“The majority of Japanese people now say they don’t want to travel abroad… Japan’s unusual situation goes against the global tourism boom”.
https://gendai.media/articles/-/168124
“The majority of Japanese people now say they don’t want to travel abroad… Japan’s unusual situation goes against the global tourism boom”.
https://gendai.media/articles/-/168124
33 Comments
Its sad, but even as a foreigner living in Japan I don’t want to travel abroad either. This is entirely due to the weak Yen and exploding prices elsewhere in my case.
Well ya, it’s exensive af for them
*Don’t want to* and *can’t afford to* are not the same thing.
Even domestic travel is down, but the author is sensationalizing the article to get more clicks and sell a narrative.
People do not spend when they do not have anything to spend in the first place. The moment disposable income becomes a thing, one of the first things that sees an uptick is travel. Foreign and domestic.
No money and no time.
Japanese people used to take short, all-inclusive package tours to Europe, North America or Australia. However, decades of stagnating wages, followed by a very significant reduction in the value of the yen, have made even those unaffordable for many Japanese people.
Its funny how the Japanese passport is one of the most powerful and cheapest in the world but I do understand most peoples perspective here about it, most countries are just straight up way too expensive compared to the standard in Japan but I guess Japan is the exception these days? Korea and Taiwan is still fairly compariable but feels too similar to most here,
Everybody I know and come across in Japan wants to travel abroad. It’s not affordable right now.
It’s not that they don’t want
It’s that they can’t afford anymore
Of course they want to. They just can’t afford to do so.
It’s not unusual. The yen is at 160 to the dollar.
What tourist boom?
They don’t have enough money. They yen is way too weak to make traveling abroad make sense. If people can’t afford kids, they can’t afford travel either. Seems pretty obvious.
You must be really rich to travel abroad now. Yen is pretty much worthless. Cant buy shit outside japan.
It starting to feel like I’m living in a third world country where anything overseas is premium and expensive now.
I think this is partly economic and partly generational. When I first landed in Japan in the late 90s, there was an eikaiwa boom and it was very common for people to do study abroad in the US, Canada, UK, etc. There were HIS packages for Bali, Thailand, Australia, Europe, etc. And I would steadily hear about going to Hawaii.
I just do not hear that stuff anymore. Certainly it is partially the crap yen, but you can see in the article that the passport numbers are way down too. Anecdotally, I don’t hear all that much interest in western countries from younger people either though. Not like it was at least. Technology might be playing a role too.
Why would they want to travel abroad with the yen so weak? It would go much further in their own country.
Japan is a great country, a moderate size island, with a strong culture and little need for things from the outside. A weakening yen though and weak language skills and declining prestige probably all play a role in this.
The same thing happening in France, the country famous for its long summer vacations. Millenials are tired of having to spend thousands for just a couple days in a different place; and are tired of crowded touristic spots.
How is anyone supposed to travel abroad when the plane ticket eats a whole monthly salary?
Well.. many may say they do not want.
The reality is that, with the current yen depreciation, most Japanese just can’t afford to travel abroad.
It’s not like they were already traveling abroad a lot anyways.
What do you mean “now”?
It’s something like less than 20% of the population that have passports. This wasn’t something that only happened recently. Japan has always been incredibly insular.
What’s unfortunate is that this further isolates Japanese people and their exposure to other cultures. Sure, there is a lot of inbound tourism, but tourists often try to conform to the local culture.
I know that it’s too expensive for most, but the article also hints at that the interest in things outside of their border is going down. As a kid growing up in 80/90s I can attest that there was an overall aspiration to become a global citizen being promoted in media and education. I wonder, as I’ve spend decades outside of Japan now, if that turned around in the Lost Decades and the society slowly taught kids to be complacent with a lifestyle that’s domestic, conservative and even survivalist.
I’d love to hear from those who have gone through the 6-3-3 education system and never left home, but if my assumption is somewhat correct, it makes sense that we’ve seen a rise of nationalism/xenophobia in the recent years.
Passport ownership in Japan is under 17% of the population. Wildly low for a first world nation. The median age in Japan is also pushing past 50 years old (second only to Monaco). As a foreigner living here I can assure you that although the yen is weak, that’s not the whole story as to why nobody leaves.
Passport ownership has been cratering since 2013, but the yen didn’t crater until 2022, so there’s a demographic explanation too.
Young people (a significant minority of Japan’s total population) still want to go abroad but now they can’t cuz the yen sucks shit (I as a person living here ALSO can’t afford to travel).
The country is just old as hell and a lot of the non-passport holders are seniors who traveled all over when the yen was hot then just let their passports lapse. The majority of the population is old as hell and just aged out of having the will or inclination.
Because the yen depreciated so much of course
It’s rather that a question of affordability or at least the trade off to a domestic vacation.
With the weak yen, a typical family holiday abroad let‘s say to Guam costs around 65kJPY in air fare per person, around 25-30kJPY per night in a hotel plus at least 8kJPY per day for food. Plus the benefit of cheaper US online delivery to the hotel is not there any more. So, a 5 day vacation will set you somewhere between 200 and 250kJPY per person.
This is at the limit of affordability for most people in the country and if you compare to Okinawa, Ishigaki and such, you will see that you have a similar vacation for max half the price, better service and sometimes even newer hotels.
When it comes to skiing, however, I have seen imported inflation with tourism: we skipped skiing this last year, because the same hotel in Hokkaido that we used to go to, now charges 1.5MJPY for one week for a family of 4 – up from below 500kJPY when we started going 7 years ago. Let’s hope that this will not also happen on the Okinawa islands. So don’t share that the most beautiful and intact coral reefs are actually there 🙂
Is the unspoken thing in this thread that while the rest of Asia is greatly affordable and close to Japan, it’s beneath them?
Can’t afford it. Can literally buy a brand new small car here for the price of taking my family to Europe.
Thirty years ago on an Eikawa salary, I was traveling abroad on a regular basis. GW in Thailand or somewhere else in SE Asia , a summer visit to see friends in the US or Canada and do a road trip, a trip back to the UK to see the family for Christmas and new year…this was a fairly normal year. Now I’m a tenured professor at a private university, but can’t possibly afford that kind of lifestyle.
It’s not that they don’t want, but they can’t afford it.
Cause they literally couldnt afford
Going abroad is definitely less affordable than it used to be, but personally I just have less interest than I used to have, plus there are so many places in Japan I would like to visit that I’m content with those options. Also interested in revisiting nearby countries at some point soon-ish, but western countries in general seem less appealing with high crime rates (petty or not), exorbitant prices, and let us not forget, no washlets/dirty facilities!
Because the yen has been getting really weak lately. People on 5chan are jokingly calling it the “Zimbabwyen”.
That is why Korea is the most popular overseas tourist destination for Japanese people recently. This is because it is the closest, making airfares cheap, and unlike the yen-dollar exchange rate, the won-yen exchange rate is still affordable. Also, K-pop and K-dramas are very popular in Japan.