Comment by wisty

I think this is just overblown?

I went to Japan in 2019, before the pandemic, the previous peak and not far off the current numbers of tourists.

Maybe I went at a quiet time, but white people were as rare as hens teeth. There are 37 million a year. Australia has 7 million and Sydney is a lot smaller than Tokyo. There's way more Japanese tourists in Japan than foreigners, every tourist trap I saw was jam packed with locals.

I think it's all just a tiny handful of small places that are tiktok famous. This is not a Japan problem, it's a problem for a single conbini near Fuji and a couple of bars.

There's also a bunch of social media outrage over a handful of rude tourists. This is not a problem with Japan, it's a made-up problem on social media.

Go to the Vatican or Bali if you want to see a tourist problem.

Show me a picture of Americans overrunning Ueno Park or Disney and I'll change my mind, but I've never seen a picture of a large number of foreign tourists in Japan, just a few tourists being annoying, with almost everyone around them being Japanese.