Blame tourist for all your countries problems
Refuse tourist into many Izakayas for decades
Fail to capture the tourist market for decades
Prices rise and force out much of the native population
Try to pivot to the same tourist you told to GTFO and never marketed to
???
FORECLOSURE!
Literal pottery.
Not a smart marketing decision to gatekeep Izakayas from people with money. Many tourist out earn even the most skilled of salarymen by a wide margin. Not marketing to this group has been a massive mistake, foolish.
Extreme nationalism is generally bad for tourism and tourism is generally good for economies. Sad to see Japan slip this way, of course, but they’re not alone.
Okay, good points, but have you had to live where tourists visit?
Yes, both in places that are overcrowed, and places with a healthy tourism industry without overcrowding. If kept at a number that doesn’t disrupt the lives of people trying to do productive work, tourists can even have a positive effect on local life.
An important part of keeping the local population happy is to completely ban airbnb, so people can still afford to live in tourist areas
Sadly only a few big cities are doing that
Housing isn’t really much of an issue in Japan. The actual issie with tourists is overcrowding, bad behavior, and the effect on food prices
That’s the idea, but it’s an idea that is hard to achieve these day, where a single viraled socmed post can turn the place upside down in a matter of days.
Mayday, a very popular Taiwanese band, went to Beijing for their concert recently, and they took a picture of the lead singer in front of a toilet, then soon after the place is flooded with fans lining up to take a picture of a toilet with the similar post, turning locals life into hell.
Some tourism influencer(dry-heave) can just post “this 100 years old shop is closing next month due to the lack of customer” and by next week the street is unwalkable.
It’s an issue that’s hard to solve at time, and if it’s super crowded, they might have a hard time to do any festival because it’s very likely lead to another stampede. They could’ve redirect the tourism to another city though.
Hell, I try not to even visit places where too many tourists visit
I feel like people here read about the few incidents about the xenophobes in Japan and assume we’re treating all the visitors like trash. Why do you think people keep coming here? They have a good time.
Even in the article, it doesn’t say we kick out foreigners from our bars. The foreigners just don’t seem interested in izakaya, which makes sense because so many of them only seem to know about ramen and sushi.
Fuck xenophobes but the comments here are weird.
Are izakaya the bars with all the really good fried stuff and cheap beer? I was in Japan for business and we spent an evening at one such bar and it was an amazing experience.
And yeah I’ve never gotten to go for pleasure, but spending a week in a smaller part of the country really made me want to go back and get to see more of it.
Yeah! They have more than just fried stuff too! If you ever make it to Okinawa in the future, I’d love to take you around. Invitation is open to anyone reading this too.
But you liked the smaller part of the country eh? Okinawa is always busy with tourists… If you don’t mind the long train ride, I went to this place called Tono in Iwate Prefecture. It was such a cute little town.
When I say smaller, I should clarify it was a small industrial city near Nagoya, it’s bigger than I thought, but it’s still somewhere few people outside japan would know about. I also got to see a slightly more urban area as well, but in both locations I was spending all day in a factory and crashing pretty hard from 12 hour jet lag at night lol.
It left me wanting to see and try more, including the touristy stuff, but especially the national parks. The beauty I saw on the shinkansen was amazing. But in general I just enjoy going new places, meeting new people, and seeing and experiencing different cultures. Seeing parts of Japan few people outside the country see was cool even if I wished I got to see some of the more classically impressive stuff too.
Honestly, as a foreigner who has been to Japan many times, I find izakaya to be extremely intimidating. I only go to them if I have someone local to go with.
Why?! On my last Japan trip I visited many izakayas. Great food, friendly people, nice vibes. Yes you have to use Google Translate and still you have no idea what you’re ordering (or sometimes there isn’t really a menu), but who cares, everything is delicious anyway.
I can see how it can be a bit intimidating. Even I don’t go into the hyper local ones because they all have their unique vibes. But I think that’s the same with any small bars elsewhere in the world. I dunno if I’d have the balls to just roll into a tiny pub in rural Ireland without knowing anyone there.
But if you’re in a big city and it looks like a busy place, I’m sure most places will be happy to serve you. I think it would help if you could communicate with them a bit in Japanese but English will do, too. But don’t go in assuming or expecting them to understand and serve you in English.
Just have a few things you wanna eat ready in your head, and ask “[food/drink] onegaishimasu” and you’re good to go! After a few beers I’m sure you’ll stop worrying too much.
I dunno if I’d have the balls to just roll into a tiny pub in rural Ireland without knowing anyone there.
Coincidentally, I did that a couple months ago. 10/10, would recommend. Everyone was super friendly and interested in why we ended up there, in a village of less than 100 people
Alright now I gotta try. My sister worked there for two years and I wanted to visit while she was there, but I couldn’t because of stupid COVID.
It’s been mentioned, but this is just a horrible title for the article. Bottom line: Japanese pubs for locals are struggling, because the locals themselves spend less time and money there —¹ for completely sensible reasons. Yea, they didn’t pivot to catering to foreigners to save their businesses, but there is no mention of xenophobia being the reason. Guess we’ve gotta ragebait somehow 🤷.
¹ This dash has been manually added by a free-range, grass-fed human, using Android’s little known “long press the minus”-technology.²
² You can long press the digits too.
Oh yeah man, it’s absurd. A lot of Asian countries have tried incredibly hard to shield the world from seeing how xenophobic and racist they are. As a black man who lived in China for 5 years, I had way way more openly racist comments and actions towards me than in the US. Like more the first month in China than in the other 40 years in the US. Japan is better, but still pretty bad. They’re just more quiet/restrained about it typically.
That’s something that always bugs me, the rest of the world always tries to shame the US for racism and other related things like they’ve solved a problem. They have, it’s just having 90%+ the same race/skin color of people. Hell China is committing a genocide right now against the Uyghurs because they’re Muslim and look more middle eastern. All while the evil US takes in more legal immigrants than the 2nd. 3rd, 4th, and 5th countries combined. The US definitely isn’t perfect by any stretch, but it isn’t even close to as bad as everyone likes to act like it is, get captain dip shit out of the presidency and you’ve already made a huge improvement.
America as per normal with most things compared to the east. We are but casual normies but China is competitive ranked racism!
also it’s false advertising, they don’t even transport you into an MMORPG world
It’s insane.
They also don’t sell weapons after I spread a rumor that they do. 1/10, would not go back.
I’m pretty sure there’s a truck that’s supposed to take you to them.
I mean, fuck racists and xenophobes but the piece isn’t blaming foreigners for this. At the end, it mentions them not really being attracted to izakaya and, before I lived here, I wasn’t really either. It gives a host of actual reasons in the article linked.
The title is kinda shit since it can be interpreted in more than one way (as in “Japan’s izakaya don’t attract tourists and are going out of business” instead of “japan’s izakaya are going out of business BECAUSE they don’t attract tourists” which is not what I believe the article was saying)
Edit: the actual source won’t load for me. Jin news reports it strictly as rising prices. Yahoo News only mentions they’re not seeing any benefits from the surge of inbound tourism. The rocketnews headline is bad.
Literal pottery:
That’s some hot cordware. Stick a NSFW tag on those fine jugs.
The title isn’t exactly representative of the article. The majority of it is focused on internal reasons for decline, and only the end of the article even mentions tourism which further acknowledges izakayas were never as popular as other restaurants for tourists anyway.
You sound sour that you didn’t get to do everything you wanted as a tourist.
Believe it or not, most people don’t actually want to live in mass-tourism places. They like to preserve their culture and get to live their lives without competing with the whole fucking world for basic resources. Most of the time they simply don’t have other choice and tourism is the only way out of poverty. That doesn’t mean they have to love tourists. Other times is powerful interest groups not even letting locals make that decision.
I would love to visit, but that like $2k+ econo-hell airfare for like 14 hours is a muuuuuuuch bigger barrier.
I was looking at SK attractions recently, food, lodging, all seemed reasonable. But again, absolutely ludicrous prices to get there so like… Guess I’m enjoying pizza and daydreaming about visiting places for another [number of years until I die]. Maybe then I can afford to visit other places.
like $2k+ econo-hell airfare for like 14 hours is a muuuuuuuch bigger barrier.
I feel the same way about South America.
It’s expensive af to go to Brazil or Peru from India.
We recently got round trip flights for $450 through Alaska Air.
flights to east asia are much more expensive from europe, and the cheapest ones were with stopover in one of gulf countries (qatar or uae generally) now you can get direct lufthansa flight over polar circle, but you’ll pay
This is so sad. Izakaya are the best.
Refuse tourist into many Izakayas for decades
I’ve been to probably 100 izakaya and never once been denied. This is the kind of bullshit you say when your views of Japan come from the internet rather than personal experience
