A few years is a long time for an influencer, and without new material, his followers will drift away and once he’s out, he will struggle to catch up with the latest trends and changes. It’ll be interested to see if he’s even able to go back to the same routine.
More than anything, he sounds a lot like the privileged kids who experience real consequences for the first time. It probably won’t actually register until he’s in prison that there’s nothing he can do about that.
Hopefully he learns from it but I suspect he’ll find something/someone else to blame and wind up another in a long line of has-been flash in the pan mini-celebrities.
Overtourism has also been seen in other popular destinations in Japan, like Kyoto and Kamakura. In Kyoto, locals complain of tourists with large suitcases clogging city buses.
This is happening in our town. We live near a tourist area and the buses from the local station to the tourist area get overwhelmed with tourists and their large suitcases. My daughter can’t count on being able to take the bus to her part time job.
Places like Shibuya are mostly foreigners these days, and some tourists are acting like it’s a beach vacation with open drinking, large groups walking slowly while clogging up the narrow sidewalks and such.
Xenophobia is on the rise in a lot of Japan. My friend lives in Tokyo and hears a lot of “go back to your country “ over little things, despite having lived here for 25 years.
It’s not so bad in my part of the countryside. I’ve never heard it in daily life. (Years ago, I had problems when trying to rent apartments, but that’s a different story.)
Wall to wall tourists clogging picturesque or quaint locations is also hardly a new thing. And them behaving boorishly, or at least being seen that way by locals, is also hardly new.
What’s new, or at least ever-growing, is the number of places affected. e.g. In Italy it used to be that only Rome and Venice were clogged with tourists. Now every old big city center and quaint village has too many.
World population is only growing and so far world tourism has grown much faster than world headcount. Meantime the total supply of quaint authentic villages hasn’t increased iota one.
IMO one of the side effects of the rise of the WWW and “influencers” is to both spread and concentrate the flow of tourists. 30 years ago they’d only know to go where travel agents steered them, which is where tour operators and tourist infrastructure already existed. Early influencers traveled away from the usual places in search of new “unspoiled” finds. Then promptly publicized the crap out of them, causing them to be quickly spoiled by the herd of lemmings having to visit only the places on “best of …” lists.
Lather rinse repeat for 15+ years now and the number of places not yet on somebody’s “best of” list are getting fewer and farther apart.
You can also blame Lonely Planet and Rough Guide for telling the reader to “skip the clichéd touristy sights and visit these off-the-beaten-path sights instead!” [“…along with our thousands of other readers!”]
Well, to be exact, the percentage growth in population has been going down. The rate of growth peaked in the early 1960s and has been steadily dropping. The population is generally estimated to peak in the 2080s and slowly drop from then on:
The population needs to drop. It’s too large as it is. There are actually some people who claim that the population should continue to increase. The general opinion though is that it should be less and will need to slowly drop for some time.
True that world population is increasing more slowly than it did. And might, just might level off on it’s own.
But ignoring war and AGW, global GDP and GDP per capita is going nowhere but up. And consumption of travel is very strongly correlated with per capita GDP reaching middle income levels. A billion Chinese recently became wealthy enough for their average citizens to travel abroad. And they are. They are not the only country to have joined / be joining the ranks of major tourist sources.
I vaguely remember a story on 60 Minutes, decades ago, about how overcrowded many European tourist sites were getting. Morley Safer might have been the correspondent. So this is nothing new, at least not since the end of the Second World War.
How do I notify the moderators that there’s a problem with post #216 in the “This is why we can’t have nice things: asshole tourists in Japan” thread”?
Click or tap the … and the flag icon at the bottom right corner of the post. Then “something else” as a reason (we are asked to always pick that) then explain why you are reporting it.
And remember that the post numbers are pretty meaningless since based on preferences, not all posts in a thread will appear to all people. What number a post is to you might not be that number to me. That’s one of those unfortunate quirks of Discourse.