One consequence of "Japanese hospitality" being widely known is that there are now swathes of tourists visiting with the expectation of getting their own "magical experience".
Some people living in places that have become tourist areas are putting up signs announcing their home toilets are not for public use. Because apparently some tourists have said things like "When I needed to use the bathroom and there was nowhere else around, I knocked on a random person's door and they were kind enough to let me use it!" So now a non-zero number of people go there with the expectation that they can (and possibly should) do the same.
Tourists used to be a novelty to Japanese. Now with over 40 million projected for this year, a massive rise from about 6 million in 2012, a large number of them taking extended vacations (in contrast to Euros who might hop a border for a weekend and boost tourist counts quickly), people are getting quickly burnt out with the entitlement many of them exhibit. To tourists, it's a magical, unique vacation and they must have the Ghibli experience someone else posted about. To locals, countless people are harassing you everyday demanding unreasonable things.
Also note that the article is about a guesthouse. It is a business and you pay for the service. It is not about getting inside random people homes because whoever is living there is too polite to kick you out.
The old lady in the article is so kind and polite because she respects you as a customer, takes pride in her job, and wants you to feel at ease. Service tradition really is something there. But don't get things wrong, it is still a business relationship.
> Some people living in places that have become tourist areas are putting up signs announcing their home toilets are not for public use.
I read that on r/Tokyo Reddit as well a while back. Quite shocking. It was some person complaining living near a large public park (possibly Shinjuku or Inokashira) about his personal premises being violated because toilet queues were quite long & people kept knocking at their door. Not sure if we both are referring to the same incident?
[For reference to others, there are enough portable toilets in these public parks to deal with tourist surge, but obviously no arrangement can handle 25000+ visitors everyday without having queues]
More ridiculous stories have popped up once in a while in japan tourist subreddits. This sakura blossom season, a British tourist couple were seeking legal recourse to avoid detention and move back to their home country ASAP after running over an elderly woman with the rental car. Some people probably don't take consequences in a tourist destination seriously.
> Nearly all the smaller countries would waive even up to a minister-counsellor’s immunity in that scenario.
Sadly, if the UK's experience is anything to go by, if it is a US government worker / diplomat they would be on the first plane home[1].
I fear it would be no different in Japan. The US would get away with it. Even more so in the Trump era where he would probably make some dumb threats to the country to force their hand.
Well yeah that’s why I said smaller countries… the big countries have minister-counsellors, sometimes even attaches, that are really significant people, and might get away with it.
Especially if it’s a cover for their actual position with a much higher rank.
I also think tourists, as a class, tend to be more entitled than others. They usually have money and also having spent money, they expect hospitality on their terms (realistically or not).
FWIW, I had a recent trip to Japan before news of issues with tourists, and I would describe my experience as "magical", not because of generosity of strangers though. None was needed. Naoshima in particular is magical on its own.
Italy is a lot like most places in the EU where tourists visit a few Instagram sites and nothing else. I think it’s incorrect to say it’s ruining southern Italy when the reality is it’s a few areas.
I was just at the Louvre where the wing with the Mona Lisa was overrun - the busiest I’ve ever seen it. The other wings were almost ghost towns.
I understand that when people travel they want to see the highlights, but I wish they would also explore a bit.
> Even if you never go to McDonalds at home, visit the McDonalds on your travels.
Eh?
> If you detect slightly more people moving in one direction over another, follow them. If you keep following this “gradient” of human movement, you will eventually land on something interesting—a market, a parade, a birthday party, an outdoor dance, a festival.
Or, y'know, a train station or something.
I'm slightly unsure whether this is parody or not.
The McDonalds part isn't as weird as it sounds. Almost anywhere outside the US, it's very different and usually much better, and they redesign portions of the menu for the local cuisine (e.g. there's teriyaki burgers and fillet-o-shrimp in Japan, a lot of veg options in India). I wouldn't make it a priority, but it's really interesting to see at least and not an expensive or long sidetrip. It's definitely a more "American" perspective, but there's a good reason.
The more I interact with people the less I think of an average person. Case in point - my neighborhood has a huge trash problem. People just dump it on the street. Why some communities consider that normal behavior is beyond me.
Those humans are creatures and lack a bit of that which characterizes civilization. They exist in all countries and within all ethnicities, sometimes to varying degrees, but they are everywhere.
A failure of inculturation. By default, humans are just clever apes. Language and culture transforms us into thinking beings that inhabit a worldview beyond the sensorium, of potentials, of possibilities, of hidden truths.
The inculturated self is meant to be in charge of the animal self. We see this in the inherent duality presented in language: “self control” implying a controller and one to be controlled; getting in in touch with yourself, implying a self and an estranged self… there are lots of these that explicitly call out the duality of the human experience.
This internal hierarchy is instilled in childhood with varying degrees of success. Some fail almost completely and live a life of reactivity, conspicuously devoid of consequential consideration. Some revert to the animal self through drug addiction. There are many maladies to describe the failure of character that is seen when inculturation breaks down.
Pre-covid/covid times were great with 8000 yen business hotels in Tokyo. Capsule hotels were meant for salarymen and available for sub-3000. Now they're also part of the country-sized amusement park experience. Capsule hotels now easily exceed 10000 yen and business hotels can be over 30000 (I've seen 45000 for shabby places that would've been half empty pre-covid).
Wages are also not moving and locals are becoming second class citizens in their own country and rapidly. Add it to the entitlement everyone has and the "hospitality" that used to be found everywhere is now rapidly and noticeably going away. People don't know just how different it was before the tourism boom.
That expensive? I've been checking prices this past weeks and I've seen prices around 8-10000 yen for regular hotels.
Got 5 nights in Asakusa for ¥43000 (in a hotel that's a bit more tourist oriented), and also got offered by Smar-EX a combo of Nozomi round ticket to Kyoto and three nights there in what looked like a business-hotel for a total of around ¥45000.
But of course, no doubt everything is getting expensive and crowded. I have "almost family" there, and I've been 4 times since 2007 (this next month is going to be my fifth) and the change on tourism was already very noticeable around 2018. And the numbers after COVID went crazy, and the low Yen is helping that too.
And it can be seen on the flight tickets too. Prices went down after the Tohoku tsunami (I remember paying around €470 for a round ticket in December 2012 or so), in August 2015 I paid €750, in August 2018 €780, and this year for July it's ~€1200 for economy and more than €2K for Economy plus (!). I guess that also having to avoid Russia helps raising prices.
I'm worried they're going the same path than here in Spain, where trying to find a room in Madrid or Barcelona for less than 70€ a night usually means having a shared bathroom, or even sleeping in bunk beds in a 8 to 12 person room. Not to talk about the rentals or general real state prices...
Edit: Ah, of course, as GuB-42 says, Rail Pass has doubled. But I guess that due to the low prices the trains were getting crowded and unavailable for locals... It's a bummer, but I'm not mad at all.
It’s not like things have become unbearably expensive though. It’s mostly tourist stuff. I’ll certainly take Japan over the price increases I’ve heard about in the rest of the world.
It’s easy to say that if you aren’t living a normal life here. Grocery receipts are growing faster than they ever have. It’s all small and incremental but enough to nearly double what we spent half a decade ago.
Keep in mind this is a country where new graduate salaries have been unchanging for the past 30 years. Even small rates of inflation is relatively devastating to certain groups.
Why would you suggest that I’m not living a normal life? It’s not like I’m here on an expat package (unfortunately).
The food price increases are noticeable, but even at my 21万 salary when I just got here they wouldn’t have been the end of the world. They’ve increased a lot, but they were also just insanely low before, so even with the increase it still feels reasonable.
I do think it’s heavily dependent on where you go. Some supermarkets are easily 50% more expensive by themselves.
I went to Japan in 2019 and 2024 and didn't notice a significant difference except for things that are clearly for tourists. The biggest one being the Japan Rail Pass, which almost doubled.
An important thing to consider is that the yen is really cheap now, it means lots of tourists because life is cheaper and high prices for imported goods for the locals.
Having come to have known the Japan of the 90s, I was disenchanted enough by my last trip in late 2019 that I haven't made plans to return.
The traveler zones full of English and kitsch had swollen to encompass everywhere within walking distance of the first 6-10 stops out from any major station. The apartment prices out there also remained high, despite how poor and relatively unpopulated the areas were.
And, nostalgically, it was filled with Chinese families that reminded me of the tired, loud, inadvertently rude Americans that stood out 30 years ago. I was surprised to see the formerly silent annoyance of the locals towards them and every other dayhike backpack-wearing, heavily scented foreigner simmer over into someone saying something as they exited the trains more than once. When people couldn't give them their own cars, they turned their backs and give them an obvious wide berth.
Even Kyoto was like this, and I had to travel far enough off the beaten path to find somewhere that didn't feel like either a Japanese theme park or any other international city in the world that I just ended up staying in my family's home village, where only the parents and grandparents hadn't left.
I feel like every word in the title is deceptive: Someone you're renting a room from is not a "stranger", nor is their renting it to you "generosity", nor are you simply "getting by". "Enjoying the hospitality of small guesthouses and private hosts" would be much more accurate.
Im wondering if tourism isnt a net negative? The tourism industry thrives which means people move to that industry, then that industry becomes so big that politicians say the country can’t survive without it, then the culture vanishes . See the coffee shops in Shibuya with majority tourists, their manner is completely different.
One consequence of "Japanese hospitality" being widely known is that there are now swathes of tourists visiting with the expectation of getting their own "magical experience".
Some people living in places that have become tourist areas are putting up signs announcing their home toilets are not for public use. Because apparently some tourists have said things like "When I needed to use the bathroom and there was nowhere else around, I knocked on a random person's door and they were kind enough to let me use it!" So now a non-zero number of people go there with the expectation that they can (and possibly should) do the same.
Tourists used to be a novelty to Japanese. Now with over 40 million projected for this year, a massive rise from about 6 million in 2012, a large number of them taking extended vacations (in contrast to Euros who might hop a border for a weekend and boost tourist counts quickly), people are getting quickly burnt out with the entitlement many of them exhibit. To tourists, it's a magical, unique vacation and they must have the Ghibli experience someone else posted about. To locals, countless people are harassing you everyday demanding unreasonable things.
Also note that the article is about a guesthouse. It is a business and you pay for the service. It is not about getting inside random people homes because whoever is living there is too polite to kick you out.
The old lady in the article is so kind and polite because she respects you as a customer, takes pride in her job, and wants you to feel at ease. Service tradition really is something there. But don't get things wrong, it is still a business relationship.
> Some people living in places that have become tourist areas are putting up signs announcing their home toilets are not for public use.
I read that on r/Tokyo Reddit as well a while back. Quite shocking. It was some person complaining living near a large public park (possibly Shinjuku or Inokashira) about his personal premises being violated because toilet queues were quite long & people kept knocking at their door. Not sure if we both are referring to the same incident?
[For reference to others, there are enough portable toilets in these public parks to deal with tourist surge, but obviously no arrangement can handle 25000+ visitors everyday without having queues]
More ridiculous stories have popped up once in a while in japan tourist subreddits. This sakura blossom season, a British tourist couple were seeking legal recourse to avoid detention and move back to their home country ASAP after running over an elderly woman with the rental car. Some people probably don't take consequences in a tourist destination seriously.
The latter case sounds more like mental derangement under stress.
I really doubt even lower ranking actual diplomats could reasonably expect to get away with running over an elderly Japanese grandma in Japan.
Nearly all the smaller countries would waive even up to a minister-counsellor’s immunity in that scenario.
Your skepticism is wrong in this case.
https://unseen-japan.com/ridge-alkonis-release-japan-reacts/
Your the third to seemingly not read my comment?
Obviously the USA is not in the category of smaller countries.
And it seems irrelevant anyways, military have different norms from diplomats.
19 year old solder, pardoned https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jennifer_Laude
How does this relate to my comment?
> Nearly all the smaller countries would waive even up to a minister-counsellor’s immunity in that scenario.
Sadly, if the UK's experience is anything to go by, if it is a US government worker / diplomat they would be on the first plane home[1].
I fear it would be no different in Japan. The US would get away with it. Even more so in the Trump era where he would probably make some dumb threats to the country to force their hand.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
Well yeah that’s why I said smaller countries… the big countries have minister-counsellors, sometimes even attaches, that are really significant people, and might get away with it.
Especially if it’s a cover for their actual position with a much higher rank.
So laws are for ordinary folk?
She was clearly an intelligence officer not a low level diplomat or staffer
tourists visiting with the expectation of getting their own "magical experience".
Having unrealistic expectations go unfulfilled sounds like what a lot of Japanese tourists feel about Paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
I also think tourists, as a class, tend to be more entitled than others. They usually have money and also having spent money, they expect hospitality on their terms (realistically or not).
FWIW, I had a recent trip to Japan before news of issues with tourists, and I would describe my experience as "magical", not because of generosity of strangers though. None was needed. Naoshima in particular is magical on its own.
Tourism reliably destroys places. Southern Italy is another example where the sheer masses of tourists have completely ruined a whole area.
Italy is a lot like most places in the EU where tourists visit a few Instagram sites and nothing else. I think it’s incorrect to say it’s ruining southern Italy when the reality is it’s a few areas.
I was just at the Louvre where the wing with the Mona Lisa was overrun - the busiest I’ve ever seen it. The other wings were almost ghost towns.
I understand that when people travel they want to see the highlights, but I wish they would also explore a bit.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/surging-travel-europe-spik...
The Mona Lisa gets over run, while the room holding the the code of Hammurabi(!!!) is basically deserted.
I didn't even know they had the code of Hammurabi. Now I want to see it.
When I tried to go recently I believe that room was closed for refurbishment :(
> I didn't even know they had the code of Hammurabi. Now I want to see it.
Eh, it looks like perl to me.
Kek
I remember going to the Louvre into the room with a Mona Lisa and being surprised by two things:
- How small the actual painting is, I always imagined it to be bigger.
- And the sea of heads between the entrance and the panting, there was no way I could get to the front to admire it up close.
The rest of the museum though was lovely to walk around in.
Southern Italy has nothing else to offer, so it's either that or live off the rest of the country. (Yes, I know many would be happy to just do that)
Nothing else except for what?
Except for tourism. Read the context of my message.
Nah, I just read your context. Have fun baiting somewhere else.
OMG, This reminds me of the ridiculous "50 years of travel tips" that showed up on HN a few months back
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066720
Including gems such as:
-have your Uber driver take you to his mother's house so she'll cook for you
-crash a wedding, you'll be the "celebrity guest"
> Even if you never go to McDonalds at home, visit the McDonalds on your travels.
Eh?
> If you detect slightly more people moving in one direction over another, follow them. If you keep following this “gradient” of human movement, you will eventually land on something interesting—a market, a parade, a birthday party, an outdoor dance, a festival.
Or, y'know, a train station or something.
I'm slightly unsure whether this is parody or not.
The McDonalds part isn't as weird as it sounds. Almost anywhere outside the US, it's very different and usually much better, and they redesign portions of the menu for the local cuisine (e.g. there's teriyaki burgers and fillet-o-shrimp in Japan, a lot of veg options in India). I wouldn't make it a priority, but it's really interesting to see at least and not an expensive or long sidetrip. It's definitely a more "American" perspective, but there's a good reason.
almost all McDonalds in my country (not US) are boring and have nothing scream about my country.
The usual this is why we can't have nice things. Hospitality only thrives when it is not abused as an expectation rather than a privilege.
The more I interact with people the less I think of an average person. Case in point - my neighborhood has a huge trash problem. People just dump it on the street. Why some communities consider that normal behavior is beyond me.
> Why some communities consider that normal behavior is beyond me.
Because they are not real communities. People living in the same place but with no sense of connection or shared identity or shared interests.
Those humans are creatures and lack a bit of that which characterizes civilization. They exist in all countries and within all ethnicities, sometimes to varying degrees, but they are everywhere.
A failure of inculturation. By default, humans are just clever apes. Language and culture transforms us into thinking beings that inhabit a worldview beyond the sensorium, of potentials, of possibilities, of hidden truths.
The inculturated self is meant to be in charge of the animal self. We see this in the inherent duality presented in language: “self control” implying a controller and one to be controlled; getting in in touch with yourself, implying a self and an estranged self… there are lots of these that explicitly call out the duality of the human experience.
This internal hierarchy is instilled in childhood with varying degrees of success. Some fail almost completely and live a life of reactivity, conspicuously devoid of consequential consideration. Some revert to the animal self through drug addiction. There are many maladies to describe the failure of character that is seen when inculturation breaks down.
Don't forget that "tourists" also get stereotyped. There are respecting, caring and careful tourists, who don't try to overuse the hospitality.
Also, everything has become absurdly expensive for the locals. During covid you could often find a hotel for 10,000 yen.
Pre-covid/covid times were great with 8000 yen business hotels in Tokyo. Capsule hotels were meant for salarymen and available for sub-3000. Now they're also part of the country-sized amusement park experience. Capsule hotels now easily exceed 10000 yen and business hotels can be over 30000 (I've seen 45000 for shabby places that would've been half empty pre-covid).
Wages are also not moving and locals are becoming second class citizens in their own country and rapidly. Add it to the entitlement everyone has and the "hospitality" that used to be found everywhere is now rapidly and noticeably going away. People don't know just how different it was before the tourism boom.
That expensive? I've been checking prices this past weeks and I've seen prices around 8-10000 yen for regular hotels.
Got 5 nights in Asakusa for ¥43000 (in a hotel that's a bit more tourist oriented), and also got offered by Smar-EX a combo of Nozomi round ticket to Kyoto and three nights there in what looked like a business-hotel for a total of around ¥45000.
But of course, no doubt everything is getting expensive and crowded. I have "almost family" there, and I've been 4 times since 2007 (this next month is going to be my fifth) and the change on tourism was already very noticeable around 2018. And the numbers after COVID went crazy, and the low Yen is helping that too.
And it can be seen on the flight tickets too. Prices went down after the Tohoku tsunami (I remember paying around €470 for a round ticket in December 2012 or so), in August 2015 I paid €750, in August 2018 €780, and this year for July it's ~€1200 for economy and more than €2K for Economy plus (!). I guess that also having to avoid Russia helps raising prices.
I'm worried they're going the same path than here in Spain, where trying to find a room in Madrid or Barcelona for less than 70€ a night usually means having a shared bathroom, or even sleeping in bunk beds in a 8 to 12 person room. Not to talk about the rentals or general real state prices...
Edit: Ah, of course, as GuB-42 says, Rail Pass has doubled. But I guess that due to the low prices the trains were getting crowded and unavailable for locals... It's a bummer, but I'm not mad at all.
It’s not like things have become unbearably expensive though. It’s mostly tourist stuff. I’ll certainly take Japan over the price increases I’ve heard about in the rest of the world.
It’s easy to say that if you aren’t living a normal life here. Grocery receipts are growing faster than they ever have. It’s all small and incremental but enough to nearly double what we spent half a decade ago.
Keep in mind this is a country where new graduate salaries have been unchanging for the past 30 years. Even small rates of inflation is relatively devastating to certain groups.
Why would you suggest that I’m not living a normal life? It’s not like I’m here on an expat package (unfortunately).
The food price increases are noticeable, but even at my 21万 salary when I just got here they wouldn’t have been the end of the world. They’ve increased a lot, but they were also just insanely low before, so even with the increase it still feels reasonable.
I do think it’s heavily dependent on where you go. Some supermarkets are easily 50% more expensive by themselves.
I went to Japan in 2019 and 2024 and didn't notice a significant difference except for things that are clearly for tourists. The biggest one being the Japan Rail Pass, which almost doubled.
An important thing to consider is that the yen is really cheap now, it means lots of tourists because life is cheaper and high prices for imported goods for the locals.
Having come to have known the Japan of the 90s, I was disenchanted enough by my last trip in late 2019 that I haven't made plans to return.
The traveler zones full of English and kitsch had swollen to encompass everywhere within walking distance of the first 6-10 stops out from any major station. The apartment prices out there also remained high, despite how poor and relatively unpopulated the areas were.
And, nostalgically, it was filled with Chinese families that reminded me of the tired, loud, inadvertently rude Americans that stood out 30 years ago. I was surprised to see the formerly silent annoyance of the locals towards them and every other dayhike backpack-wearing, heavily scented foreigner simmer over into someone saying something as they exited the trains more than once. When people couldn't give them their own cars, they turned their backs and give them an obvious wide berth.
Even Kyoto was like this, and I had to travel far enough off the beaten path to find somewhere that didn't feel like either a Japanese theme park or any other international city in the world that I just ended up staying in my family's home village, where only the parents and grandparents hadn't left.
Should have come during COVID. It was glorious for a few years there.
> So now a non-zero number of people go there with the expectation that they can (and possibly should) do the same.
Is this actually common now?
I feel like every word in the title is deceptive: Someone you're renting a room from is not a "stranger", nor is their renting it to you "generosity", nor are you simply "getting by". "Enjoying the hospitality of small guesthouses and private hosts" would be much more accurate.
Im wondering if tourism isnt a net negative? The tourism industry thrives which means people move to that industry, then that industry becomes so big that politicians say the country can’t survive without it, then the culture vanishes . See the coffee shops in Shibuya with majority tourists, their manner is completely different.