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.
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.
Literal pottery:
That’s some hot cordware. Stick a NSFW tag on those fine jugs.
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.
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.
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.
The OP’s text is pretty close to how Tourism is killing all sorts of Mom & Pop businesses in Lisbon as its impact (mainly via the transformation of residential housing into AirBnBs) is pushing out the local businesses that cater for residents.
This means businesses like little grocery stores, taverns, hairdressers, even cobblers.
Now, if one takes the viewpoint that Tourists are more important than anybody else, then it’s all the fault of the small mom & pop grocery stores, taverns, hairdresses and cobbler for not having proper strategies to market themselves to tourists or at least not pivoting their businesses to sell more knick-knacks to tourists.
An alternative view is that Tourism has negative externalities (its version of “polution”) and has to be controlled so that it doesn’t destroy the very ambience that attracts tourists (in my example that would be things like the Traditional Lisbon neighbourhoods).
If indeed Tourism in Japan is pushing out the locals who frequented Izakayas be it directly (because those people don’t live there anymore) or indirectly (realestate prices going up because of Tourism, making everything more expensive including Izakayas), then this is a problem with Tourism rather than the Izakayas.
If that is not the case, then there is some other problem in Japan (maybe a falling real purchasing power or the slow change of habits as newer generation replace the older ones), in which case that’s unrelated to Tourism. Maybe Tourists could make up for it, but what I can tell you from my experience in growing up in a place which over my lifetime was “discovered” and became very touristic (and then incompetent politicians thought it was a silver bullet to the country’s problems and went full blown insane on it by which point all the negative externalities of Tourism really started to hurt, especially the realestate bubble), traditional business which morph to cater to tourists tend to become over time a bland parody of the local traditions rather than the real deal, plus a lot of supposedly “traditional” businesses popping-up to cater for tourists are a lot more like the versions you would find in an airport than the real traditional thing. Certainly the restauration business in Lisbon which cater to tourists are a lot more like the cookie cutter glitzy but bland continental food restaurants serving “universal food” you see in airports all over the World than the traditional restaurants in Portugal.
I live near a big city. I like tourism for the city because it has the infrastructure to handle it. Some tourists come farther out and that is fine but you don’t want the same numbers as downtown go to some smaller town in the vinicity because it simply does not have that level of infrastructure. Also organized things are easier like concerts or such.
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 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.
The comments of the OP can be read like it’s the fault of izakaya for not adapting to Tourism, but in the actual article it seems more like Japan has broader problems which are causing a fall in purchasing powers which has hit the clientele of izakaya and the flaw of izakaya was not taking advantage of Tourism to make up for the fall in local clientele causes by those problems in Japan which are not the fault of izakaya (or tourists).
I come from Lisbon in Portugal, which has also become extremelly touristic in the last 2 decades, and there Tourism is actually killing the rest of the Economy (mainly indirectly, by pushing up house prices and the cost of living more broadly, which in turn make it too expensive to live or operate a business in Lisbon). Anyways, my point is that anybody who expects more than a handful of establish traditional mom & pop restauration businesses to be capable of adapting by marketting themselves and catering to tourists, has no fucking clue of the kind of people who own and operate those businesses. I mean, sure they’ll serve tourists (in broken English or maybe French), but actually adjusting to look more appealing to Tourists (lets just say that good traditional food and fancy looks are uncorrelated, possibly even negativelly correlated, in the Portuguese restauration business), much less any form of marketing other than word of mouth, is beyond most of them.
The impression I get is that izakayas are also old fashioned, so I bet they’re run by the very same kind of old fashioned people from humble origins who grew up back when Education was less universal, that run most restaurants in Portugal.
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.
Tourism has its own negative externalities (i.e. it’s own kind of “polution”) that negativelly affect the rest of the Economy if it gets too much and might even kill the very things which attract tourists. This is generally manifested as a rising cost of housing and general cost of living in touristic areas which pushes out the local residents and businesses.
Also tourism doesn’t employ highly qualified people, but rather people with basic education.
So it’s only good for economies up to a certain level of tourism and how much that is depends on how much that’s a high value added Economy (roughly, how wealthy and developed a nation is) - much higher levels of Tourism are still a good thing in, say, a mid-development level Economy with basic universal education where before Tourism most people worked in the Primary sector, than they are in an Economy of high value added industries employing higly qualified people: a country can have an Economy where Tourism is a high percentage to pull itself up to about the level of the poorer European countries, but no matter how much you have of it Tourism will never turn a country into a high tech powerhouse, beyond a certain point quite the contrary (not least because high costs of living due to it kill starting companies, even high tech ones, because they make the costs of business go up at multiple levels).
A bit of Tourism can be a good thing, a lot of Tourism is only a good thing if the alternative was an economy of mostly Primary sector activities.
Okay, good points, but have you had to live where tourists visit?
Hell, I try not to even visit places where too many 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
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.
also it’s false advertising, they don’t even transport you into an MMORPG world
I’m pretty sure there’s a truck that’s supposed to take you to them.
It’s insane.
They also don’t sell weapons after I spread a rumor that they do. 1/10, would not go back.
When I spent time in Japan, many Izakayas would not cater to foreigners, particularly the Aussies, because of their behavior.
Weirdly enough i was never turned away from any establishment. I was in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, and Himeji. Maybe I was lucky, maybe its more of a rural issue?
I think so. I was going to small places on Hokkaido in the dead of winter. I never had problems in bigger places. Osaka was the only place I got “foreigner taxed,” but you know, shady place despite being so cool.
“Shady place despite being so cool” is Osaka in a nutshell.
And that goes double for the foreigner/tourist facing areas of the city.
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
If you can get approved for a high end travel card and meet the spending requirements of the sign up offer, the bonus points will get you a round trip ticket to almost anywhere. Considering the annual fee on the card, as long as you don’t keep the card for more than a year, it’s something like 50-80% off the cost of the airfare.
Americans will actually take “Sorry, we don’t speak English” as “You are not welcome here,” when traveling abroad. It’s wild.
No, it’s literally a sign in English saying “no foreigners”, or the slightly less confrontational “members only”. Those are usually the only sign in english.
More smug racist neolib whites trying to blame Japan’s economic woes on their own uncivilized, Eastern racism.
Have you ever been to Japan? These “signs” are virtually nonexistent in the cities. I’ve spent ~4m of my life in Japan cumulatively and have never once seen an actual “no foreigners allowed” sign and have never had trouble getting food. This is a complete fabrication by Americans to justify racism.
They absolutely exist in towns. If you go outside the more urban areas you’ll spot some.
