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.
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.