestly I get it, foreigners are higher effort to deal with and if you're already busy you might not want to deal with that. Or they could be holding seats for regulars, etc.
> A matcha place I like only lets you order from the real menu after you’ve unlocked enough visits from a punch card.
What's the "fake menu" you have to order from before you unlock the real one? Or do you just have to swing by but aren't allowed to order anything? Compared to the others, it's hard to think of how this would necessarily help the business, aside from possibly disincentivizing people who are uncaring enough that their traffic would be bad but still care enough that they won't go there if they can't order something specific.
Snack bars (the seedier bars you talk about) have always had a policy of no foreigners. In fact, I think it’s just in the standard snacks bar sign template.
Many places also (used to) have sign saying 一見さんおことわり which roughly translate to "first time visitor not allowed". A little bit up to interpretation but usually in the scope of:
* store only for patrons, but welcome if you come with patron.
* anyone welcome but if you're only coming once (tourist etc), please don't (destroy the vibe).
For obvious reasons foreign tourist couldn't get this so many places just put up a "no foreigner" sign. You'll still see local foreigner sometimes hang around those places though
This is false, IME. If you spent enough time to learn how to navigate it, you could get in to most of them. I'm not even fluent and it really wasn't a big deal.
I did this living there from ~2009 - ~2016. Wasn't an issue in my visits afterwards either, at least up until the COVID years.
I will say that when I go back each year (1x/2x per) post COVID, I've seen more of them trying to be firm on it though - presumably due to the tourism influx.
I have been to many snack bars. They're everywhere, they're not "seedy", and nearly all of them are open to anyone.
That may be true, but I don't think that's what they were talking about. They were talking about fairly normal izakayas
I've been to many snack bars, and once in my almost ten years in Japan, I found one that didn't welcome foreigners.
Its about time we do that. This look online for good local places to go needs to stop. You either live there for some times and discover the place by getting to know the locals or yeah you just do not get to know the place.
Would that really work? I've lived in the same city for my entire life, and I still mostly discover places to go to online.
Where does that stop, though? Should people only ever explore their own city? Most people will only be able to move once every few years.
I remember this. Wanted to order something from a vending machine and had no clue what to do. I went to a nearby hotel and asked person at the reception to help. They actually agreed and bought the item I wanted and didn't want cash for it. Made my day.
how does the physical JCB card prevent people? Amex has an agreement with JCB (for over 20 years) for JCB to process all Amex cards. Amex is accepted everywhere because JCB is accepted everywhere
> Another specific $10 Michelin guide ramen restaurant only lets you order from a vending machine outside using a payment method you can’t access as a foreigner (one needs a physical JCB card or QUICPay - EPOS/Suica/Pasmo/Cash etc wouldn’t work).
It must be quite the character who has the discipline and drive to get a Michelin star and takes pleasure in putting giant roadblocks in front of traveling foodies. Reminds me of this elderly couple who despised kids and ran a successful toy store.
> And a few more of the seedier bars just have the (time honored) “no foreigners” sign out front.
Eh, even some non "seedy" ones have it. It's common enough.
Ugh the ‘no tattoo’ discrimination thing really bugs me.
I live in Tokyo at the moment. I get the overtourism thing, because after you've been here even just a little while (months) you start to have a disdain for tourists that do tourist things. Like breaking the rules, being a nuisance, swarming parts of the city.
I don't know what can be done about it though. Japan's economy is in trouble, and the tourist money helps and hurts at the same time. It creates tax revenue, yet inflates prices for locals. Japan's stumbling economy is a factor in itself of the tourism influx due to the weak yen.
In the next few decades I fear Japan is going to go through a difficult period of cultural erosion. It needs foreign workers and at the rate they'll be entering, they won't integrate to the level that the Japanese people want.
I'd like to think I'm one of the "15%" that the article describes - I go to great lengths to integrate despite not speaking a lot of Japanese. But deep down I know that I don't belong here, and that Japan would prefer to be a homogenous society without expats like me. And I hold no hard feelings toward them for that.
> But deep down I know that I don't belong here, and that Japan would prefer to be a homogenous society without expats like me. And I hold no hard feelings toward them for that.
I think this is an important point that I am struggling to articulate. I actually like the fact that they "prefer to do things their way". When I was traveling there, it is clear that I stand out from my behavior. We might share the same skin color but I don't speak the language nor have the mannerism.
I don't fit, they don't know how to deal with me and that is fine. In fact, I would prefer it to be that way. I prefer Japan to be Japan. Of course there are societal issues that needs to be fixed but those are orthogonal to what I am talking about.
My home country, the UK, has already been through this cultural erosion which is why I respect Japan's right to defend its own. London in particular has become a place for everybody and at the same time for nobody. It's a city of people of different values and wavelengths with very little shared strata compared with Tokyo.
Funny to see this sentiment here but in the USA if a conservative-leaning politician talks about "preserving our culture" or saying that immigrants should "assimilate" they are accused of being a code-word (or even an overt) racist.
US conservatives get no benefit of the doubt thanks to years of racism and racist policy. It is clear that they are reactionaries looking to codify white supremacy.
However, American culture has moved on (a lot) from that though. For several generations, it has been described as a "melting pot" or understood through the lens of The New Colossus mounted on the Statue of Liberty.
The question is, do you think it's fine for the same line of "Japanese supremacy" thought to apply in Japan, and if so, why do you think it's different?
Completely different. American culture is immigrant centric. I am an American, and I refuse the biblical indoctrination that some wish would represent "our" culture. Why should conservatives get to dictate what America's culture is? As far as I am concerned, we are a nation of immigrants, and no one should assimilate to certain ideas. In particular, because these ideas can be weaponized. The Church can mangle with the state, because America is mostly evangelical. Free speech can exclude criticism of foreign nations (like Isra-l), because America's most affluent are Jews. Services can be refused on the basis of one's romantic inclinations. Some people end up as more free than others. So I reject this culture claim that you are defending and do not accept that these conservatives have America's best interests in their heart. They are merely choosing the rhetoric that resonates most with lower classes (as history has taught us is a strategy that worked with peasants in the days of yore), because a critique of upper classes or billionaires or those that profit from our toil is them biting the hand that feeds them.
> Free speech can exclude criticism of foreign nations (like Isra-l)... So I reject this culture claim that you are defending and do not accept that these conservatives have America's best interests in their heart.
Do not pretend like liberals were on a different page than conservatives on that issue before the election. Support for Israel was happening under Biden and would have continued under Harris; Trump's the one who did a bait-and-switch with pretending he'd be more neutral until he got in. And conservatives have been called antisemitic by liberals far more than the reverse.
> American culture is immigrant centric.
What does this mean? Because to me, it means we don't have a culture and never will have one. What does immigrant-centric mean to people who are born not immigrants, besides getting out of the way for the next generation on its way in?
It was only under the current admin that permanent residents were detained, and American citizens were doxxed openly (I agree that deans of colleges were fired and students at Ivies doxxed by Ackman and his cronies during the previous admin). All because criticism of Isr-el. And sure, both parties are pro-Isra-l and always will be (at least until lobbying is eliminated or America-first lobbies are the only ones allowed). Hell, an op-ed written by a lady got her detained a la Gestapo. As to your second point, much of America continues to be defined by immigrants. Tesla is the best selling auto maker, and Elon an immigrant is behind it (who overstayed and was illegal for some time as a matter of fact). Chobani yogurt. Nvidia was founded by an immigrant. I could go on. I'd argue conservatism is getting in the way of the next generation, by hindering growth. Tourism in the US is down 22%. Those hurting are American businesses, and small ones in particular
as an actual londoner, no, this guy is just being codedly racist too
London isn’t an example of cultural erosion—the pie has simply grown. The same applies to New York. Diverse cultures enrich London; they add to it rather than diminish it.
Absolutely absurd. Why is it people feel the need to make out that western cities are somehow magically immune from the exact same detrimental effects that they happily accept about everywhere else?
"Enrichment" is a buzzword for the insulated elite happy that they have new things on their lunch menu, somehow ignoring all the negatives that come with it.
I can't help observing that Britain established a global empire (so vast in scope that they could truthfully say the sun never set upon it, until quite recently) and made it clear to the countries they colonized that Britain, and particularly England, was the center of civilization. We're surrounded by the artefacts of this empire, from Imperial measurements in the USA to Greenwich Mean time being the default timezone to which all others are calibrated.
If you establish a vast trading empire, and tell the often surprised new inhabitants of it that the empire requires their spices/ silks/ slaves, can you really be surprised that the more enterprising and adventurous colonised people gravitate toward the point of origin? Is it some sort of mystery that there should be more people from Algeria and Congo in France, or why there are so many Indonesian people in the Netherlands?
I feel a similar perplexity about many people in the USA making loud complaints about cultural adulteration despite a good quarter of the land having previously been part of Mexico and this being reflected in most of the place names (to take but one example). Some commentators object with an absolute straight face to hearing so many people speaking Spanish in cities with names like Los Angeles.
Migration is a policy issue, not some natural force like osmosis. It's entirely irrelevant why migrants want to come, when you have an existing population that is being harmed by migration policy.
It's simply that the wealthy benifit from increasing labour supply; this is the "enrichment" you get. Not an improvement in culture or conditions, an increase in wealth concentration.
It's entirely reasonable for a citizen in an English speaking nation to complain about other languages becoming common, as it is direct evidence of the migration policy that is doing them harm.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I am indifferent to the plight of former colonial nations experiencing the same phenomenon in reverse.
Migration is a policy issue, not some natural force like osmosis.
There's a whole discipline called social physics successfully leveraging models from physics, chemistry, and mathematics to analyze and predict social phenomena. Just as the behavior of flocking birds can be reliably modeled with a few differential equations, so can a great many social changes.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03701...
There is a disgusting degree of callousness with this comment.
It's not a "colonial nation" that is being harmed by migration, it's working class people. Meanwhile the same classes that benefited from colonialism now benifit from the wholesale destruction of communities.
Every empirical study I have seen shows that high migration lowers happiness and trust. Does that align with your pseudoscience?
Not as callous as pinning all social problems on migrants who mostly just want economic opportunity, and who generally commit crime at lower levels than the domestic population. Nor is it as callous as shrugging off the social and economic losses inflicted on those countries when they were colonized in the first place, or 'granting' them freedom without compensation for the looting, murder, and de facto enslavement.
working class people
I've got a feeling you're not a socialist, though.
pseudoscience
FUD
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I'm impressed that you created an account specifically to be so shallow and oblivious.
Always amusing that lowering the percentage of natives in a culture is an improvement, "enrichment", "vibrancy", and so on, but only in one particular kind of direction...
And interestingly, the people who utter this ideology are usually from the natives - because fundamentally it's a type of narcissism - a kind of "I'll show you" or "I like you being hurt" that feels pleasurable or gives a sense of superiority.
Can't imagine this ever being tolerated within China and Russia though, perhaps that's why they're the current bogeymen.
Yup, this happens to any melting pot city (Paris, New York, LA, San Francisco, etc). The downside of multiculturalism is these places become low-trust societies.
Do you dare leave your bike outside unlocked in these cities?
Bicycle theft is endemic in Japan as well.
Of course, being Japan, they also have a compulsory bike registration scheme and police can and do (not-so-)randomly stop people on the street to check that they're not riding stolen bikes.
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I am from a country in South East Asia, and its sad here as well. We have absolutely 0 connection to our ancestors from just 100 years ago. We (and me) have truly forgotten and don't have any identity beyond the surface level. We suffered from Arabification of every part of our culture.
I honestly think the original culture is pretty much extinct. Very, very few of the incoming generation even desire to uphold and rekindle that culture. In fact, it is despised.
Malaysia?
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This is such a weird notion. Waves of immigrants have created some of the biggest most economically productive cities the world has ever seen. If Tokyo goes this route, only greatness lays in its future.
The rest is just nostalgia, and that's fine. But realistically, a big piece of Japanese culture will be well preserved in the new culture that will emerge. As it is, we've stopped lamenting the arrival of Buddhist influence on the island, so too will other immigration influences.
many “economically productive” cities are giant shitholes
some things are more important than just making line go up
Do you actually live in such a place? Or are just looking at videos on Twitter?
Hopefully Tokyo actually rejects this western culture and mentality as fundamentally self-effacing instead, and rejects your kind's weird notions and narcissistic pronouncements of cultural superiority (so weird they'd want to be them - all Asian and Japanese like - omg gross, enrich them right away!) instead.
Eventually they may even come to view the westerner, evidenced by their minds in such a shocking condition, as a fundamentally grotesque thing, and go full closed-country again - especially after their power wanes. Certainly one case would be more beautiful than the other!
Tangential to this but I lived in Taiwan for years and every time I saw a new Starbucks or McDonald's go up, I'd have to restrain my gag reflex.
To hell with these multinational corporations that erect their sterile altars to unbridled capitalism, resulting in the mass homogenization of culture. A culture that caters to "everyone" caters to no one.
I find it amusing when Japan wants to be a homogenous society everybody respects their right to have that opinion. But when a european country voices the same wish, everybody loses their mind.
I wouldn't go so far as to say everybody respects it. Some people, maybe.
Ultimately, it's the same underlying xenophobia and racism you find everywhere else. It's easier for people to like people who are like them and harder for them to like people who are not like them.
In my opinion, people don't talk about how well America integrates other cultures enough. It's one of our defining strengths, even still.
America is built on mass migration spread across centuries. It very much is a melting pot. Or at least seems to be like one to someone who has never been there.
>Ultimately, it's the same underlying xenophobia and racism you find everywhere else. It's easier for people to like people who are like them and harder for them to like people who are not like them.
Yes and this is completely normal human behavior, and in my opinion should not be completely outright demonized. I suspect one of the many reasons why europe is the way it is today in regards to this topic, is because we have repressed these natural tribal tendencies. And just to stir the pot; I wonder how welcoming and nice many of the e.g. majority muslim countries would to the non-arabs & non-muslims if they were to mass migrate to said countries. I think they would very much exercise and impose their 'xenophobia' upon these foreigners in certainly more tougher ways.
> And I hold no hard feelings toward them for that.
But isn't that why Japan ended up like this? Every country needs either immigration or babies, and Japan chose option C: neither. And now the decision has been made for them, a very high dose of immigration is required.
It's like ignoring a cavity and eventually needing a root canal.
Xenophobia is simply an unworkable idea, like eugenics and other discredited beliefs. Or at least it needs to be paired with a religion that encourages having kids.
> Xenophobia is simply an unworkable idea
Xenophobia was the default for nearly all of human history and core to nearly all successful societies. How is it unworkable?
At its core it’s the same idea as “trust is earned, not given”.
Yes, but for most of human history we didn't have contraception either. People had children because it was either that or abstinence, and abstinence sucks. Not to mention the need to create heirs who could look after you when you became too old to work.
In an advanced society where the threat is depopulation rather than invasion, xenophobia is harmful unless you can find a way to convince people to have more children than is rational for them to have.
I get it too. I visited japan recently and in the main touristy spots (tokyo and kyoto), it felt like there were more westerners then japanese. I felt bad.
If you experience this in Tokyo, you're dealing with the fact that it's a truly global city and you're not venturing off the tourist path enough. It's definitely still a thing in some parts of Tokyo to have few-to-no westerners.
Kyoto was never going to be able to deal with the level of tourism that it's currently struggling with, though. My friends and I refuse to even stop there now - and I tried to get some friends who visited recently to avoid it in favor of some other culturally significant spots, but the TikTok trend seems to be incredibly powerful. I don't know if I have the words to express how that interaction made me feel, but it's definitely weird.
> I tried to get some friends who visited recently to avoid it in favor of some other culturally significant spots
Any tips for somebody looking to visit Japan in the next year or so?
Old-fashioned-guidebooks, like the other commenter said, can be useful... but IMO it's a gamble.
One option if you're looking to avoid Kyoto, but want something that still feels sufficiently old world, is Kanazawa. You can take the Shinkansen from Tokyo to get there; ever since this line was opened it also has its fair share of tourists, but it's way less popular than Kyoto and IMO very nice. Old Samurai town out on the western coast of Japan.
If you want history that's more somber, and you're already visiting Osaka, just take the Shinkansen a bit further down to Hiroshima. The atomic bomb museum there is IMO required viewing for seeing and understanding the impact those events had. The Nagasaki one was even more powerful of an exhibit, but frankly to go to Nagasaki you need to fly (a Shinkansen exists but it's not a fully connected route at this time).
I'm out drinking at the moment so I'm not about to write a novel, but whenever you go to book your stuff you can feel free to email me (should be in my profile) and I'd be happy to help figure things out. People should visit Japan - I don't ever want to gatekeep it; I just think people should avoid chasing the same beaten path. :)
I wish I would have known this before I went!
'
Excellent, arigato gozaimasu!
Buy an old-fashioned guide book instead of using the internet, the consumer parts of which are an advertising machine that inexorably trends towards the lowest common denominator.
Yeah definitely.
We tried going off the tourist path a bit, but since we didn't have that much time there, and know no japanese, it isn't super easy to do figure out where to go / what to do.
Seems like a golden opportunity to be smart about it and use advertising to make less visited parts of cities tourist attractions. People want to experience Japan, but naturally focii will appear over time via positive feedback, you have to overcome that with advertising and promotions on the web via influencers and advertising. That seems like a government focus if they are really interested in doing something about it.
> going to go through a difficult period of cultural erosion
I am not sure what cultural erosion you speak of. I am sure Japanese culture won't be replaced by a cultural vacuum. Japanese culture has evolved for centuries, both under external influences and because of its internal dynamics.
Many modern beloved Japanese cultural assets were formed in such manner, as noted in this article: https://archive.md/2c1WI
> Japan's economy is in trouble, and the tourist money helps and hurts at the same time. It creates tax revenue, yet inflates prices for locals
I lived in a successful major tourist region from its inception to maturity. You are incorrect in saying that it creates tax revenue: The Tourism sector generally gets tax breaks and subsidies, so it ends up eating up tax revenue to enrich whatever oligarchic structure or family dominates the landscape. Moreover, in any mild temporary crisi,s it risks collapsing and forces the government to bail it out by spending enormous amounts of money.
Tourism is like a tick that sucks away the productive forces and resources of a country - it diverts both budget (tax breaks, subsidies) and educated manpower away from actual goods and services production, provides sh*t jobs to those employed in tourism, causes inflation and CoL rise across regions and even the entire country. If you want to cripple a country's industrial and technological power, the best thing to do is to push tourism on it.
> But deep down I know that I don't belong here, and that Japan would prefer to be a homogenous society without expats like me. And I hold no hard feelings toward them for that.
I get what you're saying, but I also marvel at how completely contrary this is to the "freedom of movement" ethics of the West. I mean, someone who holds this same opinion in Europe or America would be considered a Neo-Nazi.
I think you are laboring from behind a few very common blind spots.
First, Japan is an island nation, and historically a somewhat isolated one (due to weather patterns rather than distance). Islands are fundamentally different from continents, anthropologically, lexically, strategically.
Second, 'the West' has historically been very expansionist; because of its continental configuration, there have been many, many waves of migration and military conquest, and the development of global navigation and seafaring vessels during the Renaissance made for a centuries-long outward expansion.
Third, this sort of expansionism has being going on in the Asia-Pacific region over even longer timescales and there are very different discourses with many contentious points of view if you include Japanese, Korean, Chinese and other perspectives.
On general anthropology, maybe try JAred Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel or for a more academic take, Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization. For the history of Japan, Mason & Caiger's History of Japan is comprehensive without being a huge study commitment.
Immigrants like you. Not “expats”.
There is an actual difference between those two words. GP said he lives in Tokyo "at the moment." Immigrants intend to settle permanently; expats move places temporarily and will eventually either move on to somewhere else or go back home.
Expats can turn into immigrants, but one who "knows deep down they don't belong" is less likely to.
That’s traditional outlook, but it doesn’t hold ground anymore. A lot of people considered immigrants are staying somewhere temporarily, for a few years. Most of all in comes down to people not wanting to label themselves as immigrants, because they have some prejudices against this terminology. Quite common it comes down to a person with European background labelling himself as an “expat” or “relocant”, and people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Middle East (except Israel) as “immigrants”. In the end, from point of view of host country, they are all the same immigrants that live in the country based on the same documents, e.g. resident permits, but people labelling themselves as “expats” may often support local anti-immigrant policies, not realising it will hurt them as well.
The problem isn't small businesses. Japan already have millions of hard to find gems that even the locals don't know, because the owners barely market things (runs on local patronage) and those are still doing fine outside the tourism craze. And those places can be quite direct about not wanting the one-off tourist; When I was an exchange student in Kyoto we were told off from a couple of places, which wasn't an issue.
The "small businesses" being swamped are rarely those kinds. They want that extra income but can't really serve it, and often realize that one off selfie tourists just generally have little respect for rules and end up trashing the place,(or the surroundings, not necessarily because bad intent but cultural differences) causing ire from the locals.
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Not very kitsch of the participants in those atrocities. I'm not sure what that has to do with people alive today.
It's like The Bear. Ohhhhh no I've opened a restaurant and now there are customers aaaaahhhhh this is horrible ahhhhhhhh
Yeah that was sort of the vibe I got too. I understand the point of the article, that regular customers are a nicer customer base than tourists, but it sort of has a pretentious "most tourists aren't worth of Japan" hypothesis to the article which feels silly once you think about it in a broader, economic scope
I guess it depends on the local culture. Japanese relationships are probably a lot less transactional but more “knowing your customers”.
Anyone who's ever worked in customer support will tell you that dealing with customer regularly sucks balls, even worse if they're foreign and don't know the local language, customs and etiquette so they annoy you and your local patrons while thinking they're entitled to because "we spend money here and support your economy", or even more worse if they're foreign and also intoxicated or acting up for the camera (social media streamers).
Hospitality is already a low margin business, so if you're a small business owner and need to deal with the customers yourself instead of via hired work, why would you want that extra hassle of dealing with annoying foreigners unless it's purely for milking them dry with huge markups for it to be worth it?
I am in Spain (where people, imho wrongfully, think tourism is ruining everything) and I dont see the issue; my wife and myself make enough in the summer to not have anything to do the rest of the year. I have IT businesses which I scale back to run the pub in summer for 3 month. I don't really care about whatever they do as long as it is not fighting: the more drunk and loud they are, especially guys with girls, the more they will just basically order anything of whatever price. And many of them. And yeah, some drinks and food locals would never ever buy so we mark them up 10x. Do not see an issue with that: it is not hidden and locals dont pay less for the same product: it is on the menu, everyone can see it, it's just not popular while for some groups of foreigners it's the first they ask. Welcome please!
My impression of these Japanese small businesses is that many are run purely as lifestyle businesses and making more money isn't the point. They're run for the owners to feel a sense of accomplishment and ownership and give something back to the community. There is no desire to close the business and go on vacation, especially if it means being very aggravated when they are opened.
This sounds like best description.
I think it is hard to explain to HN crowd whose most would like to run business to make most money possible in shortest time period and would not understand running business that just pays its bills and gets owner ramen profitable unless it is just a point on path to becoming unicorn.
Best laugh I've had all week, thanks!
>I am in Spain (where people, imho wrongfully, think tourism is ruining everything) and I dont see the issue; my wife and myself make enough in the summer to not have anything to do the rest of the year.
Do you have any self reflection to see why this is a problem for other citizens who aren't making bank from tourism 3 months per year and actually need to work 12 months a year but also have to deal with the issues tourism ads for them: higher rents, higher prices, extra traffic, extra noise at night from your drunken patrons, crowds, pickpockets, scammers, etc?
You arguments is just "over tourism is not a nation/city problem because it's making me rich". You can't make this up. I couldn't be as oblivious about it if I tried.
Based on your other comment where you say "innit," I suspect you're not Spanish?
It sounds like you're a Brit who opened a pub in Spain for other Brits to get sloshed at. Is this wrong?
Which is why it's better to not have any customers. And not make any money, because dealing with taxes sucks balls, too. Best, really, is not to be alive, because otherwise you'll need to deal with illness, hunger, sadness and stuff.
How many customers do you serve at your business? What are you doing besides trolling?
Yea this was major de-growther vibes to me. A couple of small businesses getting swamped just means you don't have enough small businesses. It's true that generally there aren't enough small businesses.
I'd like our productivity gains to free up people to pursue their weird jazz-coffee bar fantasies and start more businesses. That's a better world to me than the the one OP is trying to get us to retreat to.
There's lots of terrible things about social media but its ability to spread the wealth of attention to small businesses is probably the best thing about it.
Bad tourists? FINE THEM. I realize the Japanese don't like to see their relationships as transactional, but they have foreigners there and managing their behavior via transactions is totally fair to me.
P.S: I know, I know I have recently been to Japan and seen its over-tourism first hand. I also don't know a country better equipped to get a handle on it and gasp scale.
I kind of assumed "tourists are crowding me out of my favorite spaces so this must be true everywhere" which is a lot easier to assume than prove.
Way to miss the point. Most foreigners in other countries can't behave.
Well it is a job innit? Most my well paid CTOs and tech contacts I meet cannot behave either. They always have to be rude that I am just a small fish, misspell my name every time to be funny or lazy or whatnot etc. I don't care, pay the bill within 14 days, cheers.
They don't have a problem with customers, they have a problem with foreign customers that often can't behave. Being c-suite doesn't give one a free pass to be an asshole. I suggest reading the source that the linked post is an answer to: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/kyoto-japan-tourism-...
I have issues with them too (rowdy pub clients and rude c suites), but I fear, after 5 decades alternating in both these jobs, I cannot avoid them, so, I learn to play them and make more money than they came in to spend.
I would like harder evidence that Japanese business owners hate high-spending tourists. From my personal experience small business owners have at least appeared to very much appreciate my custom. There is a sordid history of Westerners defending Japan from itself - I'm not saying that is happening here, but I would like to see more systematic evidence.
It’s common throughout the world for locals from tourist destinations to bemoan the tourists while happily accepting their money.
I'm the CTO & Founder of TableCheck, the booking system used by 10,000+ restaurants in Japan. My two cents: the issue isn't simply "too many tourists" but rather over-concentration at a few hotspots, a domestic-first market, low English proficiency (ranked #87 globally, a notch above Afghanistan), and a culture deeply focused on orderliness and not causing inconvenience for others.
That said, nearly all hospitality owners in Japan I work with now recognize the importance of inbound tourism--critical for a country facing a 30% population decline by 2070. When I started TableCheck ~12 years ago, many places avoided non-Japanese guests--not always from "racism", but often a fear of miscommunication and dissatisfying guests. That mindset is rapidly fading: venues that don't capture inbound guests' revenue simply won't survive.
Happy to answer questions!
Do you sense there's still a reluctance to serve foreign guests, and that it's largely done out of necessity but not out of innate desire?
No, I really don't. Chefs and restaurant operators chose their profession out of a genuine desire to share cuisine and hospitality experiences with as many people as possible, and the vast majority genuinely appreciate meeting international guests who share their love for food. I've even heard Michelin chefs go as far to say that they feel their culinary art is more appreciated by international guests than the domestic audience.
In Japan there is a "system" ("kata") for everything, and in addition, there is a concept of hospitality called "omotenashi" which means something like "the host will anticipate the all guest's needs" (you can think "omakase"--meaning "chef chooses"--is a facet of "omotenashi")
To illustrate these concepts: I had two friends visiting from India who were religious vegetarians, they had asked me to book a traditional Japanese restaurant but almost everywhere I called used "dashi" (fish-based soup stock) as a core ingredient. I asked if dashi could be removed, but nearly every restaurant refused as they "didn't think it would taste as good"--I tried to explain my friends really wouldn't know the difference, to no avail--the system is the system, the goal is "omotenashi".
Language tends to be an issue as well, but many restaurants will say "We don't speak English and we don't have well-translated menus, but if you want to try it anyway we'll welcome you." Another example here: Tokyo Disney gives a VIP tour only in Japanese, and you have to pay extra for an English translator. I asked them why they can't just have the English speaker gives the tour; the answer was "Because the tour is in Japanese." The system is the system.
So it's easy to mistake this "omotenashi" insistence to follow the system as "(intentionally) not catering to foreign guests", but it has much more to do with "quality control" like you might find in a Toyota factory.
Are there a handful of close-minded bigots in the Japan, who refuse non-Japanese speakers/non-Japanese people? Sure, there are in any country. You are not likely to encounter them on a trip to Japan--in 17 years living here I really haven't encountered many--and if you do, just take your business elsewhere.
> critical for a country facing a 30% population decline by 2070
Tourism doesn't help with that. And this decline (if it do happens) will impact the countryside more than the places where most tourists go.
I can say that this fact of population decline (and population aging) weighs heavily on the Japanese psyche, especially in the business world. The hottest topic for our customers in sales discussions is definitely "attracting inbound tourists".
It makes sense Japanese business owners would be interested in attracting inbound tourists as a financial solution to population decline for their businesses. At the same time, it can be possible for tourism to not be a solution to the underlying problem of population decline for wider society (including longer-term longevity of businesses, and the feasibility of future businesses).
As devil's advocate, do you not see a potential disconnect here between what makes financial sense for your customers and what makes logistical sense for the nation as a whole?
Developing a healthy tourism industry, developing English skills to communicate with the world at large, all make great sense for the country as a whole. I think these can be developed without losing the cultural aspects that make Japan great.
One could argue that the tourism industry was already beyond healthy, that the impact on English skills is negligible and that it hurts others, such as business people having problems do travel because hotels have doubled or trippeled their prices.
English skills put hospitality staff in a better position to serve guests, and ultimately reduce the burden/friction on the operators themselves.
As for business travel, the price of business hotels in Japan overall has not dramatically increased—certainly not beyond what corporate budgets can afford—and much of business travel is to cities that are not of particular interest to tourists. Staying outside the city and commuting by train is also an option.
> As for business travel, the price of business hotels in Japan overall has not dramatically increased
You obviously live in a different Japan than I do (or, despite your name, don't actually live there).
I do live in Japan. Looking at APA Hotel in Ginza I see prices in the 10-20,000 JPY range ($66-$133) per night it just doesn’t feel insanely high. And thats smack in the middle of a major business/tourist area.
Well yeah, that doesn't look high in dollars for US people earning a lot, sure.
But I never said that it looks high, I said that it increased. You could easily find APAs for about 5000 JPY not long ago. And don't forget that we currently have summer, so much less tourists.
Its not clear how much of the increase is due to tourist demand vs. global price inflation in general. 5000 yen is now $33. Thats an unthinkably low price in the US unless you are going for bedbugs and a piss-stained mattress…
Prices in Japan seem to be de-coupling from the rest of the world… e.g. the “Japanese only” language-locked Nintendo Switch 2
It is very clear if you compare hotel prices to renting an apartment, which have almost been stagnant over the last 1-2 years (before they were rising quite a bit of course). At least very from 100%+ increases that I can see for hotels everywhere in Tokyo, including most of greater Tokyo area.
I am not sure I understand the argument the author is making. Is this what they are saying? [Overtourism is bad for small businesses because it encourages them to cater to tourists, and therefore to chase global trends rather than to serve the taste of the local community]
I am sure many of them would be a little upset, but I don't understand how this counts as "hurting" small businesses?
he thinks there are businesses out there that do it for the love, and somehow dont need customers or revenue to survive. and ill have to dig my heels in when he says they arent doing it to get rich.
I'm on the same boat. On one hand it seems tourism is a bad thing, on the other it recommends places that are little known to tourism... oh well
Because you are using "small business" as an abstract term, where in reality it's often a stand in for one or two people.
Those people are now providing a service to anonymous tourists, rather than being part of a community.
It's isolating.
...small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars.
If you want to be a members' only club, be a members' only club. I understand concerns with Venice sinking or a tiny train station being overrun with anime fans, but Kyoto is and always will be a popular tourist destination for many reasons.
These sorts of critics always struck me as elitist and pretentious. If reminds me of those kids gatekeeping music genres and claiming you couldn't call yourself a fan unless you listened to the most obscure album of the most obscure band.
Just a fashionable way to say you've been there and done that, and that you're above the hoi polloi.
Popular cities, and popular attractions within, are popular for a reason.
Craig's been more or less an indirect cultural ambassador/link for Japan in the tech scene for something like the past 15-20 years. I very much doubt he's gatekeeping.
The gatekeeping music reminds me of this skit. It's a word document.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5-rGN0ou_4
You got me by captioning a YouTube link with "it's a word document."
> Popular cities, and popular attractions within, are popular for a reason.
Reasons which typically don't include "can sustain infinite visitors"
Like Tour Eiffel, London Eye, Brooklyn Bridge, places with incalculable aesthetic value that nothing have to do with Hype
In my experience everyone believes they're part of this 15% of travelers interested in the local culture and not one of those stupid NPC going through the motions so the distinction this article is drawing between good and bad tourism completely defeats the point it was trying to make.
Tourism in Japan is still pretty low compared to traditional tourism hot spots like Paris or Rome. As is usual, it's the relative change that is significant rather than the absolute numbers. The change from "almost none" to "some" affects a place more than the change from "a lot" to "even more".
It also felt to me to be weirdly concentrated in particular small areas. I spent a few weeks in various places in northern Japan which varied from "very quiet" to "tourists but not too many"; but in Tokyo, Akihabara was absolutely heaving with tourists (in a way it wasn't five years ago). And even in Tokyo just getting a little way away from the hotspots you could find beautiful but quiet places still. So I agree with the author's suggestion to go to parts of the country that aren't the tiny fraction of super-famous locations or social-media sensations.
I feel like tourist places are “weirdly concentrated” as you put it. When I was Florence the center was obviously super busy, but walking only 15 minutes in one direction there seemed to be almost no tourists around (of course, the area I was in didn’t have any sights). It made me think that maybe there’s a bias to the feeling of overtourism because people think about the one part of the city where all the tourists are.
New Orleans Louisiana is like this, walk down Bourbon street and it's packed with tourists but turn and walk perpendicular to Bourbon street for 2 blocks and you're all alone.
/this is a joke, don't do this.
> Tourism in Japan is still pretty low compared to traditional tourism hot spots like Paris or Rome.
Tokyo has more international tourists than Rome and is the third city destination in the world.
https://www.euromonitor.com/press/press-releases/december-20...
That's a list of where people want to go. Further down in the article is the list of cities where people actually go. Tokyo isn't in the top 10.
I don’t think that’s true if you add in Chinese tourists, which are like 80% of Japan’s overseas tourist mix, it is china’s #2 overseas tourist destination after Korea (adjacency has a lot to do with that). France is #23, while China is the largest and fastest growing market for overseas tourists.
Tourism in Japan is fine if concentrated in central Tokyo or major cities for instance. You can try to flood Shibuya or Ginza with tens of thousands of tourists everyday it won't be much of an issue.
Tourists spilling over on less prepared and smaller places is the real issue IMHO. Seeking "authenticity" while not being local/integrated understandingly generates friction at scale.
Rome had been the center of the western world for 2000 years, and Paris for 400. You can't compare those "well-trodden" cities to Kyoto, which was relatively secluded from tourists until the invention of jet airliners.
That's not true. https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/us-trips-to-japan-surp...
AFAICT, Germans & Brits outnumber Americans in Paris and Chinese outnumber Americans in Tokyo. So American numbers aren't particularly significant, IMO.
But seanmcdirmid in a sibling comment is likely correct, and I'm possibly wrong.
Hmm. As a Brit I would not consider a trip to Paris to be "tourism". It's just a trip over the border. Yes they speak a different language there but it's a language that I was forced to study in school. No doubt Germans feel the same way.
Going to Spain on the other hand would be tourism. I don't speak Spanish, it's not a neighbouring country, you arrive in an airport, etc.
If an American or a Chinese person goes to Paris I feel they likely have different motivations and itinerary than a Brit, Belgian, etc who is taking the train possibly only for the day.
I was in Rome a couple of summers ago (not as a tourist) and it was pretty crazy how many tourists there were. You could hardly walk along the streets in the centre. I wouldn't want to live there as a local, or ever be anywhere which is "not quite as bad as Rome".
I was thinking similarly, because you go to a famously tourist packed city like Paris and find nothing by local shops. But concluded differently than you: the article is just wrong.
I felt awful about being in Kyoto last year. Had I known how bad it was for the locals I would never have went. I can’t imagine how frustrated and angry if my home town was the same. The infrastructure can’t support the number of tourists unlike Tokyo. Locals can’t even get a bus without them being completely full to the brim all the day long.
It’s 100% social media. It’s the most vapid thing in the entire world. It makes tourist destinations theme parks with zero regards for the locals.
Kyoto, a city that literally almost went bankrupt during COVID due to lack of tourism.
Municipal bankruptcy is a medium-term problem, but as we're seeing, the dose makes the poison. Suffocating under an excess of tourism is arguably worse than a shortage of it, which could be replaced by other sorts of economic activity.
a problem caused by tourism killing off other industries, no?
A good, nuanced piece, especially if you read the footnotes. I'd add that some businesses aren't set up for seasonality as well as others. Pretty much every country has beach towns full of shops and motels that close in winter. But a lot of the small businesses the article is talking about are open year round and depend on locals. If you can't get into your local 4 months out of the year, it probably isn't your local anymore
Only anecdotal, but I’ve noticed recently what seems to be a gap in the social-media-driven concentration of tourists in Japan: traditional museums.
I have lived in Japan since 1983, and my sisters and their husbands recently spent three weeks in Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, and Tokyo. It was the first visit here for three of them. They’re all in their early 70s and don’t use social media much, so they got most of their ideas for places to go from web searches, which led them to travel blogs and to sites like Tripadvisor.
I tried to steer them away from the areas that I knew would be overcrowded, but with mixed success. I warned them in particular that Kyoto would be packed, but they insisted on taking a day trip there from Osaka anyway. It turned out to be the most unpleasant part of their trip because of the crowds.
As their trip progressed, they focused more on avoiding the crowds, and they gradually started adding more museums to their itinerary. I took them to the Osaka Museum of Housing and Living and the Tokyo National Museum, and on their own they visited the Osaka Museum of History, Yushukan Museum at the Yasukuni Shrine, JCII Camera Museum, and several others. None of them were crowded, and they seemed to enjoy them all.
I was particularly surprised at how empty the Tokyo National Museum was, as forty years ago it was a standard destination for foreign visitors. It still has a great collection, but very few of the thousands of tourists wandering around nearby Ueno that day chose to go there.
Personally (and ironically), I wouldn't usually think of museums if I'm looking for something non-touristy. Walking through a museum, reading and looking at things that've been laid out in a specific order for me to consume, just feels like reading a website. Unless it's a unique exhibit, there's little interactivity, and while things can certainly be learned, I often wonder if I couldn't have learned them just as well from a book.
That's not to say I'll never go to a museum; I stumbled into a small science and technology museum near the imperial palace gardens, for example. But the bigger a museum is and the more lists it's on, the more I'd assume it's touristy. The Tokyo National Museum being "a standard destination for foreign visitors" is exactly why I'd shy away from it. (Why the general public would follow that trend for museums but not for other tourist destinations, I don't know.)
I’ve lived in Nagoya for 20 years and Kyoto’s unbearable to visit anymore. I loved it twenty years ago but I have no interest in wading through the tourists from overseas.
In the mid 2000s, I visited (white American) with my then-fiancé (a foreign-born native), and it was absolutely incredible to travel with her and her still-living-there extended family.
Saw so many incredible places and was welcomed everywhere with open arms (except a coed day spa that allowed foreigners — that was difficult). When her native uncle and I got drunk at a karaoke bar, we were tolerated as tip-friendly locals.
I greatly-respected the open hostility to foreigners — to protect their culture — and would never travel again without a local guide.
Sorry to hear it's going to shit. What keeps you there?
I find Japan a bit strange about these "making profit" topics. I still don't fully grasp how it's possible so many of these business that "poured much of their life savings into opening these places, taken out loans" don't rejoice and raise their prices (a bit? a lot?), making them able to do this thing they are doing, much better. Heck invite the regulars to the 2nd drink with that extra money that is coming in now if you want, or give them a discount.
Here there is the opportunity of a lifetime, and many Japan business are straight out rejecting the money that comes pouring in. Meanwhile Japan economy is the worst it's been in 40-50 years, and virtually every week there's articles about the bleak future. It's too frustrating seeing articles complaining about how business are closing down with no money, and at the same time how these people trying to give them money are being rejected.
Background: living in Japan 5-10 years, I'm from Spain so it's not "in my blood" to think about profit also, but heck it's just too surprising some times.
PS, I'm for reducing tourism overall here actually, I'm just baffled at Japanese rejecting money.
> Here there is the opportunity of a lifetime, and many Japan business are straight out rejecting the money that comes pouring in.
because not everyone cares firstly about money?
the article is quite clear, the woman wanted to open a business to serve her friends and locals
now she can't do that, and is understandably upset
From the parent comment: "Heck invite the regulars to the 2nd drink with that extra money that is coming in now if you want, or give them a discount." That could even be revenue neutral, if she wants it to be. Why not try that?
I know, I'm totally fine with that, but then don't bring money into the article like those people are burdened economically by these tourists, you cannot have it both ways.
>because not everyone cares firstly about money?
You better care money first and foremost because when downturns came it could be devastating, remember the great lockdown?
They probably just don't know how to do it right, not that they're against the money.
Other cultures have zero qualms about a "foreigner price".
Perhaps they just need better training in how to fleece foreigners without impacting their long term local customers - it's those relationships that are probably their major concern.
I was just thinking about restaurants. The iconic French or Italian restaurant is larger than the iconic Japanese izakaya with 10 seats. And unlike the tapas bars of Spain, it isn't expected you'll move on to the next place or take your food outside.
I'll agree certain locations are getting "instagram famous" and really ruining it for the locals, but I don't think they are worse off because of it. Just let people flock to the one picture spot, they did it before social media, and now there are just more of them, nothing new here.
If anything, the tourists queuing to buy the latest novelty doughnut are not taking up space somewhere else.
This argument seems to be heavily tinged with xenophobia. Local customers good, foreign ones bad? I can understand if it was specifically about the volume…
Not only that, but these business owners are actively complaining about an influx of business.
I get it if your goal is not necessarily to make as much money as possible and just wanted to create some small, local, "underground" thing. As a small business owner myself, I can think of a few different ways you could accomplish that in spite of massive attention. I mean you can have certain days of the week where you're closed to the general public but patrons with a loyalty card can get in or something. That's just one idea; point is there are solutions.
So I tend to agree with you - this reeks of "we just don't like foreigners. They're ruining our business by being foreign."
My wife and I are about to open our first brick and mortar business and it would be our dream come true to get popular on TikTok and to be a tourist destination. Even though we are a small business in a trendy neighbourhood doing something rather niche that is [hopefully] going to attract a loyal local following.
So what? They’re right. Japanese are a million times more civilized than us foreigners/tourists.
They also have a vastly different culture with many possible faux-pas that one can make, which all tourists inevitably make, which they hate. I think they are unfair about this however
This is wildly out of line.
Foreigners are at least 10% as civilized.
People get really picky about their xenophobia and racism lmao
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Reading this thread and some of the replies reminds of the whole “world vs Japan” memes.
Wanting to preserve the local culture is racist and disgusting UNLESS it’s Japan doing it. I wonder why Japan’s so special
Because they don't have the "Wanting to preserve the local culture is racist and disgusting" western culture I guess?
That's pretty special...
I live in Colorado and we have a similar issue (though not nearly to the scale of Japan). The line about getting "TikTokked" really struck a chord because there have been a few places that have fallen to the same fate, spots that the locals only knew about are now filled to the brim with both locals and tourists from out of state.
My rule now is when we travel somewhere, we look to see what all the viral places from TikTok, and then we don't go there unless the place holds some incredible cultural significance (ie. The Louvre, Sagrada Família, etc).
What we found is cities are usually filled to the brim with the kind of spots that get "TikTokked" but only a few select places actually go viral and attract all the attention. When you use the "viral places" as a guide of where NOT to go, you end up going down some paths that lead you to some really special experiences with practically no other tourists around.
> […] unless the place holds some incredible cultural significance (ie. The Louvre, Sagrada Família, etc).
Honestly, I give those a pass too. I don't want to go to Barcelona and exacerbate the problem of overtourism (same goes for Venice). Paris is doable of course, but there too I wouldn't consider the Louvre right now. Not with its employees holding strikes because of the overcrowding!
It's a big world, and there are plenty of places where I am welcome as a tourist. The experience is better in any case; I hate crowds.
I also live in Colorado and have noticed the same thing lately. A state park near me gets slammed with tourists but there isn't much to do there unless you like hiking up steep trails or rock climbing. Most folks seem to drive in, walk around for 30 minutes, and then leave.
Maybe travel is just too cheap and easy? I like the democratisation of globe trotting that has happened but it certainly has had negative consequences
IMO it's not that travel is to cheap, it's that social media has created "hot spots" around the globe.
Take a random example: 5 cute coffee shops around Paris, all of them have that Parisian vibe that tourists are looking for but one of them had an influencer walk in and make some content. Now that one shop is all over the internet and tourists are flocking to it, creating huge lines and overwhelming the business, while the other 4 shops sit at roughly the same level of popularity as they did before.
The problem I see isn't that travel is democratized, it's that people are lazy at planning their trips and just go on social media and find these "hot spots" instead of actually doing their homework or heck even a little exploring around the city.
And I get it, planning a trip and actually doing your homework is hard, it's much easier to get on TikTok and have the entire itinerary planned in one afternoon than spending weeks researching spots on your own.
> The problem I see isn't that travel is democratized, it's that people are lazy at planning their trips and just go on social media and find these "hot spots" instead of actually doing their homework or heck even a little exploring around the city.
The problem is people are shallow. People are _actively_ seeking the queue. I know because I know people that are like this.
They want to be part of the queue because...I am not sure why. To take a quick picture at a very specific angle to avoid the crowd? To make their followers think they are doing something great? To make them jealous?
It is as if beauty have to be told and highlighted to them. They need a signboard that says "this is pretty, take a picture here!". They are not able to appreciate the minutiae of life.
Of course, I am sounding mighty superior here, but I don't think I am wrong.
The same reasons why folks prefer buying things on Amazon (or Walmart). It is renown and you know that it will have what you need and qualities are reasonably guaranteed.
Yeah I argue with my wife about this. She lives her lists, and trawls her social media feeds for stuff.
I prefer to have a loose agenda of which neighborhoods are interesting, pick one and wander it for an afternoon. Odds are we will find lots of interesting things.
We usually meet in the middle and do a mix. More and more she admits in retrospect to having stressed herself out with building and following an agenda.
I think the more interesting story here wouldn’t be the “over tourism” of the globally desirable internet-famous locations— It’s all the little regional resort towns and tourism destinations that are now ignored.
All over the US are locations that used to be the place where a people would go for a three day weekend or summer getaway. But now they are ghost towns because the cost of travel and the algorithm have reframed travel as global and not regional.
Like… Niagara Falls used to be “the” honeymoon destination for couples in the northeast. Now it seems like every honeymoon is in a beachy tropical location and the falls have been gutted economically
I understand this is what happened to UK beach towns when flying to Spain got cheap
And quite possibly also because UK beach towns are generally sad and cold (except for Cornwall and Devon for two weeks per year), compared to Spain’s? Signed, someone living in the UK.
This is something that I feel doesn't get discussed in a lot of these sorts of discussions (overtourism, local food, etc.). Reducing your carbon/social footprint by consuming locally is MUCH more enjoyable in some locations than in others.
if you find your local region unenjoyable, change your local region
Your plan to address the decline in British beach towns is to depopulate the UK?
Seems a bit extreme just to avoid a plane ride.
Often that's not an option. E.g. due to where family lives, where you can find a job, or simply not being able to afford to move.
but that's kind of the problem.
people insist that they need "the BEST", so they hop on a plane to get the picture-perfect locale that they see online at the expense of hollowing out anything that is merely "pretty good".
Isn't this what pricing is for? The "best" places can raise prices because of the high demand. Then the "pretty good" places in comparison wind up being a good value option.
No argument there!
> All over the US are locations that used to be the place where a people would go for a three day weekend or summer getaway. But now they are ghost towns because the cost of travel and the algorithm have reframed travel as global and not regional.
I find that local travelling within the US is often more expensive for the quality they offer and travelling outside the US may cost the same but give you a better experience, or at least novel.
A lot of those tiny locations all over the US are in red states. Lots of people aren't going to want to go to locations where public infrastructure has been hollowed out and discrimination is legal.
> and discrimination is legal.
Do you have proof of these red states re-legalizing discrimination, or repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and/or Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990)?
I failed to find anything about this supposed upheaval of established legal statute after a quick google search.
https://www.iowapublicradio.org/state-government-news/2025-0...
You're saying that large parts of red states aren't hostile to, say, LGBTQ people?
Why do they keep electing people who are, and passing legislature that is, then?
I think the point of is that every state had its decent share of local tourists going to local attractions. It's one thing if the blue state travelers who were traveling in the first place are now traveling somewhere else, but it's also an impact that there are also less local tourists in these states than there have been historically, because even the local tourists are now traveling elsewhere.
Either I get "Southern Hospitality" AKA decently outwardly friendly people (if you're white) and people who actually donate to charity or I get good infrastructure and legal weed, but people who are anti-social and would piss on the homeless if it were legal.
You can't win. This is why folks travel in the first place.
Yeah travel should be a privilege reserved for the ultra rich so the lower classes can focus on working until their body is used up and then they can crawl in a hole and die.
'Globe trotting' has been 'democraticized' only for the top income earners from the high-income countries. The rest of the world is not able to globe trot. Combined with digital nomadism, golden visas et al, this 'democratization' is a new form of colonization in which the high CoL countries' people can literally buy out poorer countries' most desirable regions or set themselves up as an aristocratic elite on top of the locals.
It used to be the case, now the majority of the people in high-income countries and the high earners of medium-income countries can globe trot, it is a massive increase.
As for the "colonial" aspect, Japan is not exactly a poor country. It is, in fact, a rather expensive destination (a bit less now because the Yen is cheap) and you will certainly not be seen as an aristocratic elite. You will be respected as a guest because that's how Japan works, but there is a line and it will become very clear if you ever attempt to cross it.
I think that "colonial style" tourism is on the decline, simply because the world is developing and what used to be poor countries now do very well by themselves. They will still accept your money though.
> It used to be the case, now the majority of the people in high-income countries and the high earners of medium-income countries can globe trot, it is a massive increase.
Except that is still a ~20% minority at the top. And worse, they can only trot by gentrifying cheaper locations - they can't trot in central London, Ottawa, or Japan, bar a few who are much richer.
> As for the "colonial" aspect, Japan is not exactly a poor country
This new colonization phenomenon doesnt have much to do with those. Foreigners who earn more than their peers of equivalent level come into a country and they eventually push those, even including the white collars, out of their own cities by gentrifying them through long term or short term rentals, and especially through buying properties to live in or for 'investment' (speculation, really). This happened in Lisbon, Barcelona, Madrid, and is now happening in Valencia. It will inevitably happen in Japan. The only reason it has not happened yet is that Japan's digital nomad visa is just 6 months. If it starts giving out a year or more, you will see how fast the colonization will happen. It took only 2 years for Spain. Japan would likely be a more popular destination, so it could happen faster.
Yes! Let's make it only for the rich or better yet, why not just the oligarchs?
Is the pollution and co2 production worth it so more people can take photos in front of things? Maybe it is, maybe it isnt.
> Is the pollution and co2 production worth it so more people can take photos in front of things?
Taking photos in front of things is not, but that is not the only reason people travel.
Or also for the "middle" class but as an expensive treat that would have been chosen over something else, like it used to be. After all the environmental cost of a 20€ EasyJet ticket isn't nothing.
Well, problem here is that airlines are under control of national regulatory agencies while flying internationally. Sure, a mandate of say, drastically improving comfort levels by making something like an old-style business class seat (38" pitch recliner, 4 abreast in a narrowbody) the absolute allowed minimum - could work: it will make passengers happier, reduce air rage, and lift prices to the level that somewhat curbs overtourism. But it's impossible to introduce because if one nation does so it will simply make their airlines uncompetitive abroad.
Taxing aviation fuel seems like a reasonable start.
Same problem here. "Just give airlines of nations that don't tax fuel, a boost at the expense of your own ones".
How far do you want to take that? The oligarchs can fly back and forth to Japan every week, should the air fare be so cheap that everyone can do that?
That’s a fair counter point, but I’m just saying that it did have negative consequences and we might want to consider it. It’s kinda crazy you can sometimes fly 6000 km for less than a few round trip train tickets between London and Edinburgh.
I wonder if Americans’ pitifully short vacation allowance paired with high incomes is an issue. If you’re going to Japan for a week you’re likely to only hit a few top attractions, I imagine.
Perhaps it would help to frame the problem as domestic travel being too expensive as opposed to international travel being too cheap. By the way, overtourism is not a "there's too many Americans/Europeans who can afford vacations" problem, most tourists in Japan are from nearby East Asian countries. In fact, the share of tourists to Japan who come from the US and Europe has declined in recent years.
Another is the numeric ratings on reviews on various restaurants and shops. The top scored places are often overwhelmed. An AirBNB operator (in the US) told me she much prefers one of the two bakeries near her, but her guests go to the other one because "it had a better Yelp rating." It was 4.5 vs 4.4 aka random.
I walked the Kumano Kodo after reading Craig's essay about it. I like to think I was one of the 15% he talks about here. One of these days I'll go back to Japan and I'll make sure to go to Morioka.
My favorite line in this article:
> I’ve come to see overtourism as a kind of natural disaster. How can you get angry at the earth for having an earthquake?
Seems like a long winded version of "No one goes there anymore anyways, its too crowded".
How can you have "its too crowded" and "no one goes there" at the same time?
It's meant to be humorous.
Haha makes sense
> So why do people open small shops? For any number of reasons, but my favorite is: They have a strong opinion about how some aspect of a business should be run, and they want to double down on it....That singular thing can drive an initial impulse, but small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars. That — community — is probably the biggest asset of small business ownership. And the quickest way to kill community (perhaps the most valuable gift for running a small business) is to go viral in a damaging way.
> Pour out a cold brew for small shops with giant lines of transient tourists.
> "James told me about another friend who owns a cocktail bar in Kyoto that was TikToked. She had recently stopped by and found him in tears. The only reason he opened the bar, he said, was so locals and friends like her would come. Now, all he had were customers he couldn’t talk to."
One possible interpretation of TFA is that "small shops" only want to allow certain people to enter and not others.
I wonder if some form of private club would be more appropriate.
I just got back from Japan, and even though it wasn’t peak season, the effects of overtourism were immediately apparent.
The main driver seems to be social media, obviously not unique to Japan but is really blatant. Tourists were chasing selfies and videos at iconic locations they’d seen online, rarely venturing beyond those well-known spots. This creates heavy congestion and puts strain on specific neighborhoods and landmarks. In the West, TikTok appears to be the biggest influence; among Chinese tourists, the app Xiaohongshu (Rednote) by plays a similar role. The result is a tourism culture shaped less by genuine interest or curiosity and more by curated photo ops.
Japan faces unique challenges in managing the surge in tourism. Despite the modern and cosmopolitan feel of its cities, the culture remains markedly different: socially conservative and culturally illiberal. Xenophobia and racial bias are not uncommon, and nationalist political voices have increasingly framed tourists as scapegoats for a range of domestic issues. At the same time, the country lacks sufficient infrastructure to support the growing number of visitors. In Kyoto, for example, the city’s bus system is frequently overwhelmed…you could almost argue that separate systems for locals and tourists are needed.
Many tourists also appear unprepared, I admittedly was completely unprepared for the weather. Japan is not an easy place to navigate culturally, and some visitors behave with surprising ignorance or entitlement, especially at temples and shrines. There’s a tendency to treat the country like a kind of Disneyland, an exoticized backdrop for social media content, rather than a living culture with its own rules, rhythms, and expectations. This contributes to growing resentment, particularly in a society where individuals are often viewed in terms of the groups they represent. One tourist’s behavior can easily become a reflection on all.
There’s no easy solution. But it’s clear that both travelers and destinations need to rethink their relationship. Tourism should be approached with more awareness, humility, and a willingness to engage with complexity, not just consume it.
> The result is a tourism culture shaped less by genuine interest or curiosity and more by curated photo ops
Well said, but definitely not unique to Japan. Sadly, I notice this almost everywhere I go anymore. It's also why you read about someone falling down a cliff or waterfall taking a selfie once or twice a year now.
I don't have any idea what the solution is, but it definitely makes most sights worth seeing less enjoyable now.
The cynic in me thinks that destinations/countries are going to have to pay an influencer tax and have a strong social media policy that works to direct/redirect and educate potential tourists. Japan needs to start spreading tourism a bit more evenly across the country. They could probably work with hotels to use pricing to even out visitors. But you’re right, this is a huge problem that goes well beyond Japan.
Have to say that I'm shocked that the local government hasn't cracked down on the Mario Kart stuff.
They're starting to ban it. Japan's wheels of government move slowly, but they tend to be effective when they do move.
I agree. These go-karts are only street legal vehicles if the government agrees that they are street legal. If the government passes a rule that says go-karts are not street legal, they can be confiscated and destroyed as soon as they are spotted by the police. It seems that this problem could be easily solved.
It's happened on and off over the years, and at one point Nintendo took legal action against the business itself. It's just an annoyingly persistent tourist trap.
I've traveled to Japan twice in the last 6 years; once pre-pandemic in 2019, and again in 2023, both times in the Fall. It is unbelievable how tourism has exploded there in such a short amount of time, and I thought it was bad in 2019. Areas that were quiet and mostly traversable in 2019 were impossible to navigate with the crowds four years later.
I've been to other big touristy hotspots like Rome and Venice, but overtourism in Tokyo/Kyoto was more noticeable to me, perhaps because of the culture (loud groups of tourists entering quiet orderly establishments). I recall in 2019 going to teamLab Tokyo, and there was a large group of Western tourists who had removed their shoes and were lying on the ground in the mirror room.
> Another visitor was spending a leisurely week in Morioka alone before heading to Fukuoka for a few months.
Oh hey, that was me! Small (internet) world, huh :)
There are a ton of articles about over-tourism in Japan lately, and after thinking about it for awhile, I think you can boil it down to two things other than the obvious (the yen losing value, etc.)
1. The extreme success of Japanese culture via media, specifically abroad. This wasn't just a thing that happened accidentally, it was in some sense planned for decades. See for example the Cool Japan initiative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan
I haven't been to Korea, but I imagine that their tourism numbers have dramatically increased in the last decade due to k-pop, k-dramas, Squid Game, etc. – all of which have been deliberately used to promote the country's culture abroad.
2. Japan is one of the few countries in the world which has navigated modernity without essentially just becoming Westernized. Sure, there are many Western chains and technologies there, but there are also tons of social practices, attitudes, and other things which are very different from the Western world. Or at least they have the appearance of being very different to Western eyes.
This is why there are constantly weird thing in Japan articles on Reddit and HN: it's a place that has managed to navigate its own path in the modern world, rather than just adopting the typical neoliberal homogeneity route.
I visited in 2007 and 2024 and the weird is still there, but some of the “this place is at the absolute cutting edge of cool and tech and weird” is gone. The most disappointing thing was seeing how much of the cutting edge “PC” and electronics culture was gone from Akihabara (presumably it all went to Shenzhen) and how everything sold there is just older gaming systems (did not stop us from purchasing a beautiful Nintendo Famicom.) I’m sure there are some interesting things happening that will be cool in a decade, but it’s definitely a slightly different place.
There's a meme that Japan entered the 2000s in the 80s and then just stayed there.
My first trip was in 2017, but even between then and the second trip in 2022, I could tell Akiba lost even more of its electronics culture. I was there last December and helped someone build a PC. At least for "standard" stuff you can get by, though for sourcing many things the best solution was often, somewhat sadly, Amazon JP. For things like GPUs you had to double-check you're buying new, not used, because shops will display both sometimes in the same case. All prices were somewhat more than what it'd cost to import from the US + pay taxes on that. (Except for canon camera batteries, I picked up an extra one on one of my trips and was surprised how much cheaper it was.)
For another of my own purchases, I needed to get some extra laptop RAM to finish a graphics project locally as my home machine I was remoting to was acting up. It was a struggle finding any place with them in stock at all, in or outside Akiba, and then those in sizes greater than 4 GB. And when I did, I still had to talk to someone at the counter, who pulled out a shoebox of assorted brands and sizes. Just so bizarre compared to almost every other component from HDDs to SSDs to USB sticks and more being on public walls/racks to pick over -- at worst there'd be just a rack of tags and you select the product by tag and the person at the counter will get it when you check out. Didn't have that at all for laptop RAM. I found a place at last that had a single 16 GB stick I could use, which at least helped me make progress until Amazon could get a second one to me and let me stop toeing the edge of maxing out my memory.
The e-markets in China have also reduced a lot. The rise of online shopping killed made them less necessary for their original purposes.
The weird thing in Japan for me was a book store in Tokyo, filled by men at 2am, all reading comics books.
Strongly disagree with #2. I think every foreigner who visits the big Japanese cities gets charmed by its quirky land use and small shops, but the reality of Japan is that most things are owned by conglomerates and that depopulation means that increasingly blue collar work is being done by immigrants (sound familiar?) Japanese lifestyle resembles America from the 2000s in broad strokes. China and India still have a lot of their older culture present. Indians often dress in clothing that's recognizably non-Western in every day situations and both countries have food cultures that are pretty different from the West.
Japan is certainly Westernised, hentai notwithstanding.
Japan is westernized in some ways but it managed to keep something original to Japanese culture that you can't find otherplace.
He did mention the hentai
>neoliberal homogeneity route
I'm not sure how Japan is not neoliberal or how this label relates to their culture. I think you are conflating neoliberalism with western pop culture more broadly?
Maybe neoliberal was a bad word choice. I basically just mean that many “modern” places in the world have the same generic look to them, whether you’re in Dubai or New York or Warsaw. Japan also has these places, but somehow they are a bit more uniquely Japanese than in most other places (for example, the phenomenon of salarymen.)
Warsaw and New York absolutely do not have the same look to them. (Haven’t been to Dubai to compare.)
I didn't say the cities look the same, I said many modern places in them do. And yes, for example Hudson Yards looks quite similar to a typical mall in Warsaw (e.g., the main one by the train station.) There is nothing about either mall that screams "this is a unique place."
I don’t think many people judge cities by their malls.
There's undoubtedly a cohort of tourists that come to Japan with the "Disneyland" mindset, and I agree that some sort of government-level change is needed to curb abuse. But I would like to believe these folks are in the minority.
I think a greater proportion of the tourist population are individuals that visit Japan and maybe haven't done enough research, or are just unaware of norms here. Not understanding where to queue, how to order, navigate public transport, what to do at a temple, onsen, etc. This group isn't the 15% of "Best in Class tourists" Craig writes about, but rather the 75% that want to be respectful and don't know any better.
Many locals/expats will see this group and look down in disdain (or lament about them in a blog post...), but why don't more people just ask if they need help? It takes little effort to point someone in the right direction, and if it helps them better understand the country it's a win-win for both tourists and residents alike.
I feel like people love to talk about how considerate Japanese culture is, but don't care to practice it themselves when given the chance.
I've been aware of Craig Mod from a distance for a while, and from what I've seen of his books and other works, he's very thoughtful and deeply sensitive to culture, but somehow it seems pretty hypocritical to write this when his most recent book is essentially a travelogue about obscure places in Japan. Of course the Tik Tok generation is not likely to be reading his books, but he is in effect adding to the load on locations which may not be ready for them.
I was in Japan in 1996 back when a Lonely Planet guidebook was the best authentic reference for western travelers. People decried guidebooks' impact then and now. It's hard to do travel ethically in places that aren't ready for it. This isn't just about Tik Tok. As individuals, we each have to consider our impact culturally, economically, and environmentally.
The solution isn't no tourism, because tourism encourages more global awareness and cross-cultural communication. It also adds to the economy. However, places that are filled with tourists and no locals aren't much fun for most people, local or tourist. It has to be a balance.
> but in my opinion, the most rewarding point of travelling is: to sit with, and spend time with The Other ...
I didn't grow up with grandparents, so I have a natural affinity for grandmas. Some of my most cherished moments have been interacting with old ladies in places like Cinque Terre, Portofino, Brussels, Tokyo, NYC etc. I like to walk around the neighborhoods, off the beaten track, and if I get a chance to interact with an old lady, even better.
my favorite food from my visit was a mochi stand in Fujisawa station. it was a station of tables and had a sign that said MOCHI all over it
i wanted to give it a review but it didnt exist on google maps and it was even in a blind spot of Google street view inside Fujisawa
been thinking for a few years how crazy it was that my favorite place on our 10 day trip was completely invisible online in 2024. havent checked back recently but now i hope its still invisible online
they suffering from success
If Japan wants to limit tourists, they can. If they don't, it is because they truly don't want the tradeoff.
I loved going to Japan in 2011, when it was still mainly just weebs doing tourism and they were relatively very few and quite harmless. I would not go today, because I neither want to see nor contribute to this problem.
I'll come back when the idiots settle down. Meanwhile, my wife wants to see France and Scotland.
Overtourism is such a comical exaggeration, NYC gets twice as many international visitors annually as Tokyo, with less local population, but doesn’t feel the need to discriminate against tourists at all basically
Visiting Japan in 2025 definitely had a different vibe than my 2010s visits. First of all, so many more foreigners, and multiple western languages overheard nearly anywhere I went.
And clearly some locals fairly annoyed by it, such that some weren't interested in engaging with a basic level Japanese speaker/listener like me.
I have basic enough speaking/reading/(and less so listening) ability to previously navigate smaller cities with little English speaking, pick a restaurant / order some food, make small talk with taxi drivers, and entertain middle aged locals who don't see a lot of westerners.
I also saw a lot more restaurants that had extremely limited set course only menus for non-japanese speakers, and no patience for someone with non-fluency to try the Japanese menu.
This trip I felt I could not get out of Tokyo fast enough. Parts of it just felt like every other tier 1 global city, and a passive aggressive unwelcomeness that wasn't to the level of Barcelona, but clearly different than 15 years ago.
Social media is why we can't have nice things
I left Austin in 2020 and the social-media-powered tourism boom there from 2010 on was insane. In a decade, the entire east side of the city went from low income black and hispanic families to airbnbs and sterile cinder-block condos and bars. Downtown went from old dive bars and music venues in old brick buildings to high-price-but-not-high-quality residential high-rises and FAANG skyscrapers. South Congress went from kitschy shops and local restaurants to glass and steel instagram food factories. All the things I loved about it in the early 2000s are gone.
I feel like this one is a mixed bag. I would be very annoyed if my every day life was disrupted by tourists, especially like in the train stop example, and losing local businesses and attractions to outsiders is terrible. I don't want to minimize these issues at all, so to be clear, the rest of this post is just me wondering about the right thing to do while also still getting to visit interesting locations.
I feel like this article really lays it on thick to make tourists seem like vapid TikTokers. I think the reality is more nuanced. We can't pretend that every person in the world has the same upbringing, morals, and values. There are people in the US who park their grocery cart in the middle of the aisle, and I have had plenty of tourists from other countries who just stop as soon as they enter a room and gum up the whole business. But plenty of tourists DON'T do this, and plenty of locals ALSO DO THIS. 85% of tourists are not stopping the middle of roads for selfies constantly.
And the other parts feel like gatekeeping. Oh, you only get a few days off a year and can only afford cheap accommodations? You are contributing to the death of small business and the enshittification of our shining cities. If you can't afford to spend more time in fewer places, further off the beaten path (sometimes costing more/having fewer affordable options) then you are a bad traveler. Why do I have to visit locations I have never heard about in order to be considered good? How do I even find them if I can only be in a location for a short time?
It just feels like a lose lose situation as a traveler. I read about the Roman Empire, I've seen pictures of the Italian cathedrals, I've watched documentaries about Pompeii, and I've drank Tuscan wine, so I should... go visit some small town for 2 weeks with very little tourist presence, and no one speaks my language? I'm not allowed to enjoy the cultural monuments of these countries?
Feels like the only winning move is not to play.
I don't understand how you can portray these small-business owners as some helpless lambs, powerless against tourists. I can think of many ways to stop tourists from patronising an establishment. But of course (that one cocktail bar owner notwithstanding), most businesses operate for profit, and lap that money up.
Really, it seems to me like this essay is more about turning up your nose that some people are not enjoying Japan the "right" way.
Let's set the mood with a famous story.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ivan-bunin/short-fiction/s...
I'm sympathetic to most of the article but I really dislike when articles like this slip in things like "This is most readily evident in, say, the Mario Kart scourge of Tokyo".
You can just ban those karts! It's not tourists fault that you haven't.
“If you can’t afford to spend a month touring Tōhoku you shouldn’t be traveling”.
I think this is just overblown?
I went to Japan in 2019, before the pandemic, the previous peak and not far off the current numbers of tourists.
Maybe I went at a quiet time, but white people were as rare as hens teeth. There are 37 million a year. Australia has 7 million and Sydney is a lot smaller than Tokyo. There's way more Japanese tourists in Japan than foreigners, every tourist trap I saw was jam packed with locals.
I think it's all just a tiny handful of small places that are tiktok famous. This is not a Japan problem, it's a problem for a single conbini near Fuji and a couple of bars.
There's also a bunch of social media outrage over a handful of rude tourists. This is not a problem with Japan, it's a made-up problem on social media.
Go to the Vatican or Bali if you want to see a tourist problem.
Show me a picture of Americans overrunning Ueno Park or Disney and I'll change my mind, but I've never seen a picture of a large number of foreign tourists in Japan, just a few tourists being annoying, with almost everyone around them being Japanese.
> Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade.
That may be true in Manhattan, but Japan has amazing, lovable chains. The fact that you are never far from a 7-Eleven, Family Mart, Coco Ichibanya, or Ichiran (and they are often open late if not 24 hours) is one of my favorite parts of Japan.
And the shopping is pretty good. A Muji flagship store just has a lot of things to buy that you aren’t going to find in a downtown Portland or Paris Muji.
Don't forget Yoshinoya, Sukiya, or Cafe Gusto.
This seems to be be becoming an increasing problem in many places, there are a number of protests that have popped up in Madrid, Venice, Hawaii, Mexico City, Lisbon...
I can't blame them really, I've been kind of disgusted by the behavior of tourists I've seen in some places to the point where I think I won't travel much to major cities any more. What happened to trying to blend in?
“It’s bad for my business that I now have lots of customers who aren’t my preferred race/nationality” seems a wild thing to say, because the reality is that the customers stop coming not because of “tourists”, but because they don’t like “foreigners“.
Cities are not amusement parks
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To the "NPCs", those same places are completely new, they're actually all different people with different experiences of the world.
Someone's jealous
Jealous of what. I am spaniard. I outearn all the tourists. Yet tourism is destroying Spain.
Barcelona is crazy though.
Also quite beautiful.
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Fascinating.
I have no idea what the fascination with Japan, I must have missed something.
A beautiful set of volcanic islands with extremely polite natives, rich in art, culture and history and practically zero crime is not for everyone.
Nah you're probably just cooler than everyone else
Very successful cultural exports in the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s. Now the kids who grew up in that era are young adults and have some money.
There are many low(ish) crime, polite, picturesque destinations, rich in art, culture, and history, but Kazakhstan never exported anime.
It's no anime, but who doesn't think of Kazakhstan every time they bite an apple?
I doubt most people even know why one might think about Kazakhstan when biting into an apple.
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A big part of their success today is embracing globalism, beginning with the Westernization effort in the Meiji era and continuing into the present era with top Japanese firms becoming multinational, eg Nintendo/Sony of America, Toyota opening plants in the US, etc.
Communism, on the other hand, seems to have led to more isolation in the Cold War era, and is also another way to cultivate some interesting cultural identity, although not necessarily the culture you want.
lol, yes by globalists I was totally referring to whether Nintendo is national or international.
Oh, I guess you were talking about Jews then.