Comment by sho_hn

> They idealize Japan through fetishized objects. If you showed the picture of that same coffee shop in Philippines or some south east asian country, nobody in the West would care.

I think you're mostly right on the money on that, but I'll also say it doesn't have to be all fetishization. A lot of US Americans legitimately do live in places where you don't have access to cozy nightlife like that because it's not what the market provides, and if it's to your tastes, I can understand desiring it.

I lived and worked in South Korea for a number of years, and I really enjoyed some of the laid-back wine bars and whiskey bars there, made for working-age couples and small groups in their 20s to lounge around and talk with a drink. That kind of atmosphere is very commonly available there, but fairly hard to find in Berlin (where I live now), where bars more typically are tacky, sticky, and play terrible music so loud you have to yell at each other. I also miss the late-night coffeeshops a lot, where I spent many a night with the laptop doing FOSS stuff - your typical Berlin café closes no later than 7pm. There are exceptions to these rules but the sort of places I like are generally a lot harder to find.

Note I e.g. get the same opinion from Catalan friends in & about Berlin, who really miss their chill bars and street-side places from back home in Barcelona and similar. So this is again more of a "I like this foreign thing I can't have here as much" than it is about Japan.