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Comment by keiferski

20 hours ago

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.

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keiferski

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matthewdgreen  19 hours ago

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.

  • Jach  18 hours ago

    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.

  • seanmcdirmid  19 hours ago

    The e-markets in China have also reduced a lot. The rise of online shopping killed made them less necessary for their original purposes.

Karrot_Kream  15 hours ago

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.

shigawire  20 hours ago

>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?

  • keiferski  19 hours ago

    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.)