The neighborhood suddenly became a popular spot about two years ago, apparently after a photo taken in a particular angle showing Mount Fuji in the background of a local convenience store, became a social media sensation.
I used to live in Japan and around 50% of Japanese were sweet, friendly, welcoming and accommodating. 35% purposefully ignored or avoided me. And 15% were snide, bitter, racist, exclusionary, angry, rude assholes who can get fucked and/or need to go traveling to see that the world doesn’t revolve around them. One of the sweet ones even shouted down, literally, one of the assholes who harassed me in the subway.
Come at me weebs. Except with “that’s literally any country” bullshit. Japan is unique in this way.
Not a weeb but I think that’s most places if you don’t look or speak like them. I’m American but I’m brown, west coast, bigger cities there’s enough brown people I don’t stand out. Down south, rural small towns, most of Europe those reactions and percentages sound about right.
Okay maybe we experienced different places but at least in Osaka this has not been my experience. The most xenophobia I've experienced ever since I came (a year+ ago) is random restrictions on foreigners at JP Bank (which should honestly rot in hell), but I've definitely not seen anything close to your experience. I'm a young Middle Eastern guy for refence.
I didn’t have that experience in Korea. I encountered maybe two people who seemed to be actively racist or exclusionary against me as a foreigner, so it would be a fraction of a percent.
First, what does that have to do with the article, or was this a response to something accidentally set at parent level?
I've been in Japan for almost 9 years now and that's not really my experience. I've been generally just treated like a normal human as I would anywhere else. Yeah, there are racist fuckheads, but 15% seems like a lot in my experience.
Deliberately making your neighborhood less attractive in order to fend off tourists seems like the worst possible solution to this problem. Why ruin the view for locals?
Because tourists can end up inadvertently majorly fucking over locals in a huuuge way. Barcelona is a good example of what happens when tourism is left unimpeded.
If it's where I think it is, it's not going to block the view for the locals. That's not to say it won't be an eyesore, but locals will often have their own views (and a ton of that town's population lives more outside and inside is mostly just tourist stuff (hotels, onsen, parks, etc.)).
It depends on the place. If there are places that are filled with independently wealthy people, they will try to make their home town as unfriendly as possible to tourists to reduce traffic.
Japan has a strong and well educated middle class that isn‘t reliant enough on tourism to abandon their professions. Of course it’s a big part of their national economy today, but not every town is that needy or greedy for cash. Some just want to live their lives instead of opening and running a souvenir shop for the rest of their days or until tourists stop coming.
The article talks about how tourism is important to the town, literally being built on it, but it’s just this spot is especially bad because tourists are behaving badly by illegally crossing the street and trespassing, among other things.
So many places, even in japan, are dying to get some tourist 💵 attention and these guys just dont give a fuck. So weird, just start a takoyaki stand near the photo spot and rack in the cash. Eventually the fad will die anyway
It‘s a sure way to throw your actual profession down the gutter for what might be a short hype. The mass tourism we see globally today completely dwarfs everything anyone ever anticipated and it sure as hell isn‘t sustainable just by it‘s nature to cannibalize itself.
Another neighbourhood in Kyoto has also thought about outright banning tourists after having to deal with them just walking into people’s homes. The neighbourhood is known for its old architecture. They’re still private homes. It’s nice you think the old houses look cool, you can’t just walk into them.
Wait, what? If I learned one thing from JRPGs is that it’s ok in japanese culture to just barge into someone’s home unannounced, without knocking. Have they been lying to us?
Okay as an expat who's had to deal with this shit firsthand I'm not one to defend Japanese nonsense but I think people are entitled to do whatever they want with their homes. Again, very much not a fan of Japanese xenophobia (Japan Post Bank should rot in hell) but the onus is on the tourists to not enter random people's homes here.
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